Episode 114: The Education of Lin-Manuel Miranda w/ Dr. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Liger. I've got to start this episode off with a bit of a personal story. When my son was little, my wife and I showed him the recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical Hamilton on the Disney Plus streaming service. He loved it, and he soon started noticing Miranda's face and voice in a number of his other favorite movies.

0:33Miranda's ubiquity became a kind of running joke for him. Whenever he saw him on screen or even just heard Miranda's name mentioned, my son would exclaim, that guy's everywhere. And it's true. Miranda's almost certainly the most prominent figure in American musical theater of at least the last decade, and he's also become a key figure in many recent Disney hits. He's also the subject of Dr. Daniel Pollack-Pelsner's biography, Lin-Manuel Miranda, The Education of an Artist, which is the first full-length treatment of its subject's life and work.

1:08Daniel's a professor of English and theater at Portland State University, and winner of the Graves Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. What a pleasure to be here, Mike. Thanks for having me. Let's start with your rationale for writing this biography. Because on the one hand, if I can say a commercial case, it just seems so straightforward. Here's this omnipresent figure, as we were just saying, in contemporary musical theater, in Hollywood. But on the other hand, especially in this day and age, that means so much of his life and career have already been

1:43documented in minute detail. What's unique about your book's perspective on Lin-Manuel Miranda, and what do you think the format of a traditional biography offers in this era of social media and constant internet discourse? Well, you certainly could describe it as a traditional biography. It's actually not how I thought about it as I was writing it. I think it was a reviewer maybe in the LA Times who described this as a nonfiction buildings roman, and that's what I wanted it to be. I teach a class on coming-of-age

2:17stories for first-year students, and at the end, they all write their own coming-of-age story using the techniques we've learned. And I saw this as my final project, that this is like a 90s YA coming-of-age novel that happens to be true. I'm a Shakespeare professor by training, and through taking groups to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that I got kind of fascinated by what a new canon of work for America might look like on the Shakespeare model through commissioning projects at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and started interviewing contemporary playwrights, Lynn Nottage, Chiara

2:48Aguirre-Hudis, Paula Vogel, Robert Schenken, about whether Shakespeare was a useful model for them in telling American stories. And that led me to Oscar Eustice at the Public Theater, who said like, oh, if you want contemporary Shakespeare's, check out this guy who's written a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution. This was 2015. And the night we went, previews on Broadway. Joe Biden was sitting down the row from us. And I thought, oh my God, like this is as close as I could get to seeing,

3:19you know, Henry V down the row from Queen Elizabeth in 1599. Like, it's a performance of the origin of American power for the elected representative of American executive authority, with all of these vice presidents and presidents on stage rapping to the vice president in the audience. And I thought, well, I missed the first 400 years of Shakespeare reception history, but I can get it on the ground level for Hamilton reception history. Wrote about it in London and Puerto Rico. And I was always struck that Lin-Manuel talked about the teachers who shaped him as an artist. And he would talk about the projects he wanted to take on after Hamilton, based on what

3:49he felt he could learn from the people that he was collaborating with. And as a teacher myself, that for me was the immediate angle. And when somebody asked if I wanted to move beyond these articles to a book, it's like, I want to write about the education of an artist. And one of my mentors in grad school, Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare professor, and when I was there, he'd just written this amazing book, Will in the World, How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, that was a huge popular success and is a phenomenal read, but I think had attracted a little scholarly skepticism, because it's all

4:22imaginative conjecture, saying like, okay, here's what we don't know that much about what Shakespeare saw or read or encountered, but we can put together what was going on in his world. And maybe he would have seen this touring production that came through the Midlands, maybe he would have run into this person. And so the thrill for me, because of the documentation of Lin-Manuel's life, my pitch to him was, I want to write a will in the world for the 21st century, explain how a latter-day Shakespeare became Shakespeare. And we can know with like date hour precision where Lin-Manuel was and what he was

4:57seeing and what he was reading and how that manifested in the work. So that was an excitement to me. And then even though, like, if you were on Twitter from 2010 to 2020, you could indeed know what Lin-Manuel ate for breakfast and what, you know, Biggie's song was on his playlist that day. Like there was so much that nobody outside his friend group or, you know, his family had seen before. Nobody had listened to his very first musical that he wrote when he was 1600, college high school, Nightmare in D Major, about the ghost of a fetal pig that came back to haunt the kid who dissected him in AP bio or his

5:3290s jukebox musical basket case in college or his senior thesis sci-fi time travel production. Like there was so much out there that he and his friends were willing to share with me that I thought could give a lens into the development of the portrait of a young artist who would go on to create the works that we knew. It's interesting you're mentioning aspects of Miranda's childhood, because I was really surprised in reading the book, the degree to which those childhood experiences show up in really direct ways in his art, specific lyrics, even in shows like In the Heights or

6:08Hamilton. But even the inspiration for his current project, this adaptation of the 1979 movie, The Warriors, apparently came from one of those traumatic childhood events where somebody watches a movie that they're not quite old enough to see yet. Could you tell us a bit about his upbringing and maybe in particular, how some decidedly adult themes, this really serious concern, fear of mortality become recurring motifs of his work?

6:39Sure, Mike. Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, Lin-Manuel is supremely in touch with his childhood self and both the joy of play and discovery and the things that terrified him. And he is a kid of Puerto Rican parents who met at a doctoral program in psychology at NYU in the 70s and worked many jobs to give their kid a full middle class upbringing. He tested into a wonderful public magnet school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Hunter College High School, where he

7:12was introduced to the world of theater and performance. But he had these, his parents had these really sort of two different philosophies of raising him. His, he was a very sensitive child. He would cry at an unhoused person on the street. He would cry at the chord changes and bridge over troubled water. He would cry at the letterhead of his Montessori school in near NYU in Greenwich Village, because he was getting bullied by the other kids who didn't like that he could read a little bit quicker than they could. And his dad, Luis, is this scrappy, indomitable political fighter,

7:48consultant and activist who graduated from high school at, I don't know, 16 or something like that and college at 19 and came to the U.S. to do graduate work without speaking English and really didn't want anybody to push his son around and thought he got to toughen him up if he's going to make his way in New York and got him these rock'em sock'em puppets so he could learn to, to hold his own against the bullies. But Luhamel was not a fighter. He would just hug the puppets and say, no, no fighting. And his mom, who continued in the child psychology path, really saw it as her job,

8:22she told me, to make her son feel that whatever he was feeling was okay to experience. And she gave him this mantra, you want to be an artist, this is all grist for the mill. Everything that you're experiencing is going to come through in your art. And she got him transferred to a more supportive preschool up in Washington Heights. So then these trauma comes in. So his dear friend in preschool, little girl he calls his girlfriend, and they hold hands every day, and they have a little kiss. When they see each other, one morning, Lin-Manuel wakes up, age four or five. His mom's in tears and

8:56tells him that his friend has drowned. Tragic accident in her parents' backyard. And he says the whole next year was just gray for him. People would ask, do you have a girlfriend? And he would say, my girlfriend died. And then that trauma sort of subsided. But when he started in high school, his first girlfriend there was hit by a car. And he didn't perish, but he visited her really mangled in the hospital. And he developed this terrible fear that anybody he loved was going to come to harm or that he himself might die before he had had a chance to realize his full potential.

9:31And this was only accentuated when his high school girlfriend took him to see Rent for his 17th birthday. And he became totally enamored with the work of Jonathan Larson, who, as all musical theater fans know, died himself the night before his work came into the world. And this was a deeply present anxiety for Lin-Manuel. He also had a poster of Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son, the martial arts actor who was killed by a bullet on the set of a film. And so the very first musical Lin-Manuel wrote

10:03after being inspired by Jonathan Larson to put his life on stage, Nightmare in D-Major, was about the fear that this fetal pig from AP Bio would come back and kill his girlfriend or kill him. And because it was Lin-Manuel, it was funny and effervescent, but it had this deep anxiety at its heart. And that's actually what drew him to the story of Hamilton. When he was in 10th grade American history, Mr. Steinfink let the kids do a creative project if they wanted to reflect what they'd understood about the material. And he decided to make a film about the founding father who had been shot before he could

10:38live out his life. And not only who had been killed in a duel, but whose own son, Hamilton's son, had also been killed in a duel. And it was that peril, that terrifying nightmare of losing a child and then losing your own life. And Lin-Manuel's high school girlfriend had saved the original script for Lin-Manuel's screenplay that he wrote about the Burr-Hamilton duel. And it was all about Hamilton's guilt and terror that his son had died and then his decision to throw away his shot rather than take another life at the duel. He told me he got a B- on the script from his teacher who said

11:14he thought it was this simplistic psychological explanation for a complex historical moment and that 20 years later when Oscar Eustace kept pressing Lin-Manuel, you've got to explain why Hamilton throws away his shot after spending a whole musical singing, I am not throwing away my shot. All he had in his head was B-, B-, and he didn't want to provide an answer. But it certainly wasn't just a serendipitous moment of picking up a Ron Chernow biography on vacation. These are longstanding anxieties that his mom told him he could use his grist for the mill and turn

11:45into his art.

11:47Another, maybe more publicly known influence, of course, is the way a lot of Miranda's work investigates questions of identity. And there's this particularly striking quote in your book where he says, in my neighborhood, I'm the kid who goes to the fancy school. In Puerto Rico, I'm the kid who speaks Spanish with a kind of messed up gringo accent. At school, I'm the kid who lives all the way uptown. That seems to sort of speak to this maybe more complicated way in which, as I said, identity

12:18and particularly Latinidad influences and manifests itself in his art. Could you tell us more about that? You bet. Well, I think you're pointing to that key tension, which is that Latinidad is this wonderful term for creating solidarity out of disparate influences. And this was indeed Lin-Manuel's father's work with the Hispanic Federation that he created in New York to try to bring together disparate immigrant groups

12:49from the Caribbean diaspora and from Latin America in New York as a political force. And you could see a song like Carnival del Barrio in the Heights, where the residents of the neighborhood are raising the Puerto Rican flag and the Cuban flag and the Mexican flag together, also la bandera, Puerto Ricania, in a kind of collective action as a reflection of that Latinidad. But there's also, I think, in Lin-Manuel's work, a real awareness of the different paths that different Latin communities have in the United States that we really see in the difference

13:25between, you know, and in the Heights, Abuela Claudia as a Cuban immigrant coming in after World War II, from the Rosario family as Puerto Rican, children of farmers coming to the U.S. in the 70s, to Usnavi as a Dominican character coming without the privilege of citizenship that Puerto Rican migrants enjoy, of what those differences are in experiences within Latinidad. And then, of course, the difference that's so palpable for Lin-Manuel, which is the difference between being born in the

13:57country that your parents come from and being born in the United States. And that is a palpable question, of course, in In the Heights, what does it mean to find home when your family speaks a different language than the community around you when you've grown up hearing salsa rhythms and eating foods that aren't shared by your mostly non-Latino classmates? And this came through in the, really, even in the narrative texture of the book. So I was sending early chapter drafts to Lin-Manuel

14:31as I wrote them. And everybody who knows him calls him Lin, except for his parents, who only call him Lin-Manuel. And so in the first draft of the book, I had the narrator calling him Lin, which is what all the quotes were calling him. And he asked if I'd be willing to try a draft in which the narrator called him Lin-Manuel, even though his friends and collaborators were calling him Lin, because he said he felt like the sort of tension of his development as an artist was what it would mean to have a name that his father had wanted to give a son since his father

15:04was 13, involved in Puerto Rican revolutionary politics, and had read a poem by a Puerto Rican revolutionary poet reflecting on a child of a Puerto Rican soldier who's fought in Vietnam and has a Vietnamese first name Lin, a Spanish surname, Manuel, wondering how to extricate his son from the danger of colonial politics and sort of Yankee imperialism, what it would mean to be given that name in a world that couldn't pronounce it or receive it. And he felt like that that was his growth

15:38was learning to create as Lin-Manuel. And at the very, you know, sort of most recent point of his career in the score for the Disney film Encanto, he finally wrote a song entirely in Spanish, which is, you know, a language in which he's fluent, but he doesn't usually speak. But he wrote the song Dos Oruguitas, that was the Academy Award nominated song to explain the sort of family trauma in Encanto. And the actor Olga Merides, who had sung the voice of Abuela Claudia and then sang the

16:09songs for the Abuela in Encanto, told me when she heard that song, she said, oh, wow, he's finally become Lin-Manuel Miranda. He's finally grown into that name. And so I wanted that sort of tension from the code-switching childhood to embracing that legacy to be part of the book, as well as the distance that came from being involved in Puerto Rican politics and Puerto Rican advocacy with an awareness that Lin-Manuel was not born on the island and in some ways had a very different experience from people who were. Now, moving on into sort of the more professional phase of Miranda's career

16:46as he begins to develop what becomes In the Heights, a figure comes in named Voltron. And at this point, people might be wondering what is a figure from a cartoon doing in this biography? Who or what is Voltron? What sort of role did that entity play in the development of In the Heights? Oh, Mike, you were tapping the biggest gap in my professional expertise heading into this book. I felt like I knew I was an American history major in college. I've been a musical theater fan. I was a

17:21kid who was only allowed to watch PBS growing up in the 80s. And Lin-Manuel, Latchkey kid, is a child of G.I. Joe's and Thundercats and all the glorious detritus of 80s pop culture. And so I had to learn about Voltron myself. And one of, I think, Lin-Manuel's sort of amazing creative gifts is the power of analogy or power of association. So a big theme of this book is that his great art emerges from

17:52collaboration and he's able to attract the talent who can help him do the things that he can't, can't play piano that beautifully. He can't sing like most Broadway-drained artists. He's not an arranger or choreographer. Writing sheet music is a challenge for him. And so a thrill of his after college in particular, though this really actually started back when he was in high school and he'd find arrangers, he'd find musicians, he'd find singers to collaborate with him. He continued that after he graduated from Wesleyan, putting together a team that could help him take his ideas for a show

18:27and make it something that could actually land for an audience. And so an exciting process was first he met a director, Tommy Kail, who was a couple years older than him at Wesleyan and had great ideas for taking what had been Lin-Manuel's sophomore in college original show, a script called In the Heights, a sort of attempt to resist West Side Story and the Cape Man depictions of Puerto Ricans in New York as gang members wielding knives and instead reflect the kind of neighborhood of small business owners and

18:59kids, parents sending their kids to college that Lin-Manuel grew up in and turning that kind of collegiate show into something that could land in the professional world. And Lin-Manuel didn't have the piano chops to be able to make his, his musical ideas fully visible. So they brought in this wonderful pianist, arranger, orchestrator, Alex Lacamoire, a child of Cuban immigrant parents who had been working on the musical Wicked. And Lin-Manuel realized he needed some help expanding the story and his producers connected him with Chiara Alegria-Hudis, the phenomenal playwright who

19:33would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful and helped Lin-Manuel really expand what had been a story about college relationships into a story of a community and of businesses and a female protagonist. And Lin-Manuel had actually already connected with a great musician, Bill Sherman at Wesleyan, who knew musical styles that Lin-Manuel didn't and could write down scores for instrumentalists that would have taken Lin-Manuel weeks to do. And when they had this whole team together, the five of

20:05them, Lin-Manuel felt they had superpowers that none of them did on their own. And so he thought back to one of his favorite animated robot shows from the 80s, Voltron, which is a super robot that has powers that come from all these individual robots glomming on together. And he bestowed that nickname on their collaboration. And then they even got a little robot toy, Voltron, that they would pose with in pictures together as a sign of what he couldn't do on his own, but he could do in collaboration. Now, given the title of this show, the Theater History Podcast, it's probably not a

20:41surprise. One of the things that really stuck out to me in reading through the book was how Miranda's also consciously drawing from positioning himself within the sort of historic tradition of Broadway. Could you tell us more about that, perhaps especially with regards to work on some of the projects that are not as high profile, the reworked West Side Story, some of the encores productions in which Miranda appeared? You bet. I mean, that was a thrill of researching this book. I talked to about 150 people in the course

21:14of reporting it, Lin-Manuel's family members, elementary school teachers, his bus driver. And then there were the days I got to talk to John Kander and Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber. And they all adore Lin-Manuel, in part because they just recognize his virtuosity as a creator, and in part because he is so eager to give credit to his forebearers in the field. I was trained in college, a literature professor named Harold Bloom, whose big theory was the anxiety of influence, which suggested that

21:47authors were kind of locked in this Oedipal struggle with their predecessors, and they had to kind of kill off their creative fathers in order to make space for themselves. And it was really refreshing and amazing to encounter an artist who did not seem to be burdened by that anxiety at all. And Lin-Manuel has plenty of other anxieties, but entering a tradition is for him a source of joy. And he just loves putting in shout outs to his own kind of literary father figures. So he wants the world to know that

22:19Hamilton goes into seven, eight time for the song Meet Me Inside, because he loved the way that Andrew Lloyd Webber used seven, eight time in Jesus Christ Superstar, a show that he performed in college. And he wants the world to know that he put in a little razzle dazzle, click boom at the end of the room where it happens in Hamilton, because he was obsessed with Kander and Ebb's score for Chicago and saw Rob Marshall's movie, you know, packed theater at midnight when it came out. And so for him, I think

22:50that one of the great thrills of In the Heights becoming a professional show and then winning a Tony Award in 2008 was that he got invited to join this pantheon of luminaries. So Stephen Schwartz, composer Wicked and Pippin, and other shows had come to see In the Heights, because he knew Alex Lackamore, the music arranger, and then asked Lin-Manuel to write a new, two new songs, actually, for a revival of Schwartz's anthology show, Working, inspired by Studs Terkel's accounts of people having different

23:22jobs. And that was a great moment where his mom felt vindicated because Lin-Manuel had had a miserable job working at a McDonald's franchise in high school, had terrible math anxieties, hated calculating the tab, had nightmares that a pencil would be driven through his skull because he couldn't do it fast enough. And his mom would tell him, hey, it's all grist for the mill. You can use this someday. And sure enough, he could turn that McDonald's experience into a song for working called Delivery about the one glory was when he could leave the shop and go out on a delivery order. And then his

23:56producers connected him with Arthur Lawrence, the book writer for West Side Story, who wanted to do a revival on Broadway in 2009 with Spanish lyrics for the Sharks, thinking that that might help give them a little bit more dignity and complexity on stage. And Lin-Manuel was introduced to Arthur Lawrence. I kind of love this story. And Lawrence said, well, you should meet with Stephen Sondheim, talk with him about the lyrics. But Lawrence said, let me know if you need help with Sondheim. He can be a lot. And OK, Arthur Lawrence, sort of known cantankerous collaborator. Stephen Sondheim goes, I mean, Lin-Manuel

24:31goes to the Turtle Bay home of Stephen Sondheim, who lets him in and had actually visited Lin-Manuel's high school drama club years ago when Lin-Manuel was directing West Side Story. So now his dream come true, he gets to meet the work with the lyricist whom he had loved as a adolescent. And Sondheim says, OK, great, fine. I never liked the lyrics to I Feel Pretty Anyway. Go ahead and translate them. Lin-Manuel wanted to do the Spanish lyrics for a boy like that, too. Sondheim was fine with that, warned Lin-Manuel off of doing America.

25:04He thought the rhythm was going to be too complex. And then and then sort of, you know, let him out the door saying, by the way, let me know if you need help with Arthur. He can be a lot. So there was that sort of, you know, generational mode of old cantankerous collaboration that Lin-Manuel was trying to undo. But he got to he got to be part of these guys. And John Kander as well had come to see in the Heights off Broadway and invited Lin-Manuel to lunch. And unlike Lin-Manuel, who struggles a bit to get the notes out and through his fingers, Kander is this famously fluid pianist who can just think

25:36out of his fingertips and compose a song at the moment. Lin-Manuel was a little intimidated to meet him. But he says the first time they sat down at lunch, Kander said to him, do you ever sit down at the piano and feel like you just don't know what you're doing? And Lin-Manuel said that just broke the ice right away. And they got to talk craft. And John Kander remembered for me, Lin-Manuel would show up with all of these books in his backpack because he was trying to research the life of Alexander Hamilton for his next show. One day he showed up without any books. Kander said, hey, what happened? You're not doing the project? And Lin-Manuel said, no, my mom got me a Kindle.

26:09And so then Kander got a Kindle as well. And then Lin-Manuel started to send these guys early drafts of his work on Hamilton, which they were very supportive of. And so it was sort of amazing to see all the ways that Lin-Manuel could really enter this history. And I think a lot of people have pointed out that's one of the things that makes Hamilton so resonant is that even though it's drawing on a musical vocabulary that's not often represented on Broadway, it's so steeped in those traditions of storytelling and character development through song that it's

26:44intelligible and strikes some familiar chords for people who grew up in the Kander and Sondheim and Schwartz lineage as well.

26:53Yeah, we're starting to get into Hamilton here. And I don't know about you, but it feels a little weird to talk about Hamilton as a subject of theater history, as opposed to something that's sort of immediate and contemporary. But I suppose it's been some time has passed at this point.

27:11It's just such a well-known show, obviously. And I'm curious about in the process of writing the book, especially the sections on Hamilton, what'd you come across that was new, that was surprising about the development, the run of the show, given that, as we've been saying, so much else is already sort of known about this show and its genesis. That's true. Well, it's certainly true. And I hope there would be through lines that would be resonant for folks knowing that really Hamilton is Lin-Manuel's eighth musical he's written when it

27:47opens, if you count high school and college shows, that might not strike audience members who are just coming to it for the first time. But there were things, even given the wonderful Jeremy McCarter volume on Hamilton's genesis, Lin-Manuel's annotations, I didn't know that Lin-Manuel happened to live in the same apartment building as a descendant of Aaron Burr when he was working on this show. It was just incredible to me. He's grilling on the rooftop up at the very northern

28:18tip of Manhattan. And this woman comes by and says, hey, I heard you're writing a Hamilton musical. My husband was a great, great, whatever, descendant of Aaron Burr. And the conversation with Antonio Burr, a forensic psychologist, and maintained to Lin-Manuel that his father, you know, great, great, great grandfather ancestor was not a murderer, but was in fact the murder weapon for Hamilton's own death drive. Didn't end up being fully a perspective that Lin-Manuel adopted in the show, but sort of opened him up to curiosity about how you might make Burr not just the villain in

28:52his history and led him to H.W. Brand's book about the subject and ways that he was able to connect himself to it too. And so these sort of amazing serendipitous moments of like, wow, there are even more connections to different facets of the life that I hadn't known. And I also, the moments I was, I mean, there's lots of sort of source study, which I suppose is the Shakespearean in me that's always delighted to find a reference that perks up in the show. But I was also fascinated just as a writer with resistance to choices that Lin-Manuel made in Hamilton that now feel like totally canonical

29:29to us. So Lin-Manuel shared with me an email that Stephen Sondheim had sent him after Lin-Manuel sent Sondheim a recording of act two of the show ends with, with, you know, what now every, every, I'm sure your, your kid can quote, who lives, who dies, who tells your story. And Sondheim, I'm paraphrasing, but wrote back to Lin-Manuel and said, okay, it's a major work. So I'm going to treat it with seriousness and rigor. And he said, who lives, who dies, who tells your story is not the ending of your show.

30:00So that does not live up to the themes that your show has been building towards and it's anticlimactic and you really need to reconsider it. And I thought, wow, I'm so, it sort of, it made me feel those moments that maybe you feel too as a writer, where you, you feel like you really found something good and then you share it with an audience and like, no, it's not working for me. So I asked the memo, what do you do if you get that note from Sondheim? And actually Oscar Eustace, who was, who had then

30:30become a producer of Hamilton at the Public had told me, he shared Sondheim's note. He didn't think that that was the, the right, right sort of motif to conclude with. So Lin-Manuel told me that if he, he, when he got a note like that from somebody he respected, like Eustace and Sondheim, he would sit with it and he would tell himself either they're right or he was right. But if he, but if it was important to him to keep, he knew that he hadn't earned it yet and he'd have to justify that ending. And he hadn't at that point written Hamilton's final soliloquy as the bullet is, uh, whistling across

31:08the stage toward him. And it was, that was the last, basically the last thing he wrote for the show, New Year's Day, just, just days before the show was about to open. And that really expanded Hamilton's story to be about America. You great unfinished symphony, uh, you sent for me and made the question of Hamilton's legacy, a question of national legacy as well. And Oscar Eustace told me one, once he heard that soliloquy, then he thought, okay, the ending can work. You've, you've earned this sort of metahistorical question. Um, but I, I love these moments of pushback on something that we

31:43kind of just accept as engraved in the, you know, in the tablets of Hamilton that itself had to be, um, earned or, or, uh, reconsidered along the way. Yeah. And it's interesting too, in that regard and sort of revisiting the story of Hamilton, it also feels that you mentioned, uh, Shakespeare reception a little bit earlier, the history of 400 years of, of how Shakespeare's plays have been viewed and received. It feels like we've gone through a mini version of that with Hamilton over the last decade or so. Uh, you chronicle some of the larger conversation about the musical and I'm wondering

32:20how you understand the show's place in Broadway history in the larger cultural landscape from a somewhat different historical vantage point than we had back when it came out, uh, a little over a decade ago. Well, you're totally right, Mike. It sort of, it seems almost vertiginous that just in 10 years, it's gone through this sort of whiplash that, uh, you know, Henry V takes hundreds of years to go through. And it's gone from like the show that celebrates the Obama era to, um, a show that then was, was quite criticized at, uh, when the Disney recording was released at the height of the Black Lives

32:55Matter protest movement, um, when, when, you know, the, the, you know, sort of the critique of centering slaveholders of providing an immigrant story that doesn't account for the differences in a, in a, you know, a, a white colonial subject versus, um, folks who are undocumented today, what its representation of women is, what its erasure of indigenous populations in the, in, um, in the space that becomes the United States, like all of these critiques that actually were, were present at the beginning of the show, but we're sort of more the province of, I would say a certain left-wing

33:27academic, uh, responses to the play. Then as, as that sort of language of critique moves into the, into popular American discourse over, over the five years or so from 2015 to 2020, become a bigger part of the show's, um, reception. And then, um, and then I think, uh, you know, in the, in the kind of current nightmare of the Trump era, for some people has started to seem like a kind of, uh, relic of a, uh, an earlier era of optimism that's unmerited or a kind of fantasy of progress. Um,

33:59I, I, I, to me, those always seem kind of more stories that we tell about the show than the stories that the show itself is telling, as is always the case with reception history. And, and I feel like, um, uh, you know, as with the Shakespeare play that pings in different ways, depending on where we are in the culture, like when I felt like we were sort of living in act one Hamilton for a while, which was this vision of a collective communal energy fueled by the drive of black American music and performers of color rallying together to, uh, you know, offer a new vision for this country. And that lately it's

34:34felt more like we're living in act two of Hamilton, which is a space in which, um, acrimony and ego and allegations of misconduct, you know, descend into political violence and, and put the legacy of our institutions and our figures, uh, up for grabs. Um, cause that seems like the show, you know, show has always been a tragedy and, and, and now we're seeing those elements of it more than just the, uh, rallying cries beforehand. Um, but I'm so, I'm so curious to see whether this is, uh,

35:05it sort of seems inconceivable that this is a show that won't have some staying power or that won't, uh, lodge itself in, in our collective consciousness as the years go forward. Um, but we also know the, you know, the shows like Oklahoma or hair or rent that seemed inescapable and, uh, culturally dominant in their day that continue, of course, to have vibrant presences, but don't have quite the same space that they occupied at the time. Um, so I guess we'll, we'll, we'll see time. We'll tell a little bit about that,

35:36but the degree to which Hamilton has saturated the culture because of digital media and social media access and that like so many children like your kid and like mine can sing every single note from it seems like, um, a kind of maybe unprecedented degree of cultural saturation for a musical theater work. Yeah. And you mentioned social media there. Uh, one of the thing you kind of chronicle that I think is really interesting in the book is the degree to which Miranda is using,

36:07uh, newfangled things like YouTube and Twitter, uh, or at least newfangled at the time to kind of shape public image and legacy that ties in with things like the ham for ham performances. Uh, do you see anything sort of maybe new, unique about how he's using that in that regard? Yes, I think that's totally true. That is, I was surprised that there's a little sort of, um, you know, um, sideshow history of technology that's coming through the book, even back from his parents' final albums to the cassette tapes that he used to make mixtapes to, um, you know,

36:41his first iPods on which he could shuffle through different genres to, uh, getting GarageBand and Logic Pro on his computer to as, as kind of, uh, prosthetics for the instruments he couldn't play himself. And then absolutely right. He's, he is thrilled to upload a promotional video for in the Heights when it transfers to Broadway in which he's spoofing high school musical two with a, you know, an improv rap to get people to come to see his show and then finding Twitter as well. And his joke about it is that it's an audience in his pocket. And he's, he's been a guy

37:12since his first piano recital, um, who has thrilled to applause and to getting to share his work and a genuine fan, um, both of other people's work and of his own, who was, who was thrilled to have that connection almost to the point he, he would say of an addiction. And, um, when I talked to his producers, they, they were thrilled too, because, um, his, Lin-Manuel's desire to share both his own composition process and his influences and to cheer on his fellow artists and to, you know, let sort of fans in on the backstage process was totally authentic. You know, it's just sort of a bubbling over

37:48exuberance of joy that he has and was great mark, great, like authentic marketing for the show and would allow people to connect with, uh, particularly in the case of Hamilton, a cultural phenomenon to which access was extremely limited, um, before, you know, the Disney recording was released and was a problem for the show that was sort of, you know, people were being scalped out of accessibility for a show that was trying to represent all Americans. And so those ham for ham performances, the kind of, you know, the street theater, um, uh, uh, performances outside the Richard Rodgers were for many people

38:22their first taste of what was happening inside the Richard Rodgers before that maybe the performance on the Grammys and the performance on the Tonys. And they were, uh, uh, I think they were just, they were just for fun. And Lin-Manuel's wife, um, joked to him, it's like, wow, you found an audience outside your audience. Like you had, you found a theater outside your theater, folks that you could connect with. But I think Lin-Manuel also like just wanted to provide, um, you know, a little, a little taste of enjoyment for people who couldn't be part of the, uh, experience there. And then what became

38:55interesting to me was like how that, I, I, I don't, I don't, I don't have any reason to doubt the sincerity of that desire to provide joy and entertainment and, um, collaboration, um, what happened when that came up against the, the, the economic conditions of, uh, who was going to profit from the financial success of Hamilton. And, um, this was part of the story that, uh, profit sharing negotiations had been reported as a, you know, as a fact, but I hadn't really understood what it felt like to be on the inside of the theater at that time. And since I was trying to write the education

39:31of an artist, this, this was a moment where I felt like my subject had, had learned this lesson, which is initially you get people to create great art by making the collaboration with you the most fun thing that anybody can do. And you lead through enthusiasm and through joy. And that makes people want to create with you. And people in the Heights called it party con pay. They were, they were just having a great time. They were getting paid for it. And then on Hamilton, when this incredible revenue was being generated from the show, um, and, uh, actors in the company felt that they should receive

40:02a greater portion of it than the, than the, uh, sort of the salary contract, uh, created. And the producers felt they were in the research and development business and lost money most of the time. So when they were making it, then that was the way that they would fund future projects and, and cover the risk. Um, it, it was a moment where simply having fun and, and leading with enthusiasm was insufficient, um, for at least for some members of the company to grapple with that, the economic disparities of the, um, of the show and let some, some of the company members not to

40:33want to participate in the ham for ham performances there. And so I thought, you know, that it's not, it's not just sort of theater gossip, but it's, it's part of your education of what do you do when you've learned how to lead in one way, and then it comes up against a different reality. There's two points from kind of almost opposite ends of your narrative within the book that I thought were kind of interesting in connection with one another. Uh, the first is Miranda's acknowledgement that quote, Hamilton is the first line of my obituary. I'm never topping it as a

41:05cultural event. And the second comes much earlier in the book. Uh, I think, I don't think I'd realized how contingent the, uh, sort of outcome of Miranda becoming this major musical theater figure was basically from what I understand, uh, it was a lot quicker and easier, uh, to get into the theater program at Wesleyan than it was to kind of do film school. Um, those two things together, I think, speak to a lot of his post Hamilton career trajectory. Uh, how do you sort of see what's,

41:36what's gone on after Hamilton reflecting that? And how do you see himself? Uh, how do you think he sees himself in terms of his legacy specifically with regards to theater, as opposed to these other, uh, fields of media in which he's also now been, uh, quite prominent? Right. It's such a good point. Mike had, had Wesleyan had a different set of requirements for the film major, um, instead of making you take two years of history and theory before you were allowed to check out the cameras, um, from the, from the, uh, the film department. It's certainly possible that Lin

42:10Manuel would have followed what he wanted to be as a kid, which was a filmmaker. He was known at Hunter as the, the film guy. He was always carrying around a camcorder. He made two original feature length movies while he was in high school. And, um, I don't think he would say that they were great works of art. In fact, they were the only things that he would not let me see when I was doing the research, although we described what was in them, but that was absolutely what he wanted to do. And he wanted to double major. He went to Wesleyan cause he could double major in theater and film. And he was convinced by sitting in on a class with Janine Basinger, who's sort of the, the godmother of

42:44modern film criticism. Um, but then he just wanted to make stuff and it took too long in the film program. And he felt there was a financial barrier to entry as well, cause he had to pay for sort of extra effects for your senior thesis. So he was totally explicit with me that his choices after the success of Hamilton were to get the film school that he couldn't get, uh, or didn't feel he could afford at, uh, Wesleyan. So it was just apprenticing himself to Rob Marshall, um, as the, uh, you know, on the set of Mary Poppins Returns, uh, peeking in on, uh, John M. Chu and Alice Brooks on the set of the

43:20film of In the Heights, helping to executive produce, um, with Tommy Kail, the TV series, uh, Fosse-Verdon to learn how Bob Fosse shifted from being a theater director to being a film director. Like he wanted to learn how to make movie musicals like the movie musicals that he grew up loving. And then his, um, in essence, his senior thesis was Tick, Tick, Boom, his film about, uh, Jonathan Larson's, um, uh, Jonathan Larson's failed attempt to get a, a show up for rent a musical that had deeply haunted him when he was in college and that he actually performed in, in the

43:52Encore series. So, um, so that was, that was the, that was the goal. That was how he wanted to spend his capital. But I, I certainly don't see it as him forsaking theater at all. And when he's told me about the projects that are coming up, um, which are, you know, are his to share, but there's, it's certainly both in the film and in the, and in the theater direction. And I think, I mean, home is so important to him. It's something that we've talked about earlier in a sense of, uh, Latin identity. He lives in Washington Heights. He feels at home in the Times Square

44:27area. Broadway is the community that has embraced him and he loves an audience. Um, I, I sort of wondered why he didn't want to write his own memoir. Um, you know, why he was letting me write this version of his story. And one of his high school friends said that he told them, he said, why would he want to do something that didn't have applause at the end? Uh, you know, let Daniel write the book. He'll write his next, uh, show whether or not he's going to be in the, uh, in the show. So I think that's always going to be, um, I think that's always going to be a part of his

44:59career, but I think he's always wanted it to be part of his career alongside musical storytelling and visual storytelling and film. And, um, and I, and I don't see it as, as, uh, a sort of commercial sellout thing of going to Disney. It's like, he's loved, he loved Little Mermaid since he was in, uh, fourth grade. He, he grew up in the Disney Renaissance. Now he gets to contribute to that for him joining Mencken and, uh, and, uh, Ashman's sort of pantheon is, is the same as joining the Sondheim Kander pantheon too. So there are definitely theater projects coming up. And the one of course that's been announced is the, uh, stage version of Warriors, which, which as you say, ties directly

45:34back to watching it as a kid and being terrified that you wouldn't make it home alive. And amazingly, when you listen to it, like actually has, it has a baseline from Lin-Manuel's first high school show, Nightmare in D Major. And it's got like a arpeggio line from his college senior thesis musical, Unborrowed Time. And it's even, it's got, it's got a song that he wrote for, for one of those high school feature films, Naughty Bird Curtsy. So it's like it, to me, it was this sort of glorious reprise of so many fears and desires that have run throughout his career. And, um,

46:10and I was glad he wrote it while I was writing the book because then it gave me an epilogue for the book, which was how he wrote sort of the musical story of his own life.

46:19Yeah. To that point about, uh, you know, sort of why doesn't he write his own memoir? Well, we'll have Daniel do it. Um, I am curious, uh, to kind of ask about, I asked you about rationale at the beginning of this interview and now I guess maybe a little bit about process. What, what was it like writing the book? How do you sort of balance, uh, I'm sure you're used to doing archival work, but here you're dealing with mostly very, uh, very much alive people. What did, what was that like in terms of developing this? Well, it might, it was both a thrill because I get to talk to all of

46:52these, these folks and Lin-Manuel was tremendously generous about spending a bunch of time with me himself and then, and then connecting me with, with, uh, you know, his elementary school bus driver and his high school girlfriend and his, uh, um, you know, his collaborators from college and everything. And, and then there were, you know, for somebody who mentored by the Stephen Greenblatt, uh, mode of, uh, you know, I began with a desire to speak with the dead. Like I've had imaginary conversations with Shakespeare in my head. He never talks back. Now I actually get to talk to artists

47:23and ask them these questions and, and try to illuminate the world that they, um, come through and what they've learned along the way. That's thrilling. And it's challenging because of course people have understandable opinions about how they're being represented in this work and what stories you're telling about them. And that was often a complicated and delicate process to navigate about how to make sure I'm telling the truth and have it be a truth that's recognizable to, um, to everybody who's involved in this story. And, and it was, um, it was so much fun to have both the interviews and to, to learn all these different stories and then to have the archival

47:57material alongside. So the, the, the, God, it was like tracking down. There was this, this guy who went to high school with Lynn, who I knew then in college and then was living, um, near the Oregon Shakespeare Festival who had a VHS tape of the high school performance of Nightmare in D Major that we tracked down. They need to find a VCR to play it on. My kids were, had never seen a, a video cassette tape before. And they're like, will there be sound? Can you fast forward? What's

48:27going to happen with it? And, um, and then, and then to, you know, get to see the, the high school script for the Hamilton film or Lin-Manuel's high school girlfriend had also shared his very first script for In the Heights in college, which was amazing. And not a single song or scene or line survived from that script to the version that was performed on Broadway, except for that title phrase and Washington Heights, uh, and the joke about Usnavi's name. So getting to see the genesis of

48:58that work was, was very exciting. Um, and at first I was trying to figure out what my voice was going to be in this project. Cause I really, I didn't, I've written stuff that's very voicey before, but I felt like Lin-Manuel's, um, lyrics are so pyrotechnic. I sort of didn't want the narrative voice to be competing for the reader's attention with Lin-Manuel's voice. So I really wanted, I sort of thought it was like, I want to build a, I want to, I want to like build the stone wall of the cathedral so I can set the

49:31stained glass window in it and it will, it will sparkle most beautifully on its own. So the first drafts I did for the book were oral histories. I would just cut together quotes from the interviews, uh, and I would do them for things that hadn't been reported at all elsewhere. So I did an oral history of Lin-Manuel's first feature film that he made his sophomore year in high school, Clayton's Friends. That was about his friends having a sleepover and having to use martial arts to fight against, uh, the, the bad guy. And, um, and I also wanted to do that to give Lin-Manuel a little proof of

50:05concept of like what I was actually doing with all these people that he was connecting me with and to give him confidence in the story. And I don't think anybody else would be interested in these, but, um, I was very moved that they resonated with him and let him feel like, okay, this is allowing him to get the treatment that, that, uh, the works of art that he admires get with their oral histories and their, uh, and their biographies. And then the real fun of it was, um, how can I make this not an academic book? And the first version had 150 pages of footnotes that

50:36my publisher then basically asked me to take out, but really make it narrative driven and, um, and try to make the arc of each chapter be an emotional arc rather than a, an argumentative structure and use scene and story and dialogue and description to, to try to conjure the moments that would reveal the stages in Lin-Manuel's, uh, artistic education. And so my, my beta readers there, I did, I did have musical theater professors who were reading this as I went and, um, and colleagues who would help, help me to

51:09make sure I was, I was, um, representing things that I didn't know about firsthand, um, much more accurately than I could on my own. But I also had my aunt who mostly reads romance novels, reading early versions. And my, uh, and my father-in-law who's a doctor and my mother-in-law who's a lawyer. And I thought, okay, if they, if they wouldn't be interested in it, then it can't stay in the, in the book. So I hope the result can read a little bit more, uh, you know, a little bit more like a novel than like a, a, a treatise to, um, really with the goal of being a book that I wrote for my students who want to have

51:44lives in the arts. And, um, likely Manuel are often trying to synthesize their own families, culture, and heritage with an industry that's not always hospitable to different voices and could get, you know, not a, not a blueprint, but a kind of mindset of how you learn from everybody around you. And, uh, the epigraph for, for the book came from a, um, it's actually a dinner platter that some family friends gave me and my wife for our wedding with a quote from a Jewish wisdom text, Pirke Avot,

52:14it said, who is wise, the one who learns from everyone. And when I saw that, I thought, oh yeah, that's, that's the argument of the book. And I want to show how Lin-Manuel has learned from everybody around him. And that was my pitch to him. I wanted to honor his teachers and, um, and, and show how great works of art don't just spring fully formed into the world, but are the product of, um, sponging up and then synthesizing all the influences that came to you. And that was, I think what, what Lin-Manuel said resonated with him about the project. And I hope that's what that, uh, students and teachers could take away from it. We'll post links in our show notes that will help you learn more about

52:52Daniel Pollack Pelsner's book, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the education of an artist. Daniel, thanks for sharing your insights into such a central figure of the last few decades of our theatrical history. Mike, I'm, I'm a big fan of the theater history podcast, and I'm honored that, uh, this story could be a part of it.