• No one could have predicted that a hip-hop-infused musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton would be Broadway’s hottest ticket, but Hamilton—which Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote over the course of six years—is sold out through next year. Here are a few things you might not have known about Miranda’s take on the life and times of the first Secretary of the Treasury.
  • IT WAS INSPIRED BY RON CHERNOW’S BIOGRAPHY OF HAMILTON.
  • Not long after his show In the Heights won four Tony Awards in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda went on vacation. Before he left, he picked up a biography called Alexander Hamilton. “I was just browsing the biography section. It could have been Truman,” he told 60 Minutes. “I got to the part where a hurricane destroys St. Croix, where Hamilton is living. And he writes a poem about the carnage and this poem gets him off the island.”
  • “That is part and parcel with the hip-hop narrative: writing your way out of your circumstances, writing the future you want to see for yourself,” Miranda told The New York Times. “This is a guy who wrote at 14, ‘I wish there was a war.’ It doesn’t get more hip-hop than that.”
  • Miranda recalled to Vogue that “I Googled ‘Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical’ and totally expected to see that someone had already written it. But no. So I got to work.”