Super Soul Special: Lin-Manuel Miranda: Creativity and Compassion

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1:09I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. Taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now. Lin-Manuel Miranda! Hi, you.

1:42Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Wow! The Apollo. The Apollo. And it's showtime. Ah! Did you just get back from Puerto Rico? Did you? No, I just got back from having a new human head on my chest. I know, you have the baby. You know, you have the baby. The baby just came. A week ago. A week ago. Yeah, a week ago. So now there's two. Yeah. I said I'm not leaving the house for two months, and then Oprah called. So here I am. You're the only thing I'm leaving the house for. I know, you said yes. You said yes, thank you. What's it like with two? Well, we had a day of brilliance, and my other son came home and he was like, oh, I love him, and it was like peaceful for a day.

2:25And then my older son got... Sebastian's three, right? Sebastian's three, and then he got the stomach bug. So my wife and that beautiful child have been with her parents all week, is sequestered, and I have been in the diarrhea upside down for a week with the stomach bug. And I'm fine, but I've just been nursing the other one. So it's like, oh, this is what two is like. You kind of sometimes have to tag team, and that's what I've learned in the short week I've been a father of two. So it's disrupted the household? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. What did you tell Sebastian about this baby coming? It's Francisco.

3:02And it's his baby. That's been the whole thing. That's my baby. And then for a while he was growing some and that was amazing. He was like, well, I have two in my stomach. Not to be outdone. But it's wonderful. It's very surreal too. I'll put it this way. There's one song in Hamilton that's like truly autobiographical. There's no historical precedent for it. It was just a song that came out while I was writing. There's a moment where Eliza is singing to Hamilton's called That Would Be Enough. And there's nothing in a textbook for that moment. I didn't do any research for that. It's just a moment where Eliza is telling Hamilton, as long as you come home at the end of the day, that would be enough.

3:41If my child is gonna have a bit of that mind. My wife is gonna kill me for telling this story, because she doesn't like how she comes off in this story. I played it for my wife, and, like, tears are streaming down my cheeks. And she goes, is that what you wish I would say to you?

3:58And I went, no, that's my love song to you. You, to you. Um, yeah, I can't even think about it. But that's the thing that changes, is you have this new person that, with any luck, is gonna get some of the attributes of the love of your life. You guys are going to pass on so much to your kids, but what is the thing you most want your two sons to know and have? Wow, that's a great question. The biggest gifts my parents gave me, and I say that as I look at my sister in the audience, because she got them too, one, I think, immense pride in our culture. We grew up in New York, but we grew up on 200th Street, so we spoke Spanish in every business we walked into.

4:40And so we always were speaking Spanish and English, and always spent the summers in Puerto Rico. So there was a great sense of connection to where we came from and where they came from. And that's a real gift. And the gift of also being sent to Puerto Rico. So you can't speak English with your parents. Your grandparents don't speak English. So it's sink or swim and make yourself understood. And that was a real gift. And then the other gift is a sort of glorious, benign neglect. In that my parents both worked really hard. I have never known either of my parents to have just one job. They always had many jobs at once, and they worked really hard so that we could have the things we wanted.

5:17And I grew up aware of that. But I also grew up in a house where they were not around for the nine to five. We all ate dinner sort of at our own speed. I ate dinner when I went home. You ate dinner when you got home. And I would go to like my room. Not everybody sitting around the table. Yeah, no. It was sort of every person for themself. But they were there for the important stuff. They never missed a play. They were very present, but they weren't around. Got it. And so I had this enormously rich imaginative life, as my Twitter followers will know, because you will see hours of VHS videos and movies that I made growing up.

5:50But that time and that sort of creative loneliness, does that make sense? Yes, it does. Yes, yes. But do you ever think about what, and I think this for all of you who had a much more challenging childhood than your children, when your children are going to be raised with opportunity and with access and with the ability to literally do anything they can dream of how do you raise kind children right yeah i mean that's that's the thing is the most important thing with some ambition and drive of their own but the most important thing you can give your children is empathy it's the the most important thing it is it's the number one tool in your toolbox as an artist you can't do anything if you can't imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

6:35That's the whole gig. That's the whole gig as a writer, as a writer and as an actor. When people say - You're absolutely right. As an actor, I never thought about it. As a writer, of course you have to, right? And if you don't have that, you just quit. I mean, that's your whole job is to put yourself into someone else's shoes, understand what they've been through, what they're going through, and try to articulate it, whether you're embodying that as a character or you're trying to write that. I had to figure out what Aaron Burr cared about. I had to figure out what Alexander Hamilton cared about.

7:04And your only tools are research and empathy. So how did you do that? Slow, slow, slow. Slow like a couplet at a time for seven years. Really? So how does the process work for you? Does you get an idea, you hold on to that idea, you write that idea, then something else comes, it mills with that idea, it builds, or then you throw it all out? What's the process? I think there's this myth that one idea then sends you racing to finish a musical and there you are. Yes. It's thousands of ideas and they're not all going to be yours. You know, it is Ron Chernow's genius that what he plays up in his biography of Hamilton, because I've read a couple, but his is the one I fell in love with, is his relentlessness.

7:46And that's always what he's pushing. Oh my God, at 15 he's survived all this and he's doing this. And so there's that sense of relentlessness. Did you get it the first time you read it? Yes. You got it the first time you read it. At the end of the second chapter, I said, this is the most hip-hop I've ever seen. Am I allowed to curse? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, this is the most hip-hop. Because it's all about writing and transcending your circumstances through writing. He has this hellish childhood. Well, there's something going on in your head that's not going on in other people's head. Because I could have read that biography, and I would not have found any hip-hop in there at all.

8:24Not one piece of hip-hop would I have discovered in that. But it's also, but then the other sort of strand at the same time, in addition to him being a writer, is that he grew up in the Caribbean and that he got a scholarship and that's what got him off the island. And that's exactly what happened to my father. My father got a full ride to NYU grad school when he was 18 years old. He'd already graduated University of Puerto Rico by the time he was 18. No, I am the dummy slacker of the family. You understand. So that notion of, oh, well, this is, I didn't know that about him. I just knew he was a guy on the$10 bill.

8:59I think I knew he died in a duel, but I didn't know that he was an immigrant. And then I understood everything. I was like, oh, so he had to work this hard because that's the gig, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You work three times as hard and you're promised maybe a fraction of as much. And he knew those rules going in. And so, oh, he's the immigrant of the Founding Fathers. That's why he invented the financial system and the Coast Guard and the New York Post and caught beef with Jefferson. He had to. He had that drive that it takes to survive as an immigrant, even when these were just the colonies.

9:29So when you originally started, you weren't trying to create this social musical phenomenon that was going to bring us a better understanding of history and ourselves. Or were you? No, I was trying. I knew that he sang. he sang. I just knew that it was a really compelling idea for a musical. And I look at the musicals I love, and there's different kinds, right? In the Heights, when I was writing in the Heights, and when Kiara came on board, we realized this, thank you, this was, this is about a community changing. It started as sort of just my college musical, but then we realized, oh, this is about neighborhood changing.

10:06And so we looked at other musicals about communities changing. We We looked at Fiddler on the Roof. We looked at Cabaret, which is about Germany changing fast. We looked at those musicals that are about a community. With Hamilton, it's about Hamilton, and his force of personality is so strong that every other character is just trying to make sense of him. Either they're falling in love with him, or they want to kill him. Kill him. So I watched Sweeney Todd, and I watched Gypsy, and I watched those musicals where it's like, name above the title here comes mama rose that's hamilton you know it's like that's he's this force of nature and this whirlwind and so those were sort of the things i looked to so i just knew that he was very propulsive and he had a very event-filled life and then i found myself drowning in research it had been two years and i'd only written two songs i'd written the opening number it took me a year to write my shot because if i'm gonna back up my claim that hamilton is the most hip-hop guy who ever lived, he has to announce himself with the best lyrics I've ever written in my life.

11:09So every couplet took me about a week. It would rhyme at the end of the line, and I'd go, I bet I can make this rhyme like six more times in here. And it had to be as dense as my favorite rappers. It had to be as dense as Jay-Z. And by dense, I mean like, don't rhyme just at the end of the line. Rhyme seven syllables. Rhyme in, you know, I'm past patiently waiting, I'm passionately smashing every expectation, every action's an act of creation. You know. And... Like that. When I'm doing that, it took me months to think of that and going, that's the bar. If Hamilton's gonna... If I'm gonna back up my claim that this is the most hip-hop shit I've ever read, that's gotta be the bar.

11:47And so that's why it took so long. Were you dreaming in rhyme? Yeah. I was dreaming in rhyme. I was drowning in research. And then I was really sort of adrift until... And I got a really good bit of advice from John Wideman. John Wideman collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on Assassins and Pacific Overtures, great musicals about history, wrestling history to the stage. And he said something that sounds so simple in hindsight, but he said, well, you don't have to get it all. You don't have to get it all. Just start with the pieces that you think are a musical. Just write the things that sing to you.

12:23And in doing that, I wrote My Shot. I wrote Helpless. I wrote Say No to This. I wrote The Rap Battles. And then it started forming a spine. It sort of started telling me what wanted to come out. Because there's the thing of chase your passion, the cliche of chase your passion. But I literally did that with Hamilton's life. What do I really want to write? And that began to form the spine of the evening. And then when it had the response that it did, I don't know how many times you see it, Gail. Five times. When it had the response that it did. Five times. When it had the response that it did. Nobody could get tickets five times, Gail.

13:02who gets tickets five times, when it had the response that it did and you saw that it was changing the way people, as I said, saw history and also saw themselves, you thought what? I don't know what I thought. I knew we'd be okay with school groups. Honestly, that was the practical part of my head. The practical part of my head was like, well, if they get over the use of the F word, we'll have like a good year run because school groups will take their... Because I'd seen that happen when I performed at the White House. I'd seen in the YouTube comments, everyone was saying, my teacher showed us this.

13:37You know, that thing lived online for seven years. Oh, the thing you did at the White House? Yeah, at the White House in 2009. The Daily Show made fun of me when that happened. There's a piece on the Daily Show. It was the day after I performed, and they go... It's like, you know, and it's like the perfect subject for a Daily Show slam. It was like there was a poetry jam at the White House, and they cut to me going, I'm doing a hip-hop show about Alexander Hamilton. and they cut back to Jon Stewart like this. And it got that reaction. Speaking of school children, the Seattle Times recently featured a 17-year-old African-American teenager.

14:12Her name was Katira Howard. Did you hear about this? She's a senior in high school who said this about Hamilton. Before Hamilton came along, early U.S. history lessons seemed like these white guys who changed America. But with actors of color playing traditionally white roles, change is not only the musical theater, but history. The world is changing. I feel that if I want something, no matter who is set up for that position, I can get it. So Katira, that's what Katira said, is just one of millions of people that were fundamentally changed by Hamilton. So I guess the question is, how does it feel to know that your creative effort poured into it, getting the rhymes, getting it right, has changed so many lives?

14:54It's really overwhelming, and I think that a lot of what the show is actually about is legacy and how we have no control over that. You know, Aaron Burb did a lot of good for this country, and he is defined in our history by his worst moment, by his most reckless moment. And it's also about we don't get to tell the stories. And even history is curated by the people who survive and the people who live to tell it. Yep, yep, yep, yep. And one of the best things we do is we do this educational initiative called EDGEHAM. And we partnered with the Gilded Lerman Institute. They do 11th graders come to see our show, but they do a few weeks of research on their own favorite historical figures.

15:32And they perform for us. They each pick groups and they come on stage and they perform at the Richard Rogers or wherever Hamilton is playing all over. And the pieces they write will blow your mind. I mean, if you treat history as subjective as it is, you get to hear stories. So I've seen pieces from young people, one young man who wrote a piece from the perspective of one of Thomas Jefferson's sons via Sally Hemings. And the opening line was, the founding father didn't acknowledge he was my father. And it got better from there. So it's also just opening history up as not facts to memorize, but stories that aren't being told.

16:12and the stories we don't even cover in the two hours and 45 minutes that we have you and opening that up. And that's going to be the real legacy, what those kids grow up to make because they're already blowing our minds in our little school assemblies. And it's really exciting. How do you define the times or describe for yourself the times that we're living in now? Because you were just talking about as an artist, and I do think this is as a human being too because we are all artists of our own lives, that the most important quality is empathy. and we don't live in a time where it feels like people are being empathetic towards one another.

16:49Absolutely. Well, I think several things. One, I think we're living in a time of enormous moral clarity. That is what I felt the day after the election. I was like, okay, well, here are the things we can't go backwards on because we've made immense strides towards LGBTQ rights. We've made immense strides as a country that have taken a long time. We can't go backwards. And so I think everyone felt like oh I have these internal battle lines that are being drawn and these are the things that we're going to fight for I don't know about you guys I open Twitter like grimacing like what happened in the night what am I about to read I am so terrified because it's it just feels and I think because of social media it all just feels like it's happening even faster everything just it just feels like there's 20 things a day happening internationally nationally locally and And I think the thing that I challenge myself to do all the time, and I fail all the time, is, all right, what can I focus on?

17:43What won't let me go unless I do something about it? Because you can drown in how many people need help all over the world. That's right. And you have to pick, all right, what can I be effective at and what can I do? You know, the success of Hamilton has offered me a really big megaphone. That's it. I don't, I don't, I'm not running for public office. I'm not doing anything like that. I heard that!

18:08Because... You've divided the... You and I both know that there's so much... You can do so much. I would argue that Oprah is a more powerful position than president. Thank you for that. But, no, I think each person should use their platform. You use your platform, how you most see fit, and what is the most authentic for you. And that's why when you call me for help in Puerto Rico, I could feel that this was a passion and a love and an empathy that was coming out of a place that was raw and real for you. How is Puerto Rico now? Puerto Rico is still a third without power, 40 % without power. It's how many months later?

18:54My parents' hometown does not have power. They have been running on generators, waiting in line for gas for four months. The gas situation has eased. The money situation has eased. Because for a while, ATMs were putting a cap on how much you could even take out. But my hometown, Vegalta, is still without power, where my aunt and uncle and cousins who I love very much and I'm very close to, we've got matching tattoos all live. Just to interrupt, I can't let that go. What's your tattoo say? Oh, we all got little matching coffee cups. I mean, Usnavi is a little autobiographical. So we all have little coffee cups all over each other.

19:28But the initial push was power and aid and urgent needs that is still happening. There are still towns and mountain towns. Puerto Rico is amazing, and it contains all the biomes. There's rainforest, and there's desert, and there's beach. It's this insane little island 100 miles across, and there are places that are harder hit and are still as if the hurricane happened yesterday. And there are places, metropolitan areas, where it's business. Where it's better. So it's a third now still without power. Yeah, 40 % to a third, yeah. Yeah. And so when you saw people's hearts opening up, wanting to respond, did that give you hope?

20:05Well, I think we all jumped into action because we weren't hearing anything. You have to remember, the cell towers were wiped out, electricity was wiped out, so no one heard from their families for a minimum a few days, many for weeks. And so I started writing that song, I mean, I think the night it made landfall because that's my first instinct. things. That's, to quote West Wing, how I enter the world. I'm going to figure out how to make it sing. And so I thought, well, one, I'm going to grab a line. It's Hurricane Maria, so I'm going to grab a line from Maria that's most relevant from West Side Story.

20:42And then I thought, what we need to get behind is the entire island, not just San Juan, not just the places you've heard about or you go on vacation. And so the lyrics are literally just the names of the 78 municipalities of Puerto Rico. And everyone jumped aboard. People I'd never met. You know, I send Camila Cabello a tweet because I don't have her phone number. And she responds right away. And Luis Fonzi, who had the biggest hit of the year, just wrote two words I'm in. And so then we put the whole thing together in about a week and a half. And actually, we have a salsa remix coming out on Friday.

21:14Yeah, so that'll be out by the time this airs. But yeah, I mean, it was really all hands on deck because we all wanted something to do. And that's the other sort of silver lining in the time we live in is people are engaged as never before To the things that matter to them and so when are you taking Hamilton there? January 2019 Yeah, and what do you think that's gonna be like for you doing it there? Well, here's the thing with the people of Puerto Rico who've been through so much It's impossible to talk about this without crying. So I'm just gonna cry while I go ahead um Um, the, I knew I was taking Hamilton to Puerto Rico the second we got our New York Times review, and I knew this thing was going to run and have a tour.

21:58And the second I did my first Spanish language interview, the first question was, when are you going to Puerto Rico? I said, I don't know, but I promise I'll be Hamilton when it happens. And so we had been planning for about six months before Hurricane Maria even hit. And so all we did was expedite the announcement, but I did In the Heights there. In the Heights was the first equity tour ever to go to Puerto Rico. And, yeah. And I jumped in. I jumped into a tour in progress to play Usnavi for a week. And it, I told you, it closed something in me I didn't even know was open. You know, to be a kid whose Spanish sounds pretty gringo to Puerto Ricans, spending a month a year there and feeling a little out of place there, a little out of place at home, a little out of place at school.

22:48That's a great way to make a writer. Be a little out of place everywhere. And two... Because you use it. You use all that. You use it and you're kind of always watching. To quote Sondheim, there's a part of you always sort of watching your interaction even as it's happening. Yeah. And I played Usnavi there and we did the show as I wrote it for New York and the love that came out of there and, you know, I remember one review was like, this show is about our families who left. It's a dispatch. It's a dispatch from the people who left. And it's them telling us they're okay. And I told you. And so it was the most creatively and emotionally fulfilling week of my life.

23:31So I knew I was going to bring Hamilton back and I knew I was going to play Hamilton because I just wanted to feel that again. And so the fact that it is coming at a time when it can be of great use. Our goal is to basically have a third of the tickets be 10 bucks and affordable to Puerto Ricans on the island and then really wildly overprice the other tickets for tourists so that that money can restore arts funding in Puerto Rico. That's the goal.

24:03And then I get to do it for three weeks again. You get to do it for three weeks again. Yeah. You know, watching you up there, it feels like joy rising. It feels like there is and life and art and prayer are all, and offering are all kind of connected. You know? It feels like that. What does it feel like to you? I imagine it feels not different from when you do your show. You get to build this really cool car and then you get to drive it. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Playing Hamilton is the best. I mean, you basically take your super ego off for two and a half hours, walk into every room and say, I'm the smartest person here.

24:43You get to get into duels. You get into fights. You get to have affairs. You get to fall in love. It's a 14 course meal for an actor. No one was ever going to write me that part. I performed in TV shows and stuff before. I'm always sort of the Puerto Rican friend of the white leads. And no one was going to write me that part. And so writing that and then getting to do it was a total joy. And now the joy for me is in getting, you know, we have five companies now and we have so much incredible talent, so many talented actors. Was it hard to come off the stage? Was it hard to come off the stage? No, it was not.

25:16No, it was not. It was a joy to hand it off. You know, I handed it off to Javier Munoz, who also I handed Usnavi over to. And, and we, we really sort of worked on, on the role together. And so it was an absolute joy. And now the joy is watching all of these people make it their own. And I actually, I don't know why, I wrote this the other day. I think about Maya Angelou a lot. Because Maya Angelou was in a 22-nation tour of Porgy and Bess. As a kid, she was a featured dancer. Yeah, I remember. I know that. One of her books, like, it really documents it in detail. And I was like a Maya Angelou complete.

25:51I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 9th grade, and I'm one of those people, like, book and I like it. I then read everything else they ever wrote before I move on to the next thing. I'm that person. Yeah, and so I'm very aware that I have, we have five companies of incredible actors of color, and there's a Maya Angelou in there somewhere, and there is a future civil rights leader, or there is a future something, and we are just a stop on their journey. We might be their equity card, you know what I mean? But there's so much incredible talent that gets to play these parts and go all over the world, and that makes me really proud.

26:23When you did your Tony acceptance speech, you wrote a sonnet about Hamilton. You said, the show is proof. That history remembers. We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall and light from dying embers. Remembrances that hope and love last longer. That feels like a prayer. It is. It was a prayer that came out. Oh, thanks.

26:49It was a prayer that came out of a really tough day. I spent that morning like really normal. You know, 6 a.m. Rehearsal at Radio City. We have a record-setting number of nominations, rehearsed our numbers, and then I get home and read about the worst shooting in our nation's history. It was the Pulse shooting that morning. And I would have loved nothing more than to just write a very sweet sonnet about my wife and all of my collaborators that night. But if this is training for anything, if what you're doing when you're writing is you're trying to meet the moment. You're trying to be that character and meet the moment.

27:24And that was a time when we were all in mourning. we were all grieving and yet it was also a night for celebrating years and years of hard work and so I was like I can't freestyle rap to this moment I will not be able to meet the moment that way it demands something else and so I started writing this sonnet because that's what the show is about we can talk about Hamilton in the history books but the show is about how Eliza Hamilton lives to 97 years of age and has an incredible American life and goes on to do things that Hamilton would never have dreamed of and opens an orphanage and opens a school in his name.

28:03She was known as like the last Revolutionary War widow in the last years of her life and she got almost close to meeting Lincoln. I mean she lived into the 18 and so that notion of well the love story actually lives beyond the pettiness of the duel. So it's speaking to both Hamilton and this notion that we're going to go through trying times and we're going to go through challenges. Lord knows we're going through challenges. But if we're survived by the people who love us and remember us, then we'll kind of go on forever. I love you. I love you. Thank you for that. Just to be in this head. Thank you so much.

28:41Thank you. Lin-Manuel Miranda! I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.

29:11hey it's page from giggly squad and i want to let you know that if you want the newest and hottest beauty products you have to go to sephora i'm obsessed with the one size liquid blotting paper spray it's the first of its kind blotting spray that mattifies for up to eight hours it's unreal there's also the summer friday shade drops spf 50 which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden plush pear smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. Like, people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora.

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