Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist - Hardcover

Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 166801470X ISBN 13: 9781668014707

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A “valuable, comprehensive” (Quiara Alegría Hudes, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright), captivating exploration of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s artistic journey, revealing how the creator of the Broadway musicals Hamilton and In the Heights found his unique voice through bold collaborations, redefining the world of musical theater.

How did Lin-Manuel Miranda, the sweet, sensitive son of Puerto Rican parents from an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, rise to become the preeminent musical storyteller of the 21st century? Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist is his incredible story as never told before, tracing Miranda’s path from an often isolated child to the winner of multiple Tonys and Grammys for his Broadway hits Hamilton and In the Heights; a global chart-topping sensation for his songs in Disney’s Moana and Encanto; and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Miranda’s journey is a testament to the power of creativity, collaboration, and cultural synthesis. He was not a musical prodigy, but an insatiable drive to create art and learn from those around him propelled him to fuse his Latino heritage with pop, hip-hop, and the musical styles of Broadway. His was a new way of telling American stories, and of speaking to new audiences.

Drawing on interviews with Miranda’s family, friends, and mentors—and many conversations with Miranda himself—Daniel Pollack-Pelzner delves into the formative experiences that shaped Miranda as an artist, from his early musicals in high school and college to the creation of his Broadway and Hollywood triumphs. With full access to Miranda’s inner circle, this behind-the-scenes origin story is sure to captivate his legions of fans and beyond.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner has written about theater and contemporary culture for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Born and raised in Oregon, he teaches theater history at Portland State University and is the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project. He lives in Portland with his wife, whom he met in a fifth-grade production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and their two children.

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Prologue PROLOGUE
When I first met Lin-Manuel Miranda to discuss this project, he was trying to help his four-year-old log on to Disney Plus.

It was a clear, wintry day in 2022, and he’d invited me to the Drama Book Shop, a shrine to playwriting in Midtown Manhattan’s theater district that had given him and his friends a basement space after college to work on the show that became his first Broadway musical, In the Heights. Between substitute teaching and dancing at bar mitzvahs to pay his rent, he’d pop down to the bookshop basement and figure out a song on its creaky piano. He now owned the bookshop with one of his earliest collaborators on that show. He pointed out a perk of ownership—“Free coffee!”—when we filled our cups at the café and found a table to chat.

But before we did that, he had to help his son crack the Disney app. The little guy wanted to watch Encanto.

I had to suppress a laugh. If anyone should have Disney Plus streaming without a hitch, it ought to be the songwriter who supplied its most beloved content. The Broadway smash Hamilton more or less launched Disney Plus when the show’s live film version was released on the service in 2020, quickly becoming its most-streamed title. Disney’s Encanto, for which Lin-Manuel wrote the songs, was the most-streamed movie in the world in 2022, bested the next year by Disney’s Moana, also with songs by Lin-Manuel. Numbers like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and “Surface Pressure” from Encanto became so popular that Billboard named Lin-Manuel its 2022 songwriter of the year, ranked higher even than Taylor Swift. In addition to his multiple Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and the MacArthur “genius grant,” Lin-Manuel had arguably created the soundtrack to the post-pandemic world. He redefined musical storytelling by synthesizing his Latino heritage with his love of hip-hop, Broadway, and every other form of pop culture he’d encountered, the rare theater artist to become a household name.

And yet that didn’t mean the iPad app worked better for his family than for anyone else’s. It had been a crazy year, Lin-Manuel told me after he’d gotten his son logged on. With studio release calendars reshuffled by the pandemic, he’d had four movies come out in the past eight months. In addition to Encanto, there was the film version of In the Heights, an animated musical for Sony called Vivo, and his directorial debut on Netflix, a film based on Rent composer Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical Tick, Tick… Boom!. Even for an artist who famously writes like he’s running out of time, it was a lot.

But now, he said, his calendar was finally clear. He had nothing going on except helping his older son get ready for school. And cowriting a concept album based on the 1979 movie The Warriors. And composing the songs for the Lion King prequel, Mufasa. And finishing a new musical with one of his composer heroes, John Kander. And polishing the score for a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid with another of his heroes, Alan Menken. And working out a performance with Andrew Lloyd Webber to celebrate the queen’s jubilee.

When he talked about these projects, he didn’t seem burdened or overwhelmed. He looked giddy. In a gray overcoat, sweater, and jeans, with a scruffy pandemic goatee, he could barely sit still. After leading me down to the Drama Book Shop basement, he started playing tunes on an old piano, popping up to illustrate dance steps, then whipping out his laptop to show me video clips. Unlike his early days in that basement, he no longer had financial worries. With the success of Hamilton, he said, he had the freedom to pursue projects that met his main criterion: “I like to work on things I’ll learn from.”

It was that appetite for learning that had drawn me to Lin-Manuel. As a theater professor and an arts journalist, I’d written about his career before. Trained as a Shakespeare scholar, I wondered who our Shakespeares might be today—artists telling national stories in innovative dramatic forms—and in 2016, the head of New York’s Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, suggested I check out the guy who’d just created a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution. For the New Yorker, I covered the 2017 opening of Hamilton in London, and I traveled to Puerto Rico for the Atlantic in 2019 when Lin-Manuel took Hamilton there on a fundraising tour after Hurricane Maria. I wrote about his contributions to Moana and Mary Poppins Returns—sometimes appreciatively, sometimes critically. And every time I heard him speak, what struck me, besides his exuberance, was his interest in trying things that would help him learn new skills. For a songwriter who’d already found so much success, he seemed almost insatiable in his desire to expand his tool kit.

His collaborators noticed it too. “Lin is the best in the world at what he does because he’s continually challenging himself,” Jared Bush, the screenwriter for Moana and Encanto, told me. “He has this constant desire to keep improving, stretching, and learning.” And that desire, his longtime friends say, has characterized his approach to creativity for years. “Without diminishing his talent, I don’t think of him as a genius,” says Owen Panettieri, his college friend and vice president of Lin-Manuel’s company 5000 Broadway Productions. “It’s a bit of a disservice to say, ‘Oh, he’s just brilliant,’ or ‘Oh, he has this gift.’ Maybe there’s some truth to that, but I don’t believe that’s the key to his success over decades. If you really want to create art that’s lasting, there’s work and there’s sacrifice, and there’s also a commitment to openness and learning. He works really hard, and he continues to learn, and that, more than anything, is what helps.”

Comments like that intrigued me. I wanted to find out what Lin-Manuel had learned. I knew the output; I was curious to figure out the input. And doing so, I suspected, might help me reach a different understanding of creativity. Many of us assume that some people come into the world as inherent creators, and we imagine masterpieces springing, fully formed, from the brains of those unique geniuses. If any work seemed to illustrate that idea, it would surely be Hamilton. Lin-Manuel was the originator, the lyricist, the composer, the scriptwriter, and the star, motoring through brilliant raps on Broadway that changed the way America tells its origin story. If you encountered Lin-Manuel only as Alexander Hamilton, you might think he was a born genius.

And yet I soon learned that was not how most people who knew Lin-Manuel as a child would have described him. Though he had the promise to test into a Manhattan public school for gifted children, he wasn’t considered the best writer in his cohort, or the best composer, or the best musician. He was kind, enthusiastic, smart, and imaginative, and he had charisma onstage, if not particular singing talent. He enjoyed making up songs with his toys, but so do lots of children. Coming up with a ditty like “The Garbage Pail Kids are in town!” in preschool doesn’t guarantee that three decades later you’ll come up with a line like “I’m past patiently waitin’. I’m passionately smashin’ / Every expectation, every action’s an act of creation!” He had to learn how to become an...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 166801470X
• ISBN 13: 9781668014707
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italien