Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda is the toast of the entertainment world today after winning 11 Tony Awards for his hip-hop musical based on the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.
Heat Street can reveal he will officially announce later today that he is stepping down from Hamilton to be replaced by Javier Muñoz and will be working with Disney on several projects as well as developing the movie version of In the Heights, his debut Broadway musical.
But what rules did he follow that got him to a point where so many people in showbusiness are at his feet? Here, in his own words, are five guidelines that Lin-Manuel Miranda lives by:
1. Select Your Story:
Taken from his Commencement Speech At UPenn in May:
“Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative. One could write five totally different musicals from Hamilton’s eventful, singular American life, without ever overlapping incidents. For every detail I chose to dramatize, there are ten I left out. I include King George at the expense of Ben Franklin. I dramatize Angelica Schuyler’s intelligence and heart at the expense of Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. James Madison and Hamilton were friends and political allies, but their personal and political fallout occurs right on our act break, during intermission. My goal is to give you as much as an evening as musical entertainment can provide, and have you on your way at home slightly before Les Mis lets out next door. This act of choosing—the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out—will reverberate across the rest of your life.”
2. Keep In Touch With The Kids:
From a Sirius XM Town Hall Hamilton Radio Event Last Month:
“They[young people] are the best part of our job, without question. They’re the best audiences. And that’s not on some idealistic, ‘I believe the children are our future’ type thing. I mean they are literally the best audiences. They don’t know how to do anything but be honest, so they give us more energy than any other show, they give us more inspiration, and what I think they take away, because they are so extraordinary and vocal: They’re not all gonna become theater majors. They’re not all gonna write musicals. But I think what audiences are taking away is, ‘Man, Hamilton lived three lifetimes worth in his short time on this earth.’ And whether you want to do theater or you want to do something else, this show leaves you thinking, ‘What am I gonna do in my short time on this planet? Because look what they did, and look what Eliza did.’”
3. Take Your Time To Achieve Your Dream:
“It took me six years to write this f***ing show,” Miranda said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “You can only do that if you’re in love with your subject.”
He told CBS 60 Minutes: “It took me a year to write [Hamilton song] My Shot. Because every couplet needed to be the best couplet I ever wrote. That’s how, that’s how seriously I was taking it.”
Elaborating on the subject of the length of his creative process to the Independent, Miranda said: “Every couplet had so much care going into it. We’re not just rhyming at the end of sentences. We’re rhyming six times within every line in certain places so it’s a lot of care and meticulousness to make it seem like it’s all coming off the cuff. I’m not that smart!”
4. Never Let Go Of Your Past:
Miranda told journalists at the Tony Awards yesterday: “I leave [the role of Hamilton] sometime this summer. Flash forward to a few years when you are going to be so sick of me playing Hamilton. I have written a role I cannot age out of… I intend to drop in on this thing. I feel lucky that I have built something I can drop in on over and over again. I feel very lucky I want to cut to 20 years from now when you’re like ‘Lin, when will you stop playing Hamilton.’”
He also previously disclosed to the Sirius XM Town Hall Hamilton Radio Event that Hamilton was influenced by Bring It On, the 2012 cheerleading musical he co-wrote that closed after five months. “We actually learned a lot from Bring It On, which was a fully pop score,” he said.
“This was the sound of what cheerleaders danced to which are these incredible techno high-energy things. We learned a lot through trial and error and how much you can get away with tracks meshing with a live orchestra. We tried and succeeded and took steps forward and steps back. By the time we were working on Hamilton, we knew what we could pre-record and had worked through a lot of the kinks on how to make this really happen with a live orchestra.”
5. Don’t Compromise:
Taken from his Commencement Speech At UPenn in May:
“I am out of college, I am 23 years old, and [Hamilton director] Tommy Kail and I are meeting with a veteran theater producer. To pay rent I am a professional substitute teacher: at my old high school. Tommy is Audra McDonald’s assistant. Tommy is directing In The Heights, and with his genius brain in my corner, my 80-minute one-act is now two acts. This big deal theater producer has seen a reading we put on in the basement of The Drama Book Shop in mid-Manhattan, and he is giving us his thoughts. We hang on his every word, this is a big deal theater producer, and we are kids, desperate to get our show on. We are discussing the character of Nina Rosario, home from her first year at Stanford, the first in her family to go to college.
“The big deal theater producer says: ‘Now I know in your version Nina’s coming home with a secret from her parents: she’s lost her scholarship. The song is great, the actress is great. What I’m bumping up against, fellas, is that this doesn’t feel high STAKES enough. Scholarship? Big deal. What if she’s pregnant? What if her boyfriend at school hit her? What if she got caught with drugs? It doesn’t have to be any of those things, you’re the writer—but do you see what I’m getting at guys, a way to ramp up the stakes of your story?’”
“I resist the urge to crack my shoulder. We get through the meeting and Tommy and I, again alone, look at each other. He knows what I’m going to say before I say it.
“Pregnant—”
“I know.”
“Nina on drugs—”
“I was there.”
“But he wants to put our show up.”
Tommy looks at me. “That’s not the story you want to tell and that’s not the show I want to direct. There are ways to raise the stakes that are not THAT. We’ll just keep working.”
If I could get in a time machine and watch any point in my life, it would be this moment. The moment where Tommy Kail looked at uncertain, frazzled me, desperate for a production and a life in this business, tempted, and said no for us. I keep subbing, he continues working for Audra, we keep working on In The Heights…it will be another five years before Heights reaches Broadway, exactly as we intended it.