Behind the Scenes of Hamilton
Scarlet, November 5th, 2021Miranda's magic - how Hamilton became the greatest musical of all time
the book THAT started it all
Lin-Manuel Miranda's 11-time Tony Award-winning musical has graced our stages since its first sold-out run at the Off-Broadway Public Theatre in 2015. Which has us wondering, what did Miranda do for it to be one of the greatest musicals of all time? It's already broken the Tony Award nominee record with 16 nods and still continues to make history. The musical skipped past all the classics from Lion King to Phantom of the Opera, it even passed the musical which it drew inspiration from, Les Miserables, and after nearly seven years Hamilton is still at the top of the game.
Where did it all start?
We've all been there. We have a long journey ahead of us, our fingers are tired of scrolling on our phones and there are only so many times we can read the same tweet. The place we're traveling from has a shop with an array of books on display, tempted by the thought of passing time on our journey we buy one. Little do we know the book we've just bought will now lead us to create one of the greatest musicals of all time... or was it just Lin-Manuel Miranda who had that ending? In 2007 Miranda was heading out on his first vacation after wrapping up In The Heights when he stumbled across Ron Chernow's biography, Alexander Hamilton, which he ended up buying on a whim as something to read during his travels. This led Miranda to be intensely inspired and for the coming years, he worked towards bringing his image of a musical centered around the founding fathers to life!
You never know where you'll be when something life-changing happens, it can be something as simple as buying a book at an airport.
