Lin-Manuel Miranda

• Born: January 16, 1980
• Place of Birth: New York, NY
• Born: January 16, 1980
• Place of Birth: New York, NY
• Born: January 16, 1980
• Place of Birth: New York, NY

Biography

Born in New York City, Lin-Manuel Miranda grew up in Inwood, a neighborhood near the heavily Hispanic Washington Heights section of Manhattan. His mother was a clinical psychologist, while his father worked as a political consultant who served in several New York mayoral administrations. Both his parents were both born in Puerto Rico, and they sent Miranda and his sister to spend their summers there with their grandparents.

Early Life

Miranda grew up in a bilingual household steeped in an appreciation for the arts. He and his sister both took piano lessons, and he enjoyed playing and singing for his family. At the age of five, Miranda passed the exam to enter Hunter College Elementary School. Most of his classmates came from Jewish families living in exclusive Manhattan neighborhoods. He has recounted in interviews that he used to speak to his friends’ nannies in Spanish.

Miranda later attended Hunter College High School, a public school for gifted children located on New York’s Upper East Side. Almost two years after completing the first draft of his future hit musical In the Heights, he earned his bachelor’s degree in theater in 2002 from Wesleyan University. Upon his graduation from Wesleyan, he supported himself by substitute teaching English at his former middle school and crafting jingles for the political campaigns of his father’s clients.

Creative Life

From a young age, Miranda was instilled with his parents’ love of Broadway musical theater tunes, as well as the Latin music and salsa dancing that featured as an important component of their Puerto Rican heritage. Miranda’s father owned an enormous collection of cast recordings, and as a child, Miranda immersed himself and memorized the lyrics to classics such as Man of La Mancha (1964), Jesus Christ Superstar (1970), and The Sound of Music (1959). He saw his first Broadway show at age seven when his parents took him to a performance of Les Misérables (1980). The experience had a profound impact on him, as did subsequent outings to see Cats (1981) and Phantom of the Opera (1986). He also regularly performed in mini-musicals at his elementary school, including condensed versions of such classics as The Wiz (1974), Oklahoma! (1943), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), West Side Story (1957), Peter Pan (1954), and Bye Bye Birdie (1960).

In addition to these early influences, Miranda immersed himself in hip-hop music, inspired by a school bus driver who shared with him his passion for rap artists such as the Geto Boys and the Sugarhill Gang. Following a trip with his older sister to see the hip-hop film Beat Street (1984), he absorbed the influences of such artists as the Fat Boys and the Beastie Boys while continuing to cultivate his love of R&B and salsa. He would later incorporate this unique blend of pop music, rap, and Broadway show tunes into his own distinctive artistic identity.

As a student at Hunter College High School, Miranda polished his skills as a rapper and continued to explore his love of the stage. He was a star in the school’s drama program, landing many prominent roles, including leads in productions of The Pirates of Penzance (1879) and Godspell (1971). Miranda also codirected a production ofA Chorus Line (1975) and was the sole director of a performance of West Side Story, in addition to writing his first short musicals for the school’s drama festival. For his original works, he drew inspiration from the rock-themed Broadway hit Rent (1996), which he saw in 1997 on his seventeenth birthday. The show opened his eyes to the possibility of creating musicals about contemporary life. It was also during his high school years that Miranda made the acquaintance of the legendary composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who came to speak to students who had been cast in a school play. Sondheim eventually came to serve as an important professional mentor to Miranda.

As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, Miranda played an active role in the school’s theater scene, performing in musicals, writing his own songs, and staging his own productions. During his sophomore year, he created the first draft of the music and lyrics of his musical In the Heights. Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book, and Miranda collaborated with fellow Wesleyan graduate Thomas Kail to stage the show, with its distinctive blend of salsa and hip-hop, as a workshop production in 2005. After years of workshopping, Miranda earned his first big break with the musical’s Off-Broadway opening in 2007, where he played the lead role. The show earned him the 2006–7 Theatre World Award for outstanding debut performance, the 2007 Clarence Derwent Award for most promising male performance, and the 2007 ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award for best new composer in musical theater. It also received two 2007 Lucille Lortel Awards for outstanding musical and outstanding choreographer; two 2006–7 Outer Critics Circle Awards for best new Off-Broadway musical and outstanding choreography; and a 2007 Obie Award for best music and lyrics. In 2008, the year of its Broadway debut, In the Heights won multiple Tony Awards for best choreography, best orchestrations, best musical, and best original score written for theater. The following year, the original cast recording won the Grammy Award for best musical theater album, and the musical itself was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

On vacation in Mexico following the success of In the Heights, Miranda read Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton. Inspired by what he saw as parallels between Hamilton, who rose from humble beginnings to founding-father status, and rap superstars such as Tupac Shakur, Eminem, Jay Z, and the Notorious B. I. G., who came from impoverished inner-city backgrounds, Miranda began writing the musical Hamilton. He worked closely with Chernow, who vetted the show for historical accuracy. In 2009, he performed an excerpt from Hamilton for Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House Poetry Jam. The four-minute rap he delivered about Hamilton would eventually become the introduction to Hamilton, and the resulting YouTube video became a viral sensation.

Continuing to write and compose, Miranda collaborated with Sondheim on Spanish translations for the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story. He was the composer, along with Tom Kitt, and lyricist, along with Amanda Green, of the 2011 show Bring It On: The Musical. He also wrote original songs for the 2012 revival of Stephen Schwartz’s Working (1977). At the same time, Miranda assembled a diverse cast for Hamilton and placed himself in the lead role. The show opened Off-Broadway in January 2015 and, following instant acclaim, made its Broadway debut in August of that same year.

Both Miranda and his musicals have received numerous accolades in addition to those garnered by In the Heights. A National Arts Club Medal of Honor recipient, Miranda was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in September 2015. Hamilton won ten Lucille Lortel Awards, three Outer Critics Circle Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, the 2015 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best musical, the 2015 Obie Award for best new American theater work, the 2016 Grammy Award for best musical theater album, and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. At the 2016 Tony Awards, the musical won an impressive eleven awards, including Best Musical. Miranda then created a live stage recording of Hamilton, which began streaming on Disney+ in 2020. Though he had planned to release the film later in theaters, he changed course when the coronavirus pandemic hit the US in early 2020 and shut down Broadway to give viewers a chance to see the musical from home.

As an actor, Miranda has also performed in the Off-Broadway revivals of Merrily We Roll Along (1981) and Tick, Tick . . . Boom! (2001), as well as his own short musical 21 Chump Street (2014). He has also made appearances on the television shows The Electric Company, Sesame Street, The Sopranos, House, Modern Family, Do No Harm, Smash, How I Met Your Mother, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and in the films The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012) and 200 Cartas (2013). In 2016, Miranda contributed several songs to the soundtrack of the popular Disney animated film Moana, one of which received an Oscar nomination. He starred in the Disney film Mary Poppins Returns in 2018, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. From 2019 to 2022, he appeared in a supporting role in the HBO original series His Dark Materials, based on the fantasy trilogy of the same name by Philip Pullman.

In the 2020s, Miranda continued his work in film and his relationship with Disney when he provided the music for multiple films in the Star Wars franchise. In 2021, Miranda collaborated on the animated musical Encanto, for which he would win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Miranda would also release the film version of In the Heights the same year, as well as star in Vivo and make his directorial debut in the Netflix film Tick, Tick…Boom! In 2022, Miranda costarred in Weird: The Al Yankovich Story. The following year, he appeared in the Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, based on the children's book series by Rick Riordan. In 2023, he helped write three original songs for Disney's live action adaptation of The Little Mermaid.

Public and Private Life

In 2010, Miranda married Vanessa Nadal, who also attended Hunter College High School. She works as a scientist and attorney. The couple had their first child, a boy named Sebastian, in 2014 and a second son named Francisco in 2018.

Miranda is the cofounder of Freestyle Love Supreme, a New York–based hip-hop and comedy improvisational troupe that has performed around the world. He founded the nonprofit Flamboyan Arts Fund after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

Major Works

Miranda has helped reinvigorate the American musical genre by collapsing barriers that have generally set the style and substance of Broadway productions apart from popular culture. Miranda’s works display a profound respect for and influence by the arc of Broadway musical theater ranging from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. At the same time, they mesh elements of traditional Broadway narrative with a highly contemporary and eclectic aesthetic rooted in popular culture. Besides weaving in genres, such as rap, traditionally not heard on Broadway stages, Miranda also portrays characters and stories taken from communities that are, for the most part, only marginally represented on those same stages. These stories revolve around themes of ambitious outsiders attempting to stake their claim on mainstream recognition and success, straddling dominant and minority cultural landscapes, and struggling to reconcile attachments to origins and fulfillment of higher purposes.

In the Heights germinated in part from Miranda’s desire to write about his community of origin. He drafted the first version of the show during his sophomore year of college while living in Wesleyan’s Latino cultural center and residence hall together with a handful of fellow students whose parents had also been immigrants to the United States. Miranda’s bonds with other first-generation Latino students—connections he had not been able to forge as one of the few Puerto Rican students at his pre-college schools—inspired in him a desire to reflect his roots in the Washington Heights community and its vibrant Hispanic culture.

In the Heights delves into the experience of Spanish-speaking immigrants, similar to Miranda’s own parents. It recounts stories not previously explored on Broadway as the show’s Dominican protagonists contend with the impact of gentrification on their enclave and cultural assimilation on the part of a younger generation in search of affluence and acceptance. These cultural and generational tensions find expression in musical voices that stretch Broadway conventions in new directions. The narrator, a bodega proprietor named Usnavi (played by Miranda himself in the original production), introduces the other characters, who tell their stories with a mix of styles ranging from salsa to hip-hop to merengue.

In the show’s opening number, Usnavi laments his drift away from his Dominican origins, a distancing accelerated by the deaths of his parents when he was a young child. Shifting effortlessly between English and Spanish, Usnavi dreams, like most of the characters in the show, of escaping from the neighborhood. He wants to return to the Dominican Republic, even though he left there too young to remember it well. The other characters nurture similar desires to leave home: the neighborhood matriarch Abuela Claudia yearns to return to her native Cuba; Usnavi’s love interest, Vanessa, wants to move downtown to a more upscale neighborhood; Nina, the first in her family to attend college, traveled all the way to California to attend Stanford University, until a feeling of alienation (and the loss of her scholarship) caused her to drop out.

By the end of the show, however, these characters arrive at new understandings of the nature of home and the rich, culturally blended lives they have constructed. Vanessa realizes her dream of moving to the Village, but her future includes Usnavi; Nina chooses to return to Stanford, secure in her own identity; and Usnavi renounces his plans to return to the place of his birth. Like Dorothy in the classic American film The Wizard of Oz (1939), the protagonists of In the Heights realize that they have been home all along, a traditional storytelling trope that Miranda celebrates with pop-culture references sprinkled throughout Usnavi’s finale song: "There’s no place like home," he raps, in homage to Oz; another line, "It’s a wonderful life that I’ve known," is a nod to the 1946 film classic It’s a Wonderful Life. The characters also come to the exultant conclusion that their stories are as legitimate and integral a piece of the American story as that of any other inhabitant. Miranda uses In the Heights as a vehicle for communicating the universality of human tribulations related to love, loss, and ambition, even as he puts his own vernacular and inclusive spin on the narrative of the American experience. "I illuminate the stories of the people in the street," Usnavi tells the audience, a project the show mirrors with its straddling of many different musical, cultural, and socioeconomic worlds.

Bring It On: The Musical, a project on which Miranda served as a lyricist and a composer, took its inspiration from a 2000 film of the same name. The show follows the efforts of a high school cheerleading captain pushed by circumstances to complete her senior year at an under-resourced school to help get her new team to the national cheerleading championships. Miranda’s score features rap as well as music written in the style of R&B ballads, all of it infused with actual cheer competition music, which Miranda listened to while composing.

Hamilton incorporates hip-hop—as well as a full palette of the American musical experience, including pop, jazz, R&B, and Broadway show tunes—to dramatize the story of Alexander Hamilton’s unlikely rise from a poor, teenaged West Indian immigrant to American founding father. The first part of the show focuses on Hamilton’s humble origins as an impoverished child on the Caribbean island of Saint Croix: born out of wedlock, abandoned by his birth father, and orphaned at a young age. The second act focuses on Hamilton’s role in the fight to shape the government of post-Revolutionary America and his infamous, fatal duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Throughout the narrative, Miranda transforms Hamilton’s personal trajectory of an immigrant success story into a metaphor for the birth of the American nation. "Hey, yo, I’m just like my country," Hamilton brashly raps to the audience. "I’m young, scrappy and hungry / and I’m not throwing away my shot."

By choosing to tell the narrative of the United States’ founding with a cast consisting almost entirely of actors of color, Miranda celebrates the rich diversity of the nation’s immigrant past and makes a powerful connection to its contemporary multicultural society. His reimagining of the American story allows multiracial actors and audience members to see themselves reflected in a history that has traditionally excluded them. At the same time, it promotes a classic theme in American culture, namely the notion that anyone willing to work hard enough can succeed in the meritocracy that is supposed to underpin the American dream. This theme emerges in the show’s opening number, "The Hamilton Mixtape," which celebrates the brainpower and work ethic that propelled Hamilton from outsider status to the highest levels of power.

Hamilton’s casting of people of color in all of the lead roles, including those of the founding fathers, also offers all audience members a potent reminder of the United States’ diverse roots, including an implicit acknowledgement of the legacy of slavery and its impact on the American story. The gravitas of the character of George Washington, as portrayed with stern dignity by an African American actor (as are Thomas Jefferson and James Madison), is reflected in Washington’s farewell song "One Last Time," which incorporates text from Washington’s actual address and serves as a nod to President Barack Obama’s "Yes We Can" campaign video, which also featured a sung speech.

At the same time that it borrows from soaring rhetoric and historical documentation, Hamilton weaves in pop-cultural references from an array of sources. Before his somber farewell song, Washington, in a nod to W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, describes himself as "the model of a modern major general / the venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / lining up, to put me on a pedestal." Other songs incorporate tropes from Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Beatles, and the Notorious B. I. G., the young rapper murdered in 1997. When Hamilton first introduces himself to the audience, he spells out his name in the same manner in which the Notorious B. I. G. famously rapped his own name in "Going Back to Cali."

Hamilton uses popular urban street culture to reflect the energy and rebellious attitude of those who, like Hamilton, defied the authority of the dominant culture to foment a revolution in the streets of colonial America. The show suggests parallels between a number of against-the-odds triumphs: Hamilton’s ascendance from orphan to the first treasury secretary; the thirteen colonies’ bid for independence from the powerful British Empire; the emergence of hip-hop as an engine for social criticism and prosperity for some; and even the election of America’s first African American president, whose own origins, like Hamilton’s, stretch beyond American soil. Obama, along with other high-profile individuals, supported the musical and attended more than one performance.

Bibliography

“Composer, Lyricist, Actor.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015, www.linmanuel.com/#!bio/c1ktj. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Hiatt, Brian. “Hamilton: Meet the Man behind Broadway’s Hip-Hop Masterpiece.” Rolling Stone, 29 Sept. 2015, www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/hamilton-meet-the-man-behind-broadways-hip-hop-masterpiece-20150929. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Kaplan, Janice. “What Made Lin-Manuel Miranda the $625,000 ‘Genius’ behind Hamilton?” Daily Beast, 29 Sept. 2015, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/29/what-made-lin-manuel-miranda-the-625-000-genius-behind-hamilton.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.

MacGregor, Jeff. “Meet Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Genius behind Hamilton, Broadway’s Newest Hit.” Smithsonian, 12 Nov. 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lin-manuel-miranda-ingenuity-awards-180957234/. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Mead, Rebecca. “All about the Hamiltons.” New Yorker, 9 Feb. 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/hamiltons. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Miranda, Lin-Manuel. "Lin-Manuel Miranda on the Surprise Success of ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’." Variety, 3 Dec. 2022, variety.com/2022/music/news/lin-manuel-miranda-we-dont-talk-about-bruno-encanto-1235448749/. Accessed 11 Jul. 2024.

Paulson, Michael. “‘Hamilton’ Movie Will Stream on Disney Plus on July 3.” The New York Times, 12 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/movies/hamilton-movie-disney-plus.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Paulson, Michael. “Lin-Manuel Miranda, Creator and Star of Hamilton, Grew Up on Hip-Hop and Show Tunes.” New York Times, 12 Aug. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/theater/lin-manuel-miranda-creator-and-star-of-hamilton-grew-up-on-hip-hop-and-show-tunes.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.