SPOTLIGHT: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Last Tuesday, Lin-Manuel Miranda—writer, composer, and former star of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical “In the Heights”—came to speak at Harvard about his writing experiences and career. After his lecture at Professor Carol J. Oja’s course Literature and Arts B-85: “American Musicals and American Culture,” he sat down and talked with The Crimson about everything from the “Heights” and new musicals he’s currently working on to his creative process.

The Harvard Crimson: Why did you decide to incorporate more unconventional music styles, like rap, into your work?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I’m a fan of storytelling, and I’m a fan of lots of different genres of music. I think that one of the things that unfortunately sometimes happens is you get people who only listen to musicals writing musicals and they don’t see what those composers were pulling from. So with “Heights,” I tried to bring in the music I love and use those types of music to tell stories. I’m always compelled by good storytelling, whether it’s Sondheim’s “A Weekend in the Country” from “A Little Night Music” or it’s “Meet the Parents” from “Blueprint 2” by Jay-Z, storytelling is storytelling. And the fun of it was not many people are trying to do it, so we really got to write the rules in terms of how we’ve used those genres.

THC: Could you describe a bit of your process?

LM: I wrote a draft my sophomore year; it wasn’t for course credit or anything. I just really felt like I needed to write it, and I wanted to write a full-length musical. They say to write what you know, so I took everything that I knew and threw it into the pot and called it “In the Heights,” and then over the course of the eight-year process getting “Heights” to Broadway, I learned how to write. It’s a lot of discarded songs and ideas, and a lot of making good songs better and throwing out bad songs. But I had the luxury of excellent collaborators and producers who believed in our show for what it was and not what it wasn’t.

THC: What were you looking to to bring to the genre of musicals with “In the Heights”?

LM: I think most writers try to put out in the world what they don’t see, and I wanted to write the kind of musical I’ve always wanted to see—and hip-hop is sorely lacking. I mean, if you’ve seen hip-hop in musicals before “Heights”—at least Broadway ones—if hip-hop is used, it’s ironically commenting, “Hey we’re rapping and we’re lame!” I wanted to just treat it as another kind of storytelling.

THC: Do you have any advice for any people at Harvard going into the arts?

LM: My advice is to keep writing. You have a lot of free time on your hands in college, so write as much as you can now. You will not have that free time when you are working a nine-to-five job trying to make your dreams come true. I wrote a play every year when I was in school, sometimes two, and I was determined to leave with more than my diploma under my arm. The other thing is to just be nice. That sounds so cliché, but you will meet the same people going up as you will going down. So treat the guy who has a lot of money you want to invest in your project the same as the pianist who may have gigged your show, because that guy may go one to become a composer and he could become a very important person in your life down the line.

THC: What are you thinking about doing in terms of future projects?

LM: I’m co-writing the score to a musical adaptation of “Bring It On” with Tom Kitt, who wrote “Next to Normal” and did the orchestrations for the upcoming “American Idiot.” I’m working on the movie adaptation of “Heights,” on a hip-hop album about Alexander Hamilton, and I’m working on an animated musical for DreamWorks.

THC: You grew up in a neighborhood similar to “In the Heights,” and it seems like you’ve placed a lot of that in how you’ve expressed yourself. Is it difficult to continue that in further works?

LM: You write what you know to be true, and I mean that in a much more abstract sense. You know, like this Hamilton project I’m working on. I’m not a founding father, I didn’t grow up during the Revolutionary War, but when I read Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, there was something about Hamilton’s drive to excel and to use words to excel that really spoke to me in a way and I said, “I know that guy.” It’s not necessarily about the specifics, but about really trying to connect with something that you feel like you can do justice to.

THC: Finally, what’s your favorite musical and why?

LM: That’s an impossible question to answer. I can tell you the most important musical to “In the Heights” is “Fiddler on the Roof.” A lot of people think it’s “West Side Story,” but it’s actually “Fiddler,” because it really tries to paint a portrait of a community in the midst of change, and we were going for the same thing—although with different demographics and different styles.

—Thomas J. Snyder