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

0:00hi and welcome to the theater history podcast i'm mike leaguer i've got to start this episode off with a bit of a personal story uh when my son was a 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

0:32movies miranda'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 pollock pelzner's biography lin-manuel miranda the education of an artist which is the

1:04first full-length treatment of its subject's life and work daniel'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 like as a as a 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

1:38in this day and age that means so much of his life and career have already been documented 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 oh well i you know you certainly could describe it as a traditional biography it's actually not how i thought about it as i was writing it i really uh i loved i think it was a reviewer maybe

2:08in the la times who described this as a non-fiction buildings roman and that's what i wanted it to be like a i teach a class on coming of age stories 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 and i'm a shakespeare professor by training and uh through taking groups to the oregon shakespeare festival that i got kind of fascinated by like what a new canon of work for america might look like on the shakespeare model through

2:42commissioning projects at york and shakespeare festival and started interviewing contemporary playwrights uh lynn nottage chiara alegría hudis paula vogel robert schenken about whether shakespeare was a useful model for them and telling american stories and that led me to um oscar eustace at the public theater who said like oh if you 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 um 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

3:16as i could get to seeing you 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 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 lynn manuel talked about the teachers who shaped him as an artist and

3:46he would talk about the projects he wanted to take on after hamilton based on what he felt he could learn from the people that he was collaborating with and as a teacher myself i that that for me was the immediate angle and when somebody asked if i wanted to move beyond these articles to a book is like i want to write about the education of an artist and one of my mentors in grad school um stephen greenblatt shakespeare professor and when i was there he'd just written this uh amazing book will in the world how shakespeare became shakespeare that was a huge popular success and is is a phenomenal read but i

4:17think had attracted a little scholarly skepticism because it's all imaginative 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 lynn 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

4:51with like date hour precision where lynn manuel was and what he was seeing 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 lynn manuel ate for breakfast and what um you know biggie song was on his playlist that day like there was so much that nobody outside his friend group um you know his family had seen before nobody had listened to his very first uh musical that he

5:22wrote when he was 1600 college high school nightmare in d major about the ghost of a fetal pig that came back to haunt the uh kid who dissected him in ap bio or his uh 90s jukebox musical basket case in college or his senior thesis sci-fi time travel production like there was so much out there um that that he and his friends were willing to share with me that i thought could 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

5:52mentioning 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 uh specific uh lyrics even in shows like in the heights or hamilton uh but even the inspiration for his current project this adaptation of the 1979 movie the warriors apparently came from one of those uh traumatic childhood events where somebody watches a movie that they're not quite old enough to see yet um could you tell us

6:24a bit about his upbringing and and maybe in particular how some decidedly adult themes this really uh serious uh concern fear of mortality become recurring motifs of his work sure 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 um he is a kid of puerto rican uh uh parents

6:55who met at a doctoral program in psychology at nyu in the 70s and uh worked many jobs to give their kid a full middle class uh upbringing um and he tested into a wonderful public magnet school on the upper east side of manhattan hunter college high school where he was introduced to the world of theater and performance um but he had these his parents had these really sort of two different philosophies of uh raising him his uh he was a very sensitive child he would cry at an unhoused person on the street

7:26he would cry at the chord changes and bridge over troubled water he would cry at the the letterhead of his montessori school in um near nyu in greenwich village because he was getting bullied by the other kids uh who didn't like that he could read a little bit quicker than they could and his dad louise is this scrappy indomitable uh political uh fighter uh consultant and activist who uh graduated from high school at i don't know 16 or something like that and college at 19 and um came to the u.s to

7:58do 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 lumel was not a fighter he would just hug the puppets and say no no fighting and his mom who continued in the child psychology uh path really saw it as her job she told me to make her son feel that whatever he was feeling was okay to experience and she gave him this mantra so you want to be an artist this is all

8:29grist 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 on the uh um uh up in washington heights so then then these trauma comes in so he has his dear friend in preschool little girl he calls his girlfriend and they hold hands every day and they they have a little kiss um when they see each other one morning lin-manuel wakes up age four or five his mom's in tears and tells him that his friend has drowned tragic accident in her parents backyard and he says the whole

9:01next year was just gray for him people would ask do you have a girlfriend and he would say my girlfriend died and then that that trauma sort of subsided uh but when he started in high school his first girlfriend there was hit by a car um 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 his full potential and this was only accentuated when his high school girlfriend took him to see rent for his 17th birthday and he

9:36became totally enamored with the work of jonathan larson who uh as 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 uh brandon lee bruce lee's son the martial arts actor who was killed by a bullet on the set of uh of a film and so the very first musical lin-manuel wrote after being inspired by jonathan larson to put his life on stage nightmare in d major

10:07was about the fear that this this fetal pig from ap bio would come back and kill his girlfriend or kill him um 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 uh before he could live out his life and not only who would who had been killed in a duel but

10:42whose own son hamilton's son had also been killed in a duel and it was that that peril that terrifying nightmare of losing a child and then and then losing your own life that and and lin-manuel's high school girlfriend had saved the original script for lin-manuel's um screenplay that he wrote about the burr hamilton duel and it is all about hamilton's guilt and terror that his son had died and then his decision to throw away his shot uh rather than take another life at the duel uh he told me he got a b minus on the script from uh his teacher who said he thought it was this simplistic psychological

11:16explanation for a complex historical moment and that 20 years later when oscar eustace kept pressing lin-manuel you 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 minus b minus and he didn't want to provide an answer but it certainly wasn't just a serendipitous moment of picking up a ron churnow biography on vacation these are long-standing uh anxieties that his mom told him he could he could use his grist for the mill and turn into his art another maybe more publicly known influence of course is the way a

11:52lot of miranda's work investigates uh 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 uh as i said identity and particularly latinidad influences and manifests itself in his art could

12:24you tell us more about that you bet well i think there's you're you're pointing to that key tension which is that latinidad is this this wonderful term for creating solidarity out of disparate influences and this was indeed lin-manuel's father's work with um the hispanic federation that he created in new york to try to um to bring together disparate uh immigrant groups from the caribbean diaspora and from latin america in new york as a political force and you could see a song like carnival del barrio

12:57in in in the heights where where the um the uh the residents of the neighborhood are raising the puerto rican flag and the cuban flag and the mexican flag together also la bandera puerto kenya um in a kind of collective action as a reflection of that latinidad um but there's also i think in lin-manuel's work a real awareness of the different paths that different uh latin communities have in the united states that we really see in the difference between uh you know and in the heights abuela claudia as a as a cuban immigrant coming in after world war ii from the rosario

13:33family as puerto rican um uh farmer the children of farmers coming to the u.s in the 70s to snavi as a dominican character coming without the privilege of citizenship that puerto rican migrants enjoy um of what those differences are in experiences within latinidad and then of course the difference that's so palpable for le manuel which is the difference between being born in the country that your parents come from and being born in the united states and um that it's a palpable question

14:04of course and in the heights uh what does it mean to find home when you're when when your family speaks a different language than the than the community around you when you've grown up hearing hearing salsa rhythms and eating foods that aren't shared by your mostly non-latino uh classmates and um this came through in the really even the narrative texture of the book so i i was sending early chapter drafts to lin manuel as i wrote them and everybody who knows him calls

14:35him 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 the sort of tension of his development as an artist was what it would mean to have a name that his that his father had had wanted to give a son since his father was 13 involved in puerto rican revolutionary politics and had read a

15:07poem by the uh by a uh puerto rican revolutionary um poet uh reflecting on the a child of uh puerto rican soldier who's fought in vietnam has a vietnamese first name lin uh spanish surname manuel wondering how to extricate his son from the um the danger of uh colonial politics and sort of yankee imperialism what it would mean to be given that name in a in a world that couldn't pronounce it or receive it and he felt like that that was his growth was learning to create as lin manuel and um at the at the very

15:44uh you know sort of most recent point of his career in in the score for the disney film encanto he finally wrote a song entirely in spanish um which is you know a language in which he's fluent but he doesn't usually speak um but he wrote the song dos orgitas that was the academy award nominated song to explain the sort of family trauma in encanto and the actor olga merediz who uh had sung the voice of abuela claudia and then sang the the uh songs 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

16:19wanted that that sort of tension from the code switching childhood to embracing that legacy um to be part of the as well as the 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 um professional phase of uh miranda's career as he begins to develop what becomes in the heights um a figure comes

16:50in uh named voltron and at this point uh people might be wondering what is a figure from a cartoon doing in this uh uh biography uh who or what is voltron what uh sort of role did that entity play in the development of in the heights oh mike you you were tapping the the biggest uh gap in my um professional expertise heading into this book i felt like i knew i knew i was american history major in college i've been a musical theater fan um i was a kid who was only allowed to watch pbs growing up

17:23in the 80s and lin-manuel latchkey kid is a child of gi cho's and thundercats and uh and all the glorious uh detritus of 80s pop culture and so i had to learn about voltron myself um and uh and one of i think lin-manuel's sort of amazing creative gifts is the power of analogy or power of association so um a big theme of this book is that uh his great art emerges from collaboration and he's able to

17:53attract the the um the talent who can help him do the things that he can't he can't play piano about that beautifully he can't sing like like most broadway drained uh artists he's not a an arranger or choreographer uh writing sheet music is a challenge for him and so um 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 um putting together a team that could help him take his ideas for a show and

18:27make it uh something that could actually land for an audience and so um an exciting process was first he met a director tommy kale who's a couple years older than him at wesleyan and had great ideas for taking what had been lin-manuel sophomore in college original show um a script called in the heights a sort of attempt to resist uh 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 uh small business owners

18:59and kids parents sending their kids to college that lin-manuel grew up in um and turning that kind of collegiate show into something that could uh land in the professional world and um 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 uh pianist arranger orchestrator alex lacamoire um child of cuban uh immigrant parents who had been working on the musical wicked and lin-manuel realized he needed some help expanding the story and and his producers connected him with kiara allegoria hudis the the phenomenal playwright who would go on to win the

19:34pulitzer 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 uh of businesses and a female protagonist and um lin-manuel had actually already connected with uh a great musician bill sherman at wesleyan who 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 them lin-manuel felt they had superpowers that none of them did on their own and so he

20:08thought back to one of his favorite um animated robot shows from the 80s voltron which is a super robot that has uh powers that come from all these individual robots glomming on uh together and he he bestowed that nickname on their collaboration and then they even got a little robot uh toy voltron that they would they would pose with in in pictures together as a 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

20:41probably not a surprise 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 uh could you tell us more about that perhaps especially with regards to work on on some of the projects that are not as high profile uh the reworked west side story some of the encore's productions in which miranda appeared you bet i mean that was a thrill of of researching this

21:11book i talked to about 150 people in the course of um reporting it uh 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 weber and they all adore lin-manuel um 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 i was trained in college um a literature professor named harold bloom

21:42whose whose big theory was the anxiety of influence which suggested that authors 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 there was plenty of other anxieties but um but entering a tradition is for him a source of joy and he just loves putting in shout outs to uh his his

22:13own kind of literary father figures so he he you know he wants the world to know that um hamilton goes into seven eight time for the song meet me inside because he loved the way that uh andrew lloyd weber used seven eight time in um jesus christ superstar show that he performed in college and he wants the world to know that he put in a little razzle dazzle um click boom at the end of uh the room where it happens in hamilton because he was obsessed with candor and ebb's score for chicago and saw rob marshall's

22:44movie um you know packed theater at midnight when it came out and so um for him i think that 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 steven schwartz composer wicked and pippin and other shows had come to see in the heights uh he knew alex lack and more the music arranger and then asked lin-manuel to write a new two new songs actually for a revival of um schwartz's

23:18anthology show working inspired by studs turkel's accounts of people having different jobs and that was a 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 the 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 uh for for working called delivery about

23:50the one glory was when he could leave the shop and go out on a delivery order and then um his producers connected him with arthur lawrence uh the the book writer for west side story who wanted to do a revival on broadway in 2009 uh with spanish lyrics for the sharks um uh 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 i kind of left this story of course and said well you should meet with steven sondheim talk with him about the lyrics but lawrence said let me know if you need help with sondheim he can be a lot

24:24and um okay arthur lawrence sort of known cantankerous collaborator steven sondheim goes i mean lin-manuel goes to the turtle bay home of steven sondheim who lets him in and uh 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 uh work with the lyricist whom he had loved as a as a adolescent and sondheim says okay 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

24:59um to um sondheim was fine with that warned lin-manuel off of doing america he 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 um so there was that sort of you know generational mode of uh old cantankerous collaboration that lin-manuel was trying to undo but he got to he got to be part of these guys and uh john candor as well had come to see in the heights off broadway and invited lin-manuel to lunch and unlike lin-manuel who you know struggles a bit to

25:30get the notes out and through his fingers candor is this famously um fluid pianist who can just think uh out 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 candor 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 candor 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

26:00hamilton for his next show one day he showed up without any books candor said hey what happened uh you're not doing the project and lin-manuel said no my mom got me a kindle and so then candor got a kindle uh as well and then lin-manuel started to send these guys uh early drafts of his work on hamilton um which they were very supportive of and so it was uh it was sort of amazing to see all the ways that uh lin-manuel could really enter this history and i think i think you know a lot of people have pointed out that's that's one of the things that makes hamilton so resonant is that even though

26:33it's drawing on a musical vocabulary that's not often represented on broadway it's so steeped in those um traditions of storytelling and uh character development through song that it's intelligible and and um strikes you know some familiar chords for people who grew up in the candor and sondheim and schwartz lineage as well yeah we're starting to get into hamilton here and uh i don't know about you but uh it feels a little weird to talk about hamilton as a subject of uh theater history as opposed to something that's

27:05sort of immediate and contemporary but i suppose it's it's been uh some time has passed at this point yeah um it's also it'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 uh 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 has already sort of known about this this uh show and it's it's genesis that's well it's certainly

27:35true and i i hope there would be through lines that that would be um you know resonant for folks knowing that really hamilton is lin-manuel's eighth musical he's written when it when it opens if you count high school and college shows that um that might not be um might not strike uh audience members who are just coming to it for the first time but there were things even you know even given like the wonderful jeremy mccarter volume on on uh hamilton's genesis lin-manuel's annotations i didn't know that lin-manuel ran into happened to live in the same apartment building as a descendant of

28:10aaron burr when he was working on this show it was just incredible to me like he's he's grilling on the rooftop up up at very northern tip of manhattan and this woman comes by and said hey i heard you're writing a hamilton musical my husband was the great great whatever uh uh descendant of aaron burr and uh this conversation with antonio burr as a forensic psychologist uh and 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 uh death drive didn't end up being fully a perspective

28:45that lin-manuel adopted in the show but sort of opened him up to curiosity about how you might make not just the villain in his history and led him to hw brand's book about the um the subject and ways that he was able to connect himself um to it too and and so these these sort of amazing serendipitous moments of like wow there are even more connections to uh uh different facets of the life that i hadn't known and i also the the moments i was i mean there was 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

29:18but i was also fascinated just as a writer with um resistance to choices that lin-manuel made in hamilton that now feel like totally canonical to us so lin-manuel shared with me an email that steven sondheim had sent him after lin-manuel sent sondheim um 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

29:49tells 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 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

30:22working for me so i asked the memo what what do you do if you get that note from sondheim and actually oscar eustace who was uh who had then become a producer of hamilton at the public had told me he shared sondheim's note he didn't think that that was the uh 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

30:56earned 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 the stage toward him and it 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 you sent for me and made the question of hamilton's legacy a question of national

31:29legacy as well and oscar uses told me one once he heard that soliloquy that he thought okay the ending can work you've you've earned this sort of meta-historical question um but i i love these moments of pushback on something that we kind of just accept as engraved in the you know in the tablets of hamilton that itself had to be earned or or 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

32:04400 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 how 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 a little over a decade ago well you're totally right mike it sort of it seems

32:35almost 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 matter protest movement um when when we know 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 white colonial subject versus um folks who are undocumented

33:10today 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 were sort of more the province of i would say a certain left-wing academic 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 you know in the in the kind of current

33:48nightmare of the trump era for some people has started to seem like a kind of uh relic of a an earlier era of optimism that's unmerited or a kind of fantasy of progress um 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 as you know as with the shakespeare play that pings in different ways depending on where we are in the culture like i felt like we were

34:19sort 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 felt 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 so

34:52that 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 it 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 shows like oklahoma or hair or rent that seemed inescapable and uh culturally

35:25dominant 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 will tell a little bit about that but 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 other thing you kind of

36:01chronicle that i think is really interesting in the book is the degree to which miranda is using uh newfangled things like youtube and twitter uh 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

36:33coming through the book even back from his parents final albums to the cassette tapes that he used to make mixtapes to um you know his first ipods on which he could shuffle through different genres to uh getting garage band and logic pro on his computer to as his 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

37:07and his joke about it is that it's an audience in his pocket and he's he's been a guy since 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 linman most desire to share both his own composition process and his

37:37influences 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 just sort of a bubbling over exuberance 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 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

38:11and so those ham for ham performances the kind of you know the street theater um uh uh performances outside the richard rogers were for many people their first taste of what was happening inside the richard rogers before that maybe the performance on the grammys of the performance on the tonys and they were uh uh uh i think they were just they were just for fun and linman well's wife um joked to him he's like wow you found an audience outside your audience like you had you found a theater outside your theater

38:43folks that you could connect with but i think linman well 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 interesting 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 that the the economic conditions of uh who was going to profit from

39:13the financial success of hamilton and um this is 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 of 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

39:44anybody 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 the actors in the company felt that they should receive a 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

40:18moment 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 want 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

40:52within 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 cultural 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 to get into the theater program at wesleyan than it was to kind of do film school um those two things

41:29together i think speak to a lot of his post hamilton career trajectory uh how do you sort of see what's what'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

42:02of history and theory before you're allowed to check out the cameras um from the from the uh the film department it's certainly possible that lin-manuel 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

42:34what he wanted to do and he wanted to double major he went to wesleyan because 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 modern film criticism um but then he just wanted to make stuff and it took too long in the film program and and he felt there was a financial barrier to entry as well because 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

43:06didn'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 film of in the heights helping to executive produce um with tommy kale the tv series uh fossey verdon to learn how bob fossey 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

43:41larson's um uh jonathan larson's failed attempt to get 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 encore 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 it's certainly both in the film and in the and in the theater direction and i think i mean home is so important

44:19to him it's something 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 area broadway is the community that has embraced him and he loves an audience um one of the 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

44:53be in the uh in the show so i think that's always going to be um i think that's always going to be part of his career 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 a sort of commercial sellout thing of going to disney it's like he's loved he loved little mermaids since he was in uh fourth grade he grew up in the disney renaissance now he gets to contribute to that for him joining mencken and uh and ashman's sort of pantheon is is the same as joining the sondheim

45:24candor 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 back 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

45:58school feature films naughty bird curtsy so it's like it to me it was a this sort of glorious reprise of so many fears and desires that have run throughout his career and um and i was glad he wrote it while i was writing the book because then it let me gave me an epilogue for the book which was how he wrote sort of the musical story of his own life yeah 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

46:30rationale at the beginning of this interview and yeah 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 mike it was both a thrill because i get to talk to all of these 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

47:03high 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 and 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

47:34opinions 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 learn all these different stories and then to have the archival material 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

48:06and 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 video cassette tape before and they're like will there be sound can you fast forward what's going 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 lynn minwell's high school girlfriend had also shared his very

48:39first 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 his navi's name so getting to see the genesis of that 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 because i really i didn't i've written stuff that's very voicey before but i felt

49:13like lynn-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 lynn-manuel's voice 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 stained 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

49:45them for things that hadn't been reported at all elsewhere so i did an oral history of lynn-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 bad guy and um and i also wanted to do that to give lynn-manuel a little proof of concept 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

50:16they 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 my 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

50:47rather 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 lynn-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 make 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 and my father-in-law who's a doctor and my

51:23mother-in-law who's a lawyer and i thought okay if they wouldn't be interested in it then it can't stay in the in the book so i hope the the result can read a little bit more uh you know a little bit more like a novel than like a a treatise to um really with the goal of being a book that i wrote for my students who want to have lives in the arts and um likely emmanuel are often trying to synthesize their own families culture and heritage with an industry that's not always hospitable to different

51:54voices 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 it 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 limmanuel has learned from everybody around him and that

52:25was 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 limmanuel 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 daniel pollack pelzner's book linmanuel miranda the education of an artist daniel thanks for sharing your insights into such a central

53:00figure of the last few decades of our theatrical history mike i'm a big fan of the theater history podcast and i'm honored that this story could be a part of it podcast and i'm honored that this story could be a part of it