IT ALL STARTED WITH A VACATION AND A BOOK
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the founder of Hamilton, was on vacation in Mexico when he read Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton and began to imagine it as a musical.
Miranda began working on "Hamilton" in 2009, carefully working on the lyrics of the songs and the storytelling aspect behind them. He "saw Hamilton's relentlessness, brilliance, linguistic dexterity, and self-destructive stubbornness through his own idiosyncratic lens," wrote The New Yorker in 2015. "It was, he thought, a hip-hop story, an immigrant's story." Hamilton reminded him of the rapper Tupac Shakur, Miranda said, which is how he came up with the concept of a diverse hip-hop musical about the life of Hamilton. "I was like, 'This is an album. No, this is a show. How has no one done this?' It was the fact that Hamilton wrote his way off the island where he grew up. That's the hip-hop narrative," Miranda told Vogue. "So I Googled 'Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical' and totally expected to see that someone had already written it. But no. So I got to work." But Miranda's first major hit wasn't "Hamilton". He also wrote and starred in "In the Heights," a musical that fused hip-hop and salsa that he began working on while being a sophomore in college. After college, when Miranda was in his 20s and supporting himself while working on "In the Heights," he wrote political jingles. Because of his new admiration for politics, his past experience with playwright, and his interest in the subject of the life of Alexander Hamilton, he began to write the musical "Hamilton". In conclusion, by using modern means that appeal to the generation, and also past experience and knowledge of playwriting, Lin-Manuel Miranda constructed Hamilton. |
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