LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
Lin-Manuel Miranda (born January 16, 1980) is an American composer, lyricist, playwright, and actor of Puerto Rican ancestry best known for creating and starring in the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton. He co-wrote the songs for Disney’s Moana soundtrack (2016) and is set to co-star in the upcoming film Mary Poppins Returns. Miranda’s awards include a Pulitzer Prize, three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and three Tony Awards. Among other film work, Miranda contributed music and vocals for a scene in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). The Hamilton cast recording spent ten weeks atop Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart in 2015, while The Hamilton Mixtape, an album of covers of songs from the musical, developed by and featuring Miranda, reached number one on the Billboard 200 upon release in December 2016. (More from Wikipedia)
Hit Broadway shows come and go, but there is something special about Hamilton, the current hit musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The show opened on Broadway about a year ago (August 6, 2015) after an acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier in the year, and it remains the hottest ticket in town. Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast album for Hamilton was released the month following the move to Broadway and debuted at #12 on the Billboard Hot 200 Albums chart – remarkably, that is the highest placement for a cast album in more than 50 years. Also, the Tony Awards broadcast this year had its best ratings in 15 years.
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Fresh from his success with his earlier musical In the Heights (set in the mostly Dominican-American communities in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan), Lin-Manuel Miranda began reading the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Once he saw echoes of his own life there, he started envisioning the idea of Alexander Hamilton’s story as a Broadway musical.
The first any of us knew about it was at the nationally televised White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Instead of performing songs from In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda told the audience: “I’m thrilled the White House called me here tonight because I’m actually working on a hip hop album. It’s a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda had expected the incredulous laughter that greeted this statement, and it continued during his performance of a rough-cut number from the future musical Hamilton, though there was enthusiastic applause at the end. On its face, the idea is absurd: The early days of our nation and the birth of hip hop are separated by two full centuries. But Miranda has connected the dots: Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to this country who was born in the West Indies and orphaned at a young age. Hamilton did not so much speak sentences as he did paragraphs; the rapid-fire singing in hip hop was ideal for getting those dense passages out to an audience. And as related in Wikipedia, the following story about Hamilton’s use of his writing to get him out of a miserable life is in precisely the same spirit as impoverished African-Americans who try to rap their way out of the ghetto:
“[Alexander] Hamilton wrote an essay published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted [now in the U. S. Virgin Islands] on August 30, 1772. His biographer [Ron Chernow] says that, ‘Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons: For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous the 17-year-old self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had considerable fund of verbal riches.’ The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send the young Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.”
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In a post entitled “How Eloquence Made History Class Cool Again” in the blog Rhetoric, Media and the Civic Life, Samantha Biel notes that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance at the White House in 2009 was almost word-for-word from the opening song “Alexander Hamilton” in Hamilton:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore, and a Scotsman,
Dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in
The Caribbean by providence impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
. . .
Then a hurricane came, and devastation reigned
Our man saw his future drip, dripping down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain
Well, the word got around, they said, this kid is insane, man
Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
Get your education, don’t forget from whence you came and
The world is gonna know your name, what’s your name, man?
Alexander Hamilton
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In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda kept the period costumes and the history, but he changed just about everything else. Miranda, who is a Puerto-Rican–American, played the title role of Alexander Hamilton; he also inserted African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans into other major roles in the play so that this story about the founding of the USA would look like our nation does today.
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Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first major show was the audacious Jesus Christ Superstar (1970); this rock opera actually did start out as an album, Jesus Christ Superstar, with Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan in the title role, while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical went straight to the stage.
(September 2016)
