Hamilton Study Guide

Lin-Manuel Miranda was born in New York to a clinical psychologist and a Democratic strategist. After graduating from the competitive Hunter College High School, Miranda went to Wesleyan University, where he began workshopping his first musical, In the Heights. When In The Heights debuted on Broadway in 2008 (with Miranda in the title role), it was acclaimed for its unique blend of hip-hop and musical theater traditions. After the runaway success of In the Heights, Miranda worked on the musical version of Bring It On and contributed Spanish-language versions of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics for the Broadway Revival of West Side Story. In 2015, Miranda then starred as the titular character in his musical Hamilton, winning two Tony awards (for Best Musical and Best Score) and earning a nomination for Best Actor. More recently, Lin composed music for the Disney movie Moana and directed the Oscar-nominated film Tick, Tick, Boom! Miranda is also a two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, winning in 2016 for Hamilton.

Hamilton tells the story of the American Revolutionary War and of the difficult, exciting years following. Over the course of the musical, the muddled band of rebellious colonists (“a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower”) defeats the powerful British empire—a victory the musical attributes to French aid, quick thinking by Hamilton and his friends, and George Washington’s sage leadership. But if the war saw men from across the new United States come together, the first decade of the country’s history tore them apart. In particular, Alexander Hamilton, always in favor of a strong central government and a national bank, found himself at odds with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two slaveholding Virginian politicians who imagined an agrarian country built on a plantation economy. Though the musical sticks largely to the facts, it recasts the all-white Founding Fathers as Black and brown men. As Thomas Kail put it, “this is a story about America then, told by America now.”

Director Thomas Kail names four musicals as the “grandparents” of Hamilton: Sweeney Todd, Gypsy, Evita, and Jesus Christ Superstar. But perhaps more importantly, Miranda frequently emphasizes his determination to fill Hamilton with musical samples and lyrical references to the work—both hip-hop and musical theatre—that had informed it. He quotes directly from songs from a wide range of genres, from “Shook Ones, Part II” by Mobb Deep to “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. He also borrows rhyme schemes from rappers like Big Pun and thematic content from hip-hop artist the Notorious B.I.G. and composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown. By pulling from these various sources, theatre critic Jeremy McCarter argues, Miranda is giving out “invitations […] to people from diverse backgrounds that the show is meant for them.”