Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the hit musical about American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and early American political history premiered in 2015. With its groundbreaking music, performance style, and casting choices, Hamilton, a story of “America then, as told by America now,” according to Miranda, has arguably revolutionized American musicals. Hamilton won many awards, including the Best Musical (Tony Award) and the Best Prize for Drama (Pulitzer Award) in 2016.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a new book Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (2025), will discuss Miranda’s life and creative career. We will find out how in the process of becoming an artist, Miranda learned to synthesize his Latino heritage with the pop, hip-hop, and Broadway styles he absorbed in New York City, creating a new way to tell America’s histories.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner has written about theater and contemporary culture for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Born and raised in Oregon, he teaches theater history at Portland State University and is the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project. He received his B.A. in History from Yale and his Ph.D. in English from Harvard.
Hamilton and Shakespeare: The Buzz
James Shapiro, Shakespeare Scholar, on Hamilton and Shakespeare
Hamilton was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage. But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing. Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture. He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.
Oksar Eustis, New York Public Theatre, on Hamilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda does exactly what Shakespeare does … He takes the language of the people and heightens it by making it verse. He both ennobles the language and the people saying the language. … He tells the foundational myths of his country. By doing that, he makes the country the possession of everybody.
We are happy to co-sponsor this Illuminations event. Free and open to the public. Parking info here; Lot 7 is closest.