Lin-Manuel Miranda on How Hamilton Became Bigger Than Broadway

Broadway’s brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda has connected audiences to American history and inspired a bold, hip-hop-flavored revolution on the great white way.

- by jesús triviño alarcón

ALBERT EINSTEIN was a genius. He was also a horrible dresser—seemingly always disheveled, wearing oversize sweaters—and that hair. Oh, for the love of Pantene, that hair. In comparison, modern-day genius Lin-Manuel Miranda is the coolest mother funker on planet Broadway—sporting a Fania-inspired T-shirt (“Todo Tiene Su Final”), his hair slicked back in a colonial ponytail—not a man-bun, thank God. But Miranda does have one thing in common with Einstein: He looks tired.

“Can I get a cafecito with a lot of leche and a lot of azúcar?” Miranda asks his publicist, plopping down on a gray couch in his 500 Broadway Productions offices in Manhattan. He’s exhausted, and he’s busier than The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus at Comic-Con.

Alas, this is the life of the man behind the hottest ticket on Broadway in decades, the hip-hop musical Hamilton, based on founding father Alexander Hamilton. The show accomplishes the extraordinary feat of stirring up genuine interest in a figure whose accomplishments are familiar to history students—a bastard immigrant from the West Indies, he became a key figure in the American Revolution and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, served as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, and was shot dead as a still-young man in an infamous duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Yet for all that, he is possibly best known by most Americans today, unfortunately, as the dude on the ten-dollar bill and little more. Where education has failed, however, Miranda’s Hamilton succeeds, offering high drama, brilliant music and lyrics—all composed by Miranda— and inspired stage performances, with Miranda in the lead role.