Lin-Manuel Miranda is a sponge, a ham, a charmer, a dynamo, an eager collaborator, a sensitive sobber, and an extraordinarily talented, acclaimed and busy artist who is clear-eyed about his legacy: “Hamilton is the first line of my obituary. I’m never topping it as a cultural event.” So, for the rest of his life: “I can only do things out of love. And I like to work on things I’ll learn from.”
All of this I already knew before reading “Lin-Manuel Miranda : The Education of an Artist (Simon and Schuster, 400 pages), a new biography by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner that is largely a familiar chronological narrative of Miranda’s life and work, “womb to Tick…Tick Boom,” as the author puts it in a prologue. That’s where he tries to argue that his book is different from the many previous chronicles of the composer (lyricist, actor, rapper, filmmaker, book store owner, etc.) and his accomplishments.
Pollack-Pelzner’s plan, as he pitched it to Miranda seeking his cooperation, was to write about Miranda’s “education as an artist, focusing on the range of teachers – friends, relatives, classroom instructors, mentors, professionals – who helped him learn how to do what he now does so well.” With this focus, he hoped to illustrate “ a different understanding of creativity” – that it is not necessarily the result of genius, but of hard work and an openness to learning.
“Perhaps Lin-Manuel’s story – viewed not as a blueprint but as a mindset – could inspire my own students,” writes the author, a Portland-based theater professor and magazine writer who has reported on Miranda (for the New Yorker, the Atlantic) over the years.
The early chapters do make an earnest attempt to keep the focus on his education, with extensive interviews and a deep dive into the Miranda archives. You may have heard about the school bus driver who taught him how to rap, or the high school girlfriend who took him to see “Rent,” which changed his life; you’re less likely to know that his girlfriend also made him her assistant director on her senior project “A Chorus Line” ; that his sixth grade music teacher cast him in five different roles in the school’s end-of-year musical; that his eighth grade English teacher was the first to tell him he was a writer; that he had both a professional and personal crush on an upperclassman who knew everything about theater. But if the author’s implicit point is that anybody could have done what Miranda has done if they had the right mindset, the book fails quite spectacularly to make that case.
It’s hard not to feel awe, and envy, at Miranda’s childhood. His obvious aptitude for music, his mother tells us, began in the womb; he would kick every time the salsa band played at a nightclub Luz Towns-Miranda visited when she was pregnant; and when the band stopped playing, he stopped kicking. He was never as good a piano player as his older sister, but at a piano recital when he was 7, instead of just playing the one piece he was supposed to, the polite applause inspired him to play three more, until his teacher was forced to escort him off the stage. All through high school, he wanted to be a filmmaker, and somehow wrote, shot, produced and presented two films, including “Nightmare in D Major,” which, to the delight of his classmates, featured a revenge plot by a fetal pig:
Pig, I am just a fetal pig,
I am not very big
So why did you cut me up in Bio class
Is getting a good grade
Worth me getting slayed?
When he got to Wesleyan, he switched to theater, because the film major required theory classes before he would be able to do his own projects, and he could get going right away with stage shows. He soon so dominated the extracurricular theater making on campus that a schoolmate cheekily promoted a one-act festival with an e-mail that began: “Come see…absolutely nothing by Lin-Manuel Miranda!!!”
It’s in sophomore year at Wesleyan that Miranda first put together “In The Heights,” which eight years later made it to Broadway, winning him his first Tony, and thirteen years after that became a Hollywood movie. Pollack-Pelzner is dutiful and adept in recounting Miranda’s much-celebrated career, which takes up three-quarters of the book and goes show by show. The bulk of his attention is on “In The Heights” and “Hamilton,” but there is also a chapter on Working, for which he wrote some additional songs, and one on the cheerleader musical “Bring It On,” and details about his work on the Disney animated films Moana, Vivo and Encanto, and his work as an actor in the Mary Poppins sequel where he learned everything he could about filmmaking from director Rob Marshall, then the In The Heights movie, where he studied director John Chu’s different approach, then as the director himself of “Tick…Tick Boom”; finally, there is an “epilogue” on the making of “The Warriors” concept album released last year.
The author does try to keep to his thesis, the later chapters offering details about the impact on his art of his interactions with family and friends; how he soaks up lessons from everybody and everything around him. There are the sundry ways, for example, that “Hamilton” was influenced by what Miranda learned from other artists and other works. The opening number of Hamilton borrows the structure of the opening number of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. The number “Ten Duel Commandments” synthesizes Notorious B.I.G.’s rap “Ten Crack Commandments” and Professor Joanne B. Freeman’s book “Affairs of Honor,” about the history of duels in America. But much of this Miranda has told us himself (in the annotated script from Hamiltome, for example), and in any case, all such lessons are overshadowed by the dramatic retelling of one Miranda triumph after another.
Miranda’s story is, without question, a compelling one. But it was difficult for me to avoid viewing “Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist” as just another victory lap. Given its timing on the tenth anniversary of “Hamilton” – with its official publication date just days after the release in cinemas of the movie version of “Hamilton” – one might easily lump it together with the concerted marketing effort to remind the public of Miranda’s talent and Hamilton’s greatness.
There is little in the way of critical analysis. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an “exclusive excerpt” from Pollack-Pelzner’s book that, coincidentally or not, features one of the few passages from the book that voices some alternative views of Miranda’s work. There is no sense from the author of a new perspective gained from the passage of time, or because of any distance from his subject. Almost everything here is something Miranda himself could say – and has been saying for a decade. There is one intriguing paragraph from Quiara Alegría Hudes, the librettist and screenwriter of “In The Heights” that assesses that musical as a less mature work: “I love it, but it’s that youthful inspiration piece born before you have the tools.” But there is no elaboration, and I thought it telling that the author places her comment not in the chapters on “In The Heights,” but rather in the ones on “Hamilton,” the point being how much better he’s gotten.
If the author seems entranced by his subject, one can hardly blame him. Lin-Manuel Miranda is entrancing; I know this first-hand, blown away by his musicals from the get-go, and charmed by our conversations both during in person interviews and one-to-one on Twitter. His genius for generating promotional hoopla and his capacity for self-congratulations are undeniable. But they can seem part of his charm if you think some of his work is brilliant. Professor Pollack-Pelzner is not the only one who does.
