‘Hamilton’ Mania! Backstage at the Cultural Event of Our Time
So you want the Birdman tour?” Lin-Manuel Miranda asks with a grin. 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. 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. Last September, Miranda was awarded a $625,000 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in April, he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. 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. 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. The first production of Hamilton outside New York begins an open-ended run in Chicago in September. The Broadway production, completely sold out well into next year, is officially the toughest ticket on the planet.
In person and out of costume, Miranda recalls biographer Ron Chernow’s description of young Alexander Hamilton as a “slight, boyish” figure. Today, Miranda is wearing gray cords and a gray SOMB hoodie over a vintage Nintendo T-shirt. He speaks in hyperactive bursts – again, as did Hamilton per Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, the book that Miranda casually picked up before a Mexico vacation in 2008.
“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. 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. On the vanity beneath the large dressing-room mirror, there’s a bouquet of flowers, a laptop and an ACLU cap.
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. 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. “This is the way the president came into the theater,” Miranda says. He points to a nook where cast members smoke, then ducks into another door. Eventually, we’re back outside, sitting on a hidden balcony overlooking the massive Scientology church across West 46th Street.