EASTON, Pa. — American songwriter and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda visited Lafayette College on Feb. 12 for the college’s Jones Visiting Lecture.
The college is celebrating 200 years since its founding in 1826. Miranda, famous for creating and starring in the 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton, discussed Bad Bunny and the importance of passion and love in the face of improbability alongside Lafayette President Nicole Hurd.
“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making something, whether I was making songs or making flipbooks in my schoolbooks or making movies with my friends,” Miranda said. “I got hit by the theater bug in sixth grade.”
Before Hamilton, Miranda wrote and starred in the 2008 Broadway musical In the Heights, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical that same year.
Miranda has also contributed lyrics to the Walt Disney Animation Studios films Moana and Encanto, from which his songs “How Far I’ll Go” and “We Don’t Talk about Bruno” have received mass acclaim and popularity. Miranda directed the biographical musical film Tick, Tick…Boom! in 2021, starring Andrew Garfield.
Miranda recalled working an eclectic mix of odd jobs while working on In the Heights, including being a high school teacher, a bar mitzvah dancer and a backup a cappella singer. For Miranda, it was worth it to commit to his dream of being on Broadway.
“I remember thinking, even if I am a substitute teacher all my life, with unproduced musicals in my closet, this is what I want to do with my life,” he said.
He recounted watching a Broadway production of the musical Tick, Tick…Boom!, written by his childhood hero Jonathan Larson, in his senior year at Wesleyan University. The musical centers on an aspiring 30-year-old composer Jon who is worried about his lack of success.
Larson himself was trying to establish himself during the writing of the musical, but passed away from an aortic dissection before he could see his play, Rent, become one of the longest-running Broadway productions.
“The whole thing felt like a 90-minute personal attack,” Miranda said. “‘Oh, you’re a theater major? I’m 30 and I’ve done nothing.’ Are you prepared for that to be your reality?”
He began writing In the Heights in his sophomore year at Wesleyan in 1999 to create an opportunity for someone like him, an immigrant of Puerto Rican heritage, to star in a musical. Luis A. Miranda Jr., Miranda’s father, moved to New York City from Puerto Rico when he was 18.
“I had this sneaking suspicion that unless I wrote something, West Side Story would be the only time you saw Puerto Ricans in a musical ever, ” Miranda said. “[A] big motivator was fear. I have to write the roles I would want to play because I don’t see them in other roles.”
West Side Story, originally written in 1957, centers on a gang of Puerto Rican immigrants, the Sharks, living in Manhattan, New York City. Miranda said that writing In the Heights, which takes place in the Washington Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, was one of the first times he began to see himself in rooms where things happen.
“I started writing musicals in high school, but I was just writing knockoff Jonathan Larson,” he said. “In the Heights was my first time trying to bring all my Latinidad and my family culture. It was in a profound way permission to bring all of myself into the room and into my work. It’s really when I started sounding like myself.”
Miranda cited the growth of Spanish music in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an indicator that he belonged in theater, and said that he was proud of being, in some tangential way, a branch on a tree leading to Bad Bunny’s recent performance at the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
“I knew that I had permission to write In the Heights because in 1999 Ricky Martin was taking over the world, the same way Bad Bunny is taking over the world right now,” he said. “It’s amazing how circles kind of continue. I’m another link that leads to Benito being able to sing in unapologetic fucking Spanish on a global stage, representing us so beautifully with full authenticity without need of translation.”
Following the success of writing and starring in In the Heights, however, Miranda began work on a hip-hop-inspired musical biography of Alexander Hamilton, the American Founding Father who served as the first U.S. secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795.
For Miranda, though, Hamilton’s story grew a special resonance. He’d bought Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton on a whim while on vacation from performing in In the Heights, and found himself surprised to continue relating to Hamilton’s orphan background and work ethic while reading the book.
“His Dickensian tragic childhood and the fact that he wrote his way from being an orphan to basically help design our country on the strength of his writing, it was this feeling of ‘I know this guy,'” he said. “It is an immigrant temperament and mindset of ‘I have to work twice as hard to get half as far in this new place.'”
In beginning research for Hamilton, Miranda found that America had its foundation built in this “immigrant temperament”, such as with the French military officer Marquis de Lafayette, who is also the namesake of Lafayette College. The character was played in the original Hamilton production by actor Daveed Diggs, who visited Lafayette College in September of 2024 to discuss the docuseries The Class, which he executive-produced alongside President Hurd.
“It’s the other incredible immigrant story inside this narrative,” Miranda said. “Lafayette comes here and goes, ‘Is there a revolution? I want to fight in it.’ The fact that he helped win independence for the colonies is just an incredible story. This guy came from somewhere totally different and we have colleges named after him now.”
President Hurd joked with Miranda that he “knew how to say Lafayette”, after Miranda congratulated the College on its 200th birthday.
Miranda credited Hamilton’s success to the people who have mentored and befriended him throughout his life. While directing that high school production of West Side Story, Miranda arranged a session with the musical’s composer, Stephen Sondheim, who is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of musical theater.
“He came in doing a New York Times crossword puzzle,” Miranda said. “I basically raised my hand and went, ‘What was it like writing West Side Story?” An eighteen-year old Miranda originally butchered the question due to nerves. Miranda sat up in his seat and placed his hands on his thighs, and referenced the bug-eyed Lafayette students in the audience.
Sondheim told Miranda and his high school cast about writing lyrics for the musical’s opening, an escalating fight between the Sharks and the rival gang, the Jets, that was eventually not used. West Side Story famously begins with a musical number, set to the ominous snap of the Jets’ fingers.
“It was my first lesson in rewriting, and revision, and collaboration,” Miranda said. Miranda has worked for more than four years on all of his major productions. “West Side Story did not come down from the mountaintop on two stone tablets. If I can leave you with anything, it’s that rewriting is writing. Your job is to convert that initial lightning into a piece of work.”
Miranda and Sondheim did not begin a relationship until years later, when Miranda began work on Spanish translations of West Side Story while writing Hamilton. Miranda met with Sondheim at his townhouse, where he told him he was writing “this hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton.”
“He laughed, and said, ‘That is exactly what you should be working on, nobody will expect that from you,'” Miranda said. “That reaction powered about five years.”
Sondheim told Miranda to keep in touch throughout the writing process, and Miranda took the opportunity.
“If someone opens the door, I’m coming in,” Miranda said to the students, facing them directly as he had throughout the conversation.
When he wasn’t writing Hamilton or working on Spanish translations of West Side Story, Miranda was also writing lyrics for the 2016 Disney film Moana. Miranda described having to write most of Hamilton while in the dressing room at the Public Theater or the Richard Rogers Theatre, where the musical eventually played.
“I was the last guy hired,” Miranda said. “I lobbied really hard for the position. It was an ambition of mine to write music for an animated feature.”
Miranda told the students that he repeatedly urged Moana‘s writers to consider telling the story through music. The result was Miranda being assigned a rare “third-act” song, often skipped in films due to their faster pace at the end.
“Moana heals Te Kā with a song, and it’s actually a musical climax to our musical film, which I fought so hard for,” Miranda said, his voice growing in pitch. “I was such a nudge about, ‘No, we can do that with music.'”
Miranda has not stopped. He’s currently in his fourth year of work on a musical adaptation of the 1965 novel The Warriors, written by Sol Yurick, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 1979. Miranda, along with playwright Eisa Davis, released a concept album inspired by the film in October 2024. Following the album’s reception, Miranda and Davis decided to turn it into a full-stage show.
“Eisa and I are really hard at work,” Miranda said. “We’re hard at work.”
Miranda said that this commitment to the hard work it requires to create art is rooted in love and passion.
“Hate can get you a great email or even a great song, but I also think it burns hotter,” Miranda said. “I have to be able to be in love with what I’m writing about. The idea has to not leave me alone. You have to love it. Otherwise, do something else. There are better ways to make a living.”