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The year is 2016 and as increasing numbers of people flee war ravaged and poverty stricken parts of the world, the issue of rising immigration fuels populace and nationalist sentiments around the globe, causing countries to close their borders and shaking the very foundational beliefs of even the most established democracies. Britons opt for Brexit, a plan to leave the European Union as a way to regain control over that country's borders so that they can keep migrants out and in the US Donald Trump defeats Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States, largely on his promise to build a wall to keep undocumented people from coming into this country. And in that year of 2016, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, a musical about Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from from a small Caribbean nation who became one of the founding fathers of America. It used the music of hip hop, pop and R and B to tell his story, and it cast black and brown actors, including Miranda himself, to play Hamilton and his fellow revolutionaries, driving home the point that everyone in this country should have the right to claim the a share of the promises it offers. Hamilton was the ninth musical to win the Pulitzer and the first written by a person of color. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. As you probably know, Hamilton is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. During that time, Miranda has become a near ubiquitous figure on the cultural landscape, and the story of how he decided to write his show after reading historian Ron Chernow's best selling biography of Alexander Hamilton has become part of theatrical lore. But there's a lot more to the show's backstory, and I'm hugely indebted to Miranda's biographer Daniel Pollock Pelsner, much of what I'm about to tell you, and I'm about to tell you a lot. Miranda was born in New York City on January 16, 1980, to Luce Townes Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and Luis Miranda Jr. Who when he was 18, moved from Puerto Rico to New York to study on a scholarship, eventually becoming a political strategist. Working primarily with Democrats including Ed Cox, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. The Mirandas raised Lin Manuel, who they named after the title of a favorite poem, and his older sister, Lizisita, whom the family called Sita, in Inwood, a working class neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan with a large Latino population. Lynn, as just about everyone calls him, so I'm going to do it too, attended 100 colleges, elementary and high schools, public schools for gifted kids in the city. But during the summers, Lynn and Sita spent at least a month visiting their grandparents in Puerto Rico and reconnecting with their bonds to the island. Music played a major role in Lynn's life almost from the start. He had his first piano recital when he was 6, and according to his biographer, Pollock Pelsner, he was so thrilled with the applause, he got when he played his assigned P that he kept playing others until his teacher dragged him off the bench. His parents loved musicals. They'd spent their wedding night seeing one at the Public Theater, and they regularly played cast albums at home. Sita, six years older, was into hip hop and introduced her little brother to that music. And Hunter had a robust arts program that included three theater groups, including one that produced student written work. Lynn performed regularly. He played Conrad Bertie in Bye Bye Birdie and Bernardo in west side Story. But when his girlfriend took him to see Jonathan Larson's rent for his 17th birthday, he was blown away. Its music sounded like stuff he could hear on the radio, and its characters seemed like real people he'd seen on the streets of New York. He went home and started writing his own musical. It was about a fetal pig who seeks revenge on the kids who attempt to dissect him in their school lab. The score ranged from reggae to rap, and it was a hit with Lynn's schoolmates. When he got to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Lynn intended to focus on filmmaking. That plan changed when he discovered that the classes available to freshmen were on film history and theory and that students weren't given access to film equipment until their junior year. Too impatient for that, Lynn pivoted back to theater with a vengeance. He wrote so many shows at Wesleyan that one classmate actually advertised an evening of one acts by saying that it included absolutely nothing by Lin Manuel Miranda. One of the shows Lynn started working on at Wesleyan was In the Heights, a musical about the everyday people who live and work in Washington Heights, a Latino neighborhood near his own of Inwood, but that he chose because he thought its name sounded better for a musical. Shortly after he graduated From Wesleyan in 2002, a group of students he slightly knew from school expressed an interest in producing it. One of them was Thomas Kael, a director they clicked. For the next four years, the two Wesleyan grads worked together in developing in the Heights. During that time, they resisted the efforts of professional producers who wanted to add grittier and more stereotypical elements to the show, like having the characters use drugs. They found better producers in Jill Fuhrman, Kevin McCallum and Jeffrey Sellers, and they recruited the playwright Kiara Alegria Hudes to work on the book and to keep it centered on the regular kind of people Lynne grew up knowing. During that time, Lynn supported himself doing substitute teaching at his old public school, Hunter. He liked being back there, and he considered giving up his hope of making it in the theater to teach full time. But encouraged by his father to pursue his dream. He and Cale kept working on in the heights. Finally, in 2007, their musical opened at the then new performance space 30 Arts, located far on the west side of Manhattan. The show, which I was lucky enough to see early in its run, became a must see for theater lovers and a year later in the Heights opened on Broadway where it ran for three years and won Tonys for Best Musical and Best Score. It was also named a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2009, the year that Lynne Nottage won her first Pulitzer for Ruined. It was after that success that Lyn and his soon to be wife Vanessa Nadal took a vacation at a resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. There, Lynne dug into Chernow's book on Hamilton and discovered that Hamilton's journey from the small islands of Nevis and St. Croix to New York reminded him of his father's life changing journey to the city from Puerto Rico. He also felt that Hamilton's talent for channeling the rebellious spirit of his time into his writing reminded him of the rappers he had grown up loving and who did the same thing 200 years later. He began writing what would become Hamilton's opening song before he even left Mexico. When he got home, Lynn reached out to Chernow and persuaded the author to let him adapt his book. Chernow was a little skeptical about the hip hop approach until he heard the song Lynn had completed. 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 and squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar, the ten dollar founding father without a father? And when the Obamas invited Lynn to perform something from in the Heights and for an evening of poetry that they were hosting in the White House, he instead performed Hamilton's title song for them too. A recording of that performance went viral, encouraging him and Cale to further develop what they were then calling the Hamilton Mixtape. With Cale's continual prodding, Lynn finished a half dozen more numbers, including Hamilton's I Want Song My Shot and King George iii' sneering jibe at his former subjects, you'll Be Back. And he played them in a concert for the American Songbook series at Lincoln center in 2012. The response was even more encouragement. For a short period after that, Lynn worked with a playwright on a book for the show, but everyone eventually agreed that those scenes slowed the show down. The next year, he and Cale honed the sung through approach at New York Stage and Film, Vassar College's incubator for new works and finally, on January 20, 2015, almost six years after Lin had sung at the White House, a production opened at the Public Theater, where the show's name was shortened to Hamilton. The cast had emerged almost organically. Right from the start, Lynn knew that he wanted Chris Jackson, the charismatic romantic lead of in the Heights, to play George Washington. The verbal dexterity of Daveed Giggs, a standout in the hip hop improv group Lin had co founded, made him unnatural for the dual roles of the fast talking Marquis de Lafayette in the first act and a hip cat styled Thomas Jefferson in the second. Renee Elise Golsberry, who had made a name for herself as a memorable replacement in such productions as Rent and the Lion King, had to be talked into auditioning for the role of Hamilton's sister in law and intimate confidant Angelica Schuyler. But once she did come in, Goldsberry so aced the song satisfied that Lynne began to look for more ways to bring Angelica into the action. It was Tale who discovered Philippa Sue, a recent Juilliard grad who was performing as the title female character in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Dave Malloy's musical adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Sue was perfect to play Hamilton's wife, eliza. Leslie Odom Jr. Who had worked primarily in LA, including in a recurring role on the TV show Smash, got the key part of Hamilton's nemesis, Aaron Burr, after he happened to see an early reading of the show and sent Lynn a tweet congratulating him on it. Lynn's response was to invite Odom to join the work in progress. The chemistry between those principles and an ensemble that included such future stars as Ephraim Sykes, Anthony ramos and Ariana DeBose was electric. The show was extended at the public three times. Everyone came to see it, from former Vice President Dick Cheney to the iconic rapper Buster Rhymes. And everyone, conservatives, liberals and progressives, loved it. I loved it too. I saw it twice. I was nervous the second time because I thought it might not live up to what I'd seen the first time. But it did. As you might expect, there was immense pressure to rush the show to Broadway so that it would qualify for that year's Tonys. But Lynn and Cale wanted to do more work on the show, and winning the Tonys wasn't a lock. No one knew if a hip hop show about an almost forgotten historical figure would play to uptown Broadway audiences. A bio musical about the hip hop icon Tupac had closed after just 38 performances, and a rock version of President Andrew Jackson's life had limped through 94. But Hamilton proved different. By the time it officially opened at the Richard Rogers Theater on August 6, 2015, its advance sales were nearly $30 million. And when prices climbed as high as 900 for a single ticket, the producers set up lotteries so that people who couldn't afford those prices could still have a chance to see the show. And Lynn created Ham for Ham, a series of pre show outdoor concerts that featured cast members from the show performing for free. And eventually performers from other shows on Broadway joined in, too. Hamilton would eventually earn 16 Tony nominations and win 11 of them. It also won the Grammy for best Theater album, a Kennedy center honor for Lin and the three collaborators he called his Cabinet, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, orchestrator Alex lacamore and of course, Thomas Kail. And as you know, Hamilton won the Pulitzer when the show opened in London. It won seven Olivier Awards, including best Musical, and it's still running there. The first national US tour went out in 2017, and the demand to see the show was so high that additional tours were added. One is still traveling around the country, and a professional film capture of the original cast was released on Disney plus during the early months of the COVID shutdown and is still available on that streaming service now. There has been some backlash. Shortly after Hamilton moved to Broadway, cast members who had been with the show before it opened at the public pushed for a share of the growing profits. The producers resisted at first, but eventually agreed to split 1% of the Broadway profits and a smaller portion of the profits from touring productions among those original cast members. Meanwhile, over the years, critics have also called Miranda out for celebrating men like Washington and Jefferson as champions of democracy while downplaying the fact that they were also slaveholders. Donald Trump got into the naysaying, too, after then Vice President elect Mike Pence attended the show and actor Brandon Victor Dixon, then playing Aaron Burr, interrupted the curtain call to urge Pence and Trump to, quote, uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. Trump became even more annoyed when a scheduled return engagement of Hamilton pulled out that run at the Kennedy center when Trump took over the institution earlier this year. But Hamilton continues to sell out at the Rodgers, and recently, when Leslie Odom Jr. Returned to reprise his Tony winning portrayal of Burr, Hamilton shot right back up to the top of the Broadway grosses, taking in as much as $4 million some weeks. Miranda has kept busy, too. Even during the six years that it took to get Hamilton to Broadway, he had juggled other high profile projects, including collaborating with Tom Kitt and Amanda Greene on the cheerleading musical Bring it on, translating songs into Spanish for the 2009 revival of west side Story, appearing in the encores productions of Merrily We Roll along and Tick Tickets. Boom. And fulfilling a childhood dream writing songs for the Disney animated feature Moana. In the years since, Miranda has written several scores for Disney films. He's played the lamplighter Jack in the film Mary Poppins Returns and the Pira Agua guy who sells shaved ice treats in the movie version of in the Heights. He stepped back into the role of Hamilton for a series of performances in Puerto Rico to help raise money for the island after it was ravaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And he produced and directed the movie version of Tick Tick Boom with Andrew Garfield as Jonathan Larson. Last year, Miranda and Issa Davis, herself a Pulitzer finalist, released a concept album based on the cult movie the Warriors. And just a couple of weeks ago, the casting notice for a workshop production of the show they're calling warriors was posted. So fingers crossed that we'll get to see it on a stage before too long. As I said earlier, I've borrowed extensively from Daniel Pollock Pelzner's Robert recently released book Lin Manuel Miranda the Education of an Artist. And so I am thoroughly delighted that Pollock Pelzner accepted my invitation to join me in this episode to talk even more about Lin Manuel Miranda and the making of Hamilton. Hello Daniel Pollock Pelsner, welcome to all the drama.
