Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda is the composer, lyricist, and performer who brought hip-hop to the center of Broadway. He wrote and starred in In the Heights and Hamilton, two Best Musical winners that changed what a Broadway score could sound like.

Who Lin-Manuel Miranda is

Lin-Manuel Miranda was born in New York City in 1980 to Puerto Rican parents and grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. He began writing In the Heights while he was a student at Wesleyan University. He writes both music and lyrics, and he has starred in his own shows. His regular collaborators include director Thomas Kail, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, and music director and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, and playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book for In the Heights.

Miranda's scores mix rap and hip-hop with salsa, R&B, pop, and traditional show tunes, and his lyrics are famous for their dense, inventive rhymes. He is also a devoted student of Broadway history, and Hamilton nods to Gilbert and Sullivan and other classic musicals. Away from Broadway he wrote songs for Disney's Moana (2016) and Encanto (2021) and directed the film tick, tick... BOOM! (2021).

His Broadway shows

In the Heights played Off-Broadway in 2007 and opened on Broadway in 2008, with Miranda as the bodega owner Usnavi. It ran nearly three years and won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. In 2009 he wrote Spanish-language lyrics for the Broadway revival of West Side Story.

Bring It On: The Musical (2012), a cheerleading comedy, had music by Miranda and Tom Kitt, lyrics by Miranda and Amanda Green, and a book by Jeff Whitty. Hamilton, inspired by Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, began at the Public Theater and opened on Broadway in August 2015, with Miranda in the title role. It is still running.

Freestyle Love Supreme, an improvised hip-hop show he started with Anthony Veneziale and directed by Thomas Kail, played Broadway in 2019 and returned in 2021. Warriors, a musical written with Eisa Davis and first released as a concept album in 2024, is scheduled to begin Broadway performances in March 2027.

Awards, legacy, and where to start

Miranda has won three Tony Awards: Best Original Score for In the Heights in 2008, and Best Original Score and Best Book for Hamilton in 2016. Hamilton earned a record 16 Tony nominations and won 11, and it received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The cast albums of both shows won Grammy Awards. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, and in 2018 he and Hamilton's co-creators received a special Kennedy Center Honor.

The easiest place to start is the filmed version of Hamilton on Disney+, recorded with the original Broadway cast in 2016. Then try In the Heights, either the cast album or Jon M. Chu's 2021 film, for Miranda's warmer, more personal first musical about his own Upper Manhattan neighborhood.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: frequently asked questions

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