It was September 2017, and Lin-Manuel Miranda was having a tough time because of Roger Federer. “Just stressed, watching Federer,” Miranda tweeted, with a picture of him and his son slumped against the couch as they watched an off-colour Federer plod through the second round of the US Open. The match was into the fifth set, and Miranda had had enough. “I gotta feed and tuck in this kid,” he wrote, “[so] pausing match and off Twitter for a bit.”
Federer won finally, but not before Miranda crashed out. So, the Swiss great, long an admirer of the American playwright, responded to the picture soon after the win: “Just you wait…just you wait!”
It was a deliciously beg-pardon, backhanded compliment. The line is from the opening number of Miranda’s Hamilton, a ground-breaking and culturally resonant re-telling of America’s founding father and first treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. Culturally resonant, because it is a parable of modern-day America by a cast so racially diverse that it would have shocked—and even shamed—America’s original, all-white founding fathers. Ground-breaking, because it is a stage musical with no spoken dialogue; the storytelling is almost entirely through songs and rap. “My name is Alexander Hamilton/And there’s a million things I haven’t done/But just you wait, just you wait,” sings Miranda as he reveals himself as the scrappy Hamilton.
Hamilton became a worldwide sensation after its premiere in New York in 2015. It received a record-breaking 16 nominations and 11 trophies, including Best Musical, at the annual Tony Awards—the Oscars of American theatre. Barack Obama, who was US president when the musical premiered, praised it as a cultural event that “reminds us of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that’s at the heart of America”.
Vital, crazy and kinetic are three words that capture Miranda’s work rather well. In 2021, he made his debut as film director in tick, tick…Boom!—a semi-autobiographical musical on the life of Jonathan Larson, a composer and playwright who died tragically young, months before his rock musical Rent found Hamilton-like success in 1996. The ‘tick, tick’ in the film’s title is Larson’s desperation as he realises that time is running out for him to make a mark in the world; the ‘Boom!’ is, of course, death and triumph.
Miranda’s film-making is kinetic, powered by characters who would rather break into songs and dance than speak like normal people. “Musical films need a strong frame to allow the suspension of disbelief—when the camera’s right up here, it’s hard to buy someone breaking into song,” said Miranda in a recent interview. “So, my conceit was: as soon as his fingers touch the [piano] keys, we’re in the world of Jonathan Larson. That can be very real, and that can be as unreliable as we need it to be.”
The past year has been phenomenal for Miranda—tick, tick…Boom! got two Oscar nods, and Miranda himself received a Best Original Song nomination for ‘Dos Oruguitas’, which he wrote for the animated musical Encanto last year. Dos oruguitas is Spanish for two caterpillars. Co-written by Miranda, Encanto (charm) is a Spanglish film about an extraordinary Colombian family. Its lively Spanish songs have broadened the idea of what a mainstream movie can be—a vital artistic achievement in a fast-diversifying America.
This is Miranda’s second Oscar nomination for song writing, and the odds of him winning seem quite strong. He is on the cusp of achieving the EGOT—acronym for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards for outstanding achievements in television, recording, film and theatre, respectively. Hamilton had swept most major entertainment awards except the Oscars (because it wasn’t a movie); it had even won Miranda a Pulitzer Prize. With ‘Dos Oruguitas’, he might finally achieve the grand slam of show business that only 16 people have so far won.
“The stark reality is that the rest of my life is a post-Hamilton period,” Miranda said. “Thing connecting with the culture in that way, that happens once every 20 years. So, I took my inspiration once Hamilton happened from [filmmaker] Robert Rodriguez, who said the best way to avoid a sophomore slump is to do so much different shit that no one can tell what your sophomore project is.”
Miranda’s staggering range, however, has not yet won him all-round love. Predictably, conservatives in America loathe him for being a mascot of multiculturalism. Miranda is of Puerto Rican descent and his work has championed the cause of Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
The Mirandas have in fact close ties to the party elite. His father, Luis Miranda Jr, has been a political consultant to top-rung Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. Luis’s Mirram Group runs political campaigns for the party. It was Obama himself who heard and critiqued the opening number in Hamilton even before Miranda had fully fleshed out the musical.
Hamilton has been criticised for playing fast and loose with history. It has been pointed out that the real Alexander Hamilton was hardly the benevolent visionary that Miranda’s play makes of him. Historians say he was an authoritarian leader who disliked democracy, encouraged monopolies, married into a slaveholding family, and traded slaves himself. Hamilton was often reckless as well; he was shot dead by one of his former associates.
“Miranda’s play is one of the most brilliant propaganda pieces in theatrical history,” wrote Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “Hamilton [played a] central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment…. Had he succeeded [in realising his vision], Americans would probably be living in a military dictatorship.”
That could well be true. But then, Miranda knows that one should never let truth get into the way of a good story. “I am not a politician or an economist,” he wrote after Hamilton became a smash. “I am a storyteller.”