In New York you can be a new man (just you wait)
In New York you can be a new man (just you wait)
The song Alexander Hamilton written by LIn-Manuel Miranda
Before I get into the first song of Hamilton, I wanted to sneak in a post about the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, going to college. In my post Before Hamilton ( The Successes and Failures That Paved the Way) I mentioned that Miranda as a high school senior was inspired by seeing the short run musical The Capeman.
It was two years later that he began working on his musical In the Heights. That musical made its way to Broadway in 2008 and won four Tony Awards including Best Musical. The film version of In the Heights with a screenplay by Quiara Alegria Hudes comes out next year.
The college that Miranda went to was Wesleyan University. It’s one of those beautiful campuses in New England with a history that goes back to 1831. It also has a solid history in the arts. In my 2010 post “Unstoppable” Wesleyan University I joked that they must have a secret handshake there.
Screenwriter Mark Bomback (Unstoppable) was an English major at Wesleyan. A couple of years ago Vanity Fair mentioned Wesleyan’s Entertaining Class and how the small Connecticut school “has turned out a shockingly disproportionate number of Hollywood movies and shakers” listing among its graduates, Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), Michael Bay (Transformers), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm), Joss Whedon (The Avengers), and Oscar-winner Kenneth Longeran (Manchester by the Sea).
Now Miranda has joined that list. And he not only graduated in 2002, but he returned in 2005—not to work on his master’s degree—but to give the commencement address.
Then the following year he gave the commencement address at Penn.
Then he went back to high school to talk to students.