How did Lin-Manuel Miranda become a global superstar?

Lin-Manuel Miranda likes to tell the story of his first piano recital at age six. He played one song and received a round of applause. So he played another one. More applause followed. Spurred by this unexpected acclaim, he kept going through all the songs he knew until he was yanked offstage. “If I ever write a biography,” he joked, “it’ll be called I Know Another One.”

I thought of this childhood lesson when I travelled to Puerto Rico in January 2019 to see Miranda return to the title role in Hamilton. After Hurricane Maria devastated his parents’ birthplace, he became the stateside ambassador for relief efforts and quickly put together a charity single. As I listened to the track on the flight over the Caribbean, I glanced at the copyright data on my phone. The single was registered to I Know Another One, Inc.

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Why did that cheeky, self-mocking, insatiable quest for applause continue to script Miranda’s journey as an artist more than 30 years later? And how did the showboating kid become a global star, adept at synthesising Broadway history with hip-hop celebrity, Latinx politics with pop flair, infectious hooks with progressive representation? 

Miranda wasn’t anointed a MacArthur-certified genius at birth. He was a friendly but often lonely kid, a creative but not exceptional student, a charismatic but not particularly talented performer. He says he couldn’t dance or sing well enough to play the musical theatre roles available to aspiring Latino actors. So he wrote his own starring roles instead, first as Usnavi in In the Heights, then as Alexander Hamilton – brilliant rappers rather than lyrical crooners, energetic emcees rather than balletic dancers. 

Instead of a smooth path to stardom, Miranda needed an education. He was fortunate to get one: from his Puerto Rican parents, a sense of dual cultures and a love of Broadway and salsa; from his elementary school bus driver, a taste for old-school hip-hop; from his high school drama programme, the opportunity to perform; from his university classmates, a Latino community and a composer’s vocabulary; from director Thomas Kail and producer Jeffrey Sellers, the discipline to build a show; from playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes and arranger Alex Lacamoire, the artistry to build a world; from biographer Ron Chernow, a vision of Hamilton as a brash, hyper-verbal immigrant.

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In conversation, Miranda is quick to credit his teachers. When we first met to discuss this book, he quoted from memory the note that his eighth-grade teacher, Dr Rembert Herbert, wrote on the back of one of his essays: “You’ve been hibernating in this class. It’s time to come out.” Herbert saw potential in songs that Miranda had written for a class project and tapped him as an eighth-grader to script plays for the upperclassmen theatre club.

Miranda’s other teachers came outside the classroom. He credits his father, a Democratic political consultant, with giving him a work ethic, curbing his tendency to play Grand Theft Auto instead of meeting deadlines. He was eager for me to talk to his mother, a psychologist, who gave him tools to transmute childhood traumas into art and his older sister, who shaped his musical sensibility by sharing her 80s CD collection and sneaking her little brother into early hip-hop movies.

Like Hamilton, Miranda’s confidence in the power of his pen has sometimes got him into trouble. His support for president Obama’s plan for federal control over Puerto Rican debt sparked protests when he announced his plan to bring Hamilton to San Juan. And the rise of Black Lives Matter has renewed criticism over the canonisation of white male founding fathers in Hamilton’s vision of American history, even as a multi-ethnic cast transforms those familiar roles through hip-hop styles. 

These challenges have been part of Miranda’s education. He’s conceded his mistake in backing the debt plan that led to harsh austerity measures in Puerto Rico; he’s acknowledged the many layers of history that Hamilton leaves out. When the film adaptation of In the Heights drew challenges for not representing New York’s Afro-Latino population, he accepted the criticism: “I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening.”

He’s still spurred by that childlike yearning for applause, but that craving can also motivate an expansive social conscience. As Puerto Rican reporters grilled him in the press conference after Hamilton’s opening night in San Juan, he admitted: “I’m like a little kid; I just want you to be proud of me.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artistby Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is out now (Atlantic, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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