New Yorker Magazine [Feb 03] by calibre

Author:calibre [calibre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2015-02-04T01:19:09.085000+00:00

Miranda didn’t study music formally; his piano lessons petered out before he finished elementary school, though he continued to play for pleasure, on a keyboard in his bedroom. But in high school he started performing in musical theatre. As a ninth grader, he was cast as the Pirate King in a production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” beating out a senior who was expected to get the role. “I still remember the applause from that show as my favorite applause I ever got in my life,” he says. As a senior, he directed “West Side Story.” “I had no Latino men in the Sharks—they were various shades of brown, and Asian,” he recalls. “So my dad came in and did accent work with the Sharks. It was us teaching these kids how to be Latino. I had never brought any of that to school, and ‘West Side Story’ was my way to do it.” Miranda first crossed paths with Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics to that musical, at Hunter; Sondheim was a friend of another student’s father, who arranged for him to talk to the student cast. “He told the most amazing stories of how the show was created,” Miranda says. “He told us how he had written an opening number and dialogue—he started singing us these lyrics—but Jerome Robbins said, ‘No, I am going to dance all of that.’ It made an enormous impression. It was the first time I had seen how a musical gets created for real.”

In 1997, on his seventeenth birthday, Miranda saw “Rent” on Broadway. He says, “I thought, Oh, I can do that. You are allowed to write musicals about now.” He started writing twenty-minute pieces for the school’s annual theatre festival. Chris Hayes, the MSNBC broadcaster, was also a Hunter student at the time, and he directed an early work by Miranda called “Nightmare in D Major.” Hayes recalls, “The protagonist’s name was Dylan, and there was a long extended nightmare—some love from his past that was snatched from him, and an evil pig showed up halfway through. There’s a sad ballad, about the forgotten crush, which I can still hum.” Miranda was well aware of his gifts, according to Hayes: “That is part of his power—it gives him a confidence and self-assurance that is part of his charisma. He is not falsely humble. From a distance, I can imagine thinking, Who does that guy think he is? And the answer is, a once-in-a-generational musical talent.”

After graduating from Hunter, Miranda went to Wesleyan, where he reprised one of his high-school productions, a musical called “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” about a seventh grader’s first kiss. “Wesleyan was very similar to Hunter, in that you can find resources for whatever cockamamie idea comes into your head,” he says. In his sophomore year, Miranda moved into La Casa, a Latino cultural center and residence, living there with eight other first-generation students. “This was for real my first time making friends with Latino kids,” he recalls. “It

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