Musical’s journey from page to stage
Lin-Manuel Miranda was headed on vacation and wanted a book to read. No escapist beach reading for him, the Broadway composer-writer-performer picked up a historical biography: “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow. The rest, as they say, is history.
As Orlando awaits the Jan. 22 arrival of a touring production of Miranda’s smash musical “Hamilton,” it seemed like a good time to dig into Chernow’s best-seller — and imagine how Miranda was inspired on that fateful vacation.
By page 40, Chernow offers a thought that sums up Miranda’s approach to Hamilton, the man and the show: “His relentless drive, his wretched feelings of shame and degradation, and his precocious self-sufficiency combine to produce a young man with an insatiable craving for success.” You can almost hear the musical ver-
sion of Hamilton onstage exhorting “Just you wait! Just you wait!”
Lyrics pop out throughout the book. “Best of wives, best of women” — Hamilton’s tribute to his wife, Eliza — comes straight from the farewell note Hamilton wrote before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.
“I should’ve known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me” — Burr’s post-duel lament — is a direct quote attributed to Burr and noted in Chernow’s biography.
It’s easy to see how Miranda was inspired to deal with the curious love triangle among Hamilton, Eliza and her sister, Angelica. The affection among all three courses through the book’s pages. At one point, Miranda has Angelica say to her sister about Hamilton: “I’m just sayin’ if you really
loved me, you would share him.”
He might have found inspiration for that line from a letter of Angelica’s that Chernow details. Writing to Eliza, Angelica playfully refers to Hamilton as her “amiable,” and then rather shockingly adds: “By my ‘amiable,’ you know I mean your husband, for I love him very much and, if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while.”
Perhaps most fun to contemplate is how Miranda turned the phrase “throwing away your shot” on its head to create what’s arguably the best-known song in the entire show. He has said that while reading the biography, he felt hip-hop lyrics “rising off the page” — so imagine what went through his mind as he read Chernow’s description of how a Hamilton friend reacted to the founding father’s decision to avoid killing Burr during the duel by pointing
his pistol away from his adversary.
The friend was “horrified at Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot,” Chernow wrote — and one suspects a melody, a rhythm and a beautiful double meaning immediately started percolating in Miranda’s brain.
“I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical,” Chernow told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2015. But the author heartily approved of how his writing inspired Miranda’s mega-hit.
“The story of Alexander Hamilton lends itself to hiphop treatment,” Chernow told the news service. “Hamilton’s personality is driven and unrelenting, and the music has that same quality. The music and the man mirror each other.”