For a high school assignment, Lin-Manuel Miranda tried to make a film about the 1804 duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. While he and his girlfriend were scouting locations, a thief grabbed their video camera. Miranda couldn’t afford a replacement, and his social studies teacher, unimpressed with the script he submitted, awarded him a B-.
What must that teacher be thinking now?
The 10th anniversary of Miranda’s Tony Award-winning, culturally transformative musical “Hamilton,” with the duel as its centerpiece, has occasioned a new wave of critical hosannas. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s affectionate biography provides an illuminating look at Miranda’s creative development and influences, as well as a detailed account of how his greatest achievement (and other projects) coalesced.
“Lin-Manuel Miranda” benefits from Miranda’s extensive cooperation and more than 150 interviews with his family, friends, mentors and collaborators. The biography depicts a joyous, charismatic, well-meaning, occasionally imperfect man and artist who loves the limelight and manages to absorb useful lessons from nearly everything he hears, reads and sees. Imbued with “a burning desire to create art and a limitless curiosity about ways to do it better,” Miranda learned from a rapping bus driver, a high school girlfriend with a gift for directing and musical artists as diverse as Stephen Sondheim, Gilbert and Sullivan, Rubén Blades, Jonathan Larson, Jay-Z and Eminem.
As suggested by its subtitle, “The Education of an Artist,” the book is the nonfiction equivalent of a bildungsroman. It details the constellation of decisions that led to the breakthrough success of “Hamilton,” as well as to Miranda’s first Tony-winning Broadway show, “In the Heights,” and his subsequent Oscar-nominated songs for Disney’s “Moana” and “Encanto.”
The tone is mostly celebratory. But Pollack-Pelzner pays attention to Miranda’s stumbles and wrong turns, including a failed time-travel musical, as well as to his precocity. Along with revealing interviews from school chums like current MSNBC host Chris Hayes, he draws on a previously untapped archive that includes family photographs, Miranda’s juvenile videos and draft scripts of his high school and college musicals. “He was this nuclear reactor of creativity,” recalls Hayes, who directed Miranda’s short musical “Nightmare in D Major” at Hunter College High School.
It is a kick to learn that for one group assignment in eighth grade, Miranda, an often-disengaged student, set chapters of Chaim Potok’s novel “The Chosen” to music, recorded the songs and told his classmates that their only role was to lip-synch his lyrics.
As a senior, Miranda opted to direct “West Side Story,” a rare theatrical reflection of his Puerto Rican heritage. More astounding, he managed to persuade Sondheim, the show’s lyricist, to regale an awe-struck high school drama club with anecdotes about his missteps. The Sondheim relationship remained pivotal to Miranda, who later shared ideas about “Hamilton” with his mentor and wrote the Spanish-language lyrics for a 2009 Broadway revival of “West Side Story.”
At Wesleyan University, Miranda truly came into his own. He introduced himself to his freshman dorm mates by performing one of his compositions, “7 Minutes in Heaven,” “a cappella, acting and singing all the parts as they sat on the bed facing him, gob-smacked.” Miranda’s sophomore year production of his musical “In the Heights,” blending rap and Latin rhythms, was a one-act that differed dramatically from its eventual Broadway incarnation. But the show became a campus sellout and sparked a modest version of the ticket frenzy for which “Hamilton” became known.
For all these early achievements, and notwithstanding Miranda’s 2015 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Pollack-Pelzner de-emphasizes the idea of Miranda as a genius. (Not so John Kander, the composer of “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” who addressed him as “Boy Genius.”) Pollack-Pelzner makes a point of noting his subject’s weaknesses, including only a middling musical theater voice and limited piano chops.
But Miranda’s brilliance and originality — and, yes, genius — as a composer and lyricist are hard to deny. With its dense, pyrotechnic lyrics and recurrent musical motifs, “Hamilton,” in particular, seems to grow richer with each hearing. Miranda’s ability to compose rap on the spot, showcased on Tony Awards shows and in performances of his Freestyle Love Supreme hip-hop group, suggest far more than mere craft or dexterity.
The origin story of “Hamilton” is well-known by now. The musical was inspired by Miranda’s reading of Ron Chernow’s biography; it started out as a concept album, “The Hamilton Mixtape”; and it was buoyed, in 2009, by an enthusiastic White House reception of its now-iconic opening number. The famous multicultural casting, a comment on and reenvisioning of the American experiment, was motivated, in part, by Miranda’s desire to employ many of his talented friends.
One tantalizing revelation is that Miranda worked for a time with a playwright on the book of the musical (as he had with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes on “In the Heights”). But this one collaboration failed, Pollack-Pelzner says, because the dialogue scenes interrupted “Hamilton’s” propulsive flow. The playwright in question remains tactfully unnamed. And, no doubt, wondering ruefully about what might have been.
Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has written for the Atlantic, the Nation, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, Mother Jones and other publications.
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