On July 27, 2013, Lin-Manuel performed in a workshop production of the show, which was still called The Hamilton Mixtape. Instead, he performed the first song from the Mixtape, a rough version of what would become the song “Alexander Hamilton.” After that, he spent a year working on the song “My Shot.” On May 12, 2009, he was invited to perform music from his hit Broadway show In the Heights at the White House.
The first incarnation of the stage musical was a project called The Hamilton Mixtape.
After finishing the first couple of chapters, he was already imagining Hamilton’s life as a musical. The concept for Hamilton first came to creator Lin-Manuel Miranda when he picked up a copy of the historical biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow at an airport. Meanwhile, its debut on the hip-hop charts broke records, and its launch at number 12 on the Billboard 200 was the highest for a cast album since Camelot in 1961. Ticket prices were and remain unprecedentedly high, as hoards of people clamored to see it onstage. Not only were audiences clamoring to see the stage show, but people all across the country bought the soundtrack and praised its vital, explosive lyricism. Its impact was unique in that it became an almost instant and record-breaking sensation. Upon its premiere, the musical was instantly praised for its ingenious integration of elements, its fresh take on some dry history, and its meticulously rendered and catchy score. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the musical integrates rap and hip-hop into a traditional musical theater score, and stages anachronistic renderings of historical events. Using innovative musical and theatrical methods, the musical takes the audience through the biography of the impassioned politician and invites the audience to contemplate the dramatic and momentous founding of the United States of America. Eventually, we’re back outside, sitting on a hidden balcony overlooking the massive Scientology church across West 46th Street.Hamilton is an acclaimed musical that follows the life and exploits of an oft-overlooked Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton. He points to a nook where cast members smoke, then ducks into another door. “This is the way the president came into the theater,” Miranda says. After crossing the darkened stage, taking a few flights of stairs and passing through the empty lobby, we end up outside, in a long, narrow alley. Not much light, though, and it’s a lovely spring day, so Miranda suggests we head to a secret rooftop balcony – hence, the Birdman tour. On the vanity beneath the large dressing-room mirror, there’s a bouquet of flowers, a laptop and an ACLU cap. A partially deflated Darth Vader balloon hovers in the corner – fittingly enough, since this is where Miranda composed the cantina music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens – and a small bookshelf holds works by Herman Melville, Robert Caro, Judd Apatow and the photographer Sally Mann. “My dressing room has de facto been my office for the past 10 months,” Miranda says as he welcomes me inside and grabs a couple of coconut waters from his minifridge. The Broadway production, completely sold out well into next year, is officially the toughest ticket on the planet. The first production of Hamilton outside New York begins an open-ended run in Chicago in September. A recent article in The New York Times Magazine estimated that the show earns $500,000 a week and could surpass $1 billion in ticket sales in New York alone, where the Broadway run will likely last for at least a decade. Two weeks after the Pulitzer announcements, the show earned a record-breaking 16 Tony Award nominations, and its box office has been similarly off the charts. Last September, Miranda was awarded a $625,000 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in April, he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In its run downtown at the Public Theater and now here on Broadway, Hamilton, written by and starring Miranda, has been universally lauded as a singular work of brilliance. It’s a sleepy Monday afternoon at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in Manhattan, where, for the past 10 months, the most unlikely cultural phenomenon in a generation – a hip-hop musical about the Founding Father best known for authoring the bulk of the Federalist Papers and being killed in a duel – has been performed eight times a week to sold-out houses. “So you want the Birdman tour?” Lin-Manuel Miranda asks with a grin.