Tired of the tidal wave of bad news? exasperated at the threats to free speech? horrified at the attacks on performing arts and artists? Take a breather and pick up Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s biography “Lin-Manuel Miranda – The Educations of An Artist” for sanity and inspiration about the life, loves and work of an actor, composer, lyricist, filmmaker, arts activist and rapsavant. .
The son of émigré parents from Puerto Rico, Lin-Manuel’s father Luis, a teacher and activist, his mother Luz, a clinical psychologist, encouraged their son on his pursuit of music and theater. When Lin-Manuel had to get a summer job at McDonald’s, his mother would remind him that it would be ‘grist for the mill’ for his future career even if he didn’t know It yet.
Born in 1980, Lin-Manuel started piano lessons at five, in school he acted, sang and wrote short musicals including early drafts of his future Tony Award winning hit ‘In the Heights.’ Miranda realized that he had a limited compositional vocabulary, but early on he vowed to “learn as much as I can” working with music collaborators in the allied performing arts.
Aside from being a theater-kid Miranda was plugged into rap/hip-hop culture that exploded in the 90s and Miranda became a YouTube sensation, filming his own rap music videos and making DJ Mixtapes of his music.
From his childhood theater dreams to his remarkable Broadway successes, he has never changed his pursuit of what musical theater could be and should be- Diverse, innovative and accessible to everyone.
Miranda also acted in both premieres of ‘In The Heights’ (playing the vender narrator Usnavi) and as Aaron Burr in ‘Hamilton.’ Pollack-Pelzner covers the many iterations of Miranda’s musicals that eventually landed on Broadway.
In 2009 Miranda was invited to a poetry jam at the White House hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama, Miranda performed the opening number ‘Alexander Hamilton.’ And the rest is theater history. Seven years later the full show Hamilton opened on Broadway was nominated for 16 Tony Awards, a record, winning 11 including best musical. Miranda has won multiple Tony, Grammy and Emmy Awards and the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Awards.
In his 2016 acceptance speech for ‘Hamilton’ Miranda dedicated his success to his wife Vanessa with a poetry rap that then acknowledge the tragedy of the GLBTQ Pulse Nightclub shootings that had occurred the night before the ceremony. Miranda finished his acceptance speech with the refrain “love is love is love is love is love is love…’
Miranda was less interested in celebrity than building community with fellow artists and audiences, remaining a down-to-earth performer and artist who never loses his vision for an inclusive theater or his theater kid-ness.
Everything was happening at once in his creative life and then he met the love of his life, Vanessa, a law student. The chapter on their courtship and engagement is the stuff that Broadway dreams are made of, except it happened to this couple in real life.
Lin-Manuel and Vanessa complement each other’s demanding careers because they operate in separate demanding professional worlds. They plan family trips and time away from each other to settle business and take time to escape from everything. Vanessa observed early on that her Lin works faster in isolation, so she sends him off to a beach retreat or on location for research or side acting or writing projects.
Pollack-Pelzner covers Miranda’s prolific and seemingly unlimited compositional cross-cultural and fusionist musicality exemplified by his film scores to Disney blockbusters including ‘Moana’ ‘Encanto’ and ‘Vivo.’ He made his film directing debut adapting Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical ‘Tick…tick…boom’ for the screen.
Since he was a young performer, Miranda was inspired by Jonathan Larson, whose death on the eve of the opening of the first full production of his musical ‘Rent’ on Broadway, after years of workshops and rewrites, catapulted Broadway into new direction for a new generation of artists and audiences. Larson’s mentor, Stephen Sondheim, also mentored Miranda after attending his production of West Side Story and his initial college production of ‘In the Heights’ landed on Broadway winning the best musical Tony Award.
The frenzied emotions of Miranda dealt with as a student joining school productions and reveling in his natural stage talents, is almost a fantasy story in his life as he navigates the slings and arrows of the professional life of a performer, embrace the pitfalls of the creative process are full of delays, discarded ideas, drafts and the elusive unexpected breakthroughs. Not to mention the side jobs to pay the rent.
So for musical theater students and aspiring artists of every genre this biography is an essential primer to the good, the bad and the fabulous. And for everyone else who loves the arts, Miranda’s creative journey makes for one of the best theater books in this or any other season. Cue music!
