Simon & Schuster: 400 pages, $30
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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\u2019t afford a replacement, and his social studies teacher, unimpressed with the script he submitted, awarded him a B-.<\/p>\n
What must that teacher be thinking now?<\/p>\n
The 10th anniversary of Miranda\u2019s Tony Award-winning, culturally transformative musical \u201cHamilton,\u201d with the duel as its centerpiece, has occasioned a new wave of critical hosannas. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner\u2019s affectionate biography provides an illuminating look at Miranda\u2019s creative development and influences, as well as a detailed account of how his greatest achievement (and other projects) coalesced.<\/p>\n
\u201cLin-Manuel Miranda\u201d benefits from Miranda\u2019s 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 \u201ca burning desire to create art and a limitless curiosity about ways to do it better,\u201d 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, Rub\u00e9n Blades, Jonathan Larson, Jay-Z and Eminem.<\/p>\n
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As suggested by its subtitle, \u201cThe Education of an Artist,\u201d the book is the nonfiction equivalent of a bildungsroman. It details the constellation of decisions that led to the breakthrough success of \u201cHamilton,\u201d as well as to Miranda\u2019s first Tony-winning Broadway show, \u201cIn the Heights,\u201d and his subsequent Oscar-nominated songs for Disney\u2019s \u201cMoana\u201d and \u201cEncanto.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tone is mostly celebratory. But Pollack-Pelzner pays attention to Miranda\u2019s 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\u2019s juvenile videos and draft scripts of his high school and college musicals. \u201cHe was this nuclear reactor of creativity,\u201d recalls Hayes, who directed Miranda\u2019s short musical \u201cNightmare in D Major\u201d at Hunter College High School.<\/p>\n
It is a kick to learn that for one group assignment in eighth grade, Miranda, an often-disengaged student, set chapters of Chaim Potok\u2019s novel \u201cThe Chosen\u201d to music, recorded the songs and told his classmates that their only role was to lip-synch his lyrics.<\/p>\n
As a senior, Miranda opted to direct \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d a rare theatrical reflection of his Puerto Rican heritage. More astounding, he managed to persuade Sondheim, the show\u2019s 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 \u201cHamilton\u201d with his mentor and wrote the Spanish-language lyrics for a 2009 Broadway revival of \u201cWest Side Story.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Wesleyan University, Miranda truly came into his own. He introduced himself to his freshman dorm mates by performing one of his compositions, \u201c7 Minutes in Heaven,\u201d \u201ca cappella, acting and singing all the parts as they sat on the bed facing him, gob-smacked.\u201d Miranda\u2019s sophomore year production of his musical \u201cIn the Heights,\u201d 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 \u201cHamilton\u201d became known.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner\u2019s affectionate biography provides an illuminating look at Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s creative development and influences.<\/p>\n
(Andie Petkus Photography)<\/p>\n
For all these early achievements, and notwithstanding Miranda\u2019s 2015 MacArthur Foundation \u201cgenius grant,\u201d Pollack-Pelzner de-emphasizes the idea of Miranda as a genius. (Not so John Kander, the composer of \u201cCabaret\u201d and \u201cChicago,\u201d who addressed him as \u201cBoy Genius.\u201d) Pollack-Pelzner makes a point of noting his subject\u2019s weaknesses, including only a middling musical theater voice and limited piano chops.<\/p>\n
But Miranda\u2019s brilliance and originality \u2014 and, yes, genius \u2014 as a composer and lyricist are hard to deny. With its dense, pyrotechnic lyrics and recurrent musical motifs, \u201cHamilton,\u201d in particular, seems to grow richer with each hearing. Miranda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The origin story of \u201cHamilton\u201d is well-known by now. The musical was inspired by Miranda\u2019s reading of Ron Chernow\u2019s biography; it started out as a concept album, \u201cThe Hamilton Mixtape\u201d; 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\u2019s desire to employ many of his talented friends.<\/p>\n
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 Alegr\u00eda Hudes on \u201cIn the Heights\u201d). But this one collaboration failed, Pollack-Pelzner says, because the dialogue scenes interrupted \u201cHamilton\u2019s\u201d propulsive flow. The playwright in question remains tactfully unnamed. And, no doubt, wondering ruefully about what might have been.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist By Daniel Pollack-PelznerSimon & Schuster: 400 pages, $30If you buy books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[37366,18890,37368,359,37364,18,117,1652,37365,37370,34486,37369,37367,19,5044,1915,17,34487,25578,12368],"class_list":{"0":"post-50670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-affectionate-biography","9":"tag-artist","10":"tag-book-map","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-daniel-pollack-pelzner","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-family","16":"tag-genius-grant","17":"tag-grade","18":"tag-hamilton","19":"tag-heights","20":"tag-high-school-assignment","21":"tag-ie","22":"tag-influence","23":"tag-interview","24":"tag-ireland","25":"tag-lin-manuel-miranda","26":"tag-miranda","27":"tag-show"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}