I was lucky enough to watch Hamilton live yesterday. The show just met my expectations by being absolutely incredible.
As we were leaving, I heard someone say, “Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius.”
It’s a thought that’s crossed my mind many times. The man behind Hamilton is also behind two other hits: Disney movie Encanto and musical In the Heights. I watched both on a plane this past month and instantly regretted it—they had me feeling more emotional than I cared to admit.
So, how does the story of genius look? Very long, it turns out.
For example, Miranda was a sophomore at Wesleyan University when he wrote the first draft of In the Heights and watched it performed on campus. It was a story based on the Latinx community in his old neighborhood, Washington Heights.
A few years later, he started iterating on the story in the basement of a bookshop. He had a team of collaborators around him, a group he called The Cabinet. The team removed the main character entirely, moved another to a new college, and shifted the script’s political focus. The show got a new protagonist, Usnavi, named after the character’s father seeing a “US Navy” ship while immigrating to the United States.
A decade after Miranda’s Wesleyan draft, he brought the show to Broadway. And it took another 13 years for the musical to be made into the Hollywood movie I watched wide-eyed on the plane at 4 in the morning. My goosebumps were 22 years in the making.
In fact, only three words from the score of Miranda’s original campus play remain in the now Hollywood film: “en Washington Heights!”
Genius takes time. And arguably, genius is a mere product of concentrated efforts over time. So if you haven’t been working on your project long enough to raise a child and watch them graduate college, breathe. Your award-winning creation could be just a couple decades away.
