Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on Encanto and his magical month Down Under

Lin-Manuel Miranda reveals the highs and lows of his trip to Australia long before he hit the big time with Hamilton.

Lin-Manuel Miranda hopes to come back to Australia to see the Melbourne production of Hamilton. Picture: Getty Images for The Latinx House

If Lin-Manuel Miranda ever needed a reminder of just how far he has come in the past 15 years, he need only cast his mind back to his month-long trip to Australia in 2006.

No doubt if the multi-talented Miranda were to be introduced to a crowd in 2021, he would be feted as a revered actor and director for stage and screen, the creator and star of hit musicals In the Heights and Hamilton and the recipient of three Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards and two Emmy Awards.

But when he and his fellow members of improvisational hip-hop troupe Freestyle Love Machine played at the charity gala as part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival, they were rather unceremoniously wheeled out using the umbrella term “s***loads more”.

“I will never forget, we were so excited to see ourselves on TV and we all made a big meal and gathered around the TV and they listed all the acts, you know … Eddie Perfect … Tripod … Flight of the Conchords … and then they showed us and said ‘and s***loads more’,” Miranda recalls with a laugh over Zoom call from this New York home.

“So, that became our nickname for ourselves for the rest of that Melbourne trip.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda (second from left) with Freestyle Love Supreme during the 2006 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Even with all he has achieved since, Miranda still has fond and formative memories of his trip Down Under, as well as a tattoo as a memento.

Not only was he delighted to discover that Australia had a rich tradition of musical comedians, it was also when he cemented his bond with wife Vanessa Nadal, with whom he now has two sons.

He’s been keeping tabs on the Sydney production of Hamilton, which for a time last year was they only one running anywhere in the world (“that was so inspirational”), and hopes he can return when the Melbourne production opens next March.

“My then girlfriend and now wife came to visit me and that’s when I knew things were serious,” he says.

“She flew to the other side of the world to come and spend some time with me in those early days and we just had the best time. So, I am hoping to catch the production next year when it’s hopefully a little easier to travel.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda performing on Broadway in the title role of his musical Hamilton.

From his musical theatre roots, Miranda has successfully transitioned into cinema in recent years.

Having contributed songs including Grammy-winning ballad How Far I’ll Go as a hired hand for Disney’s animated hit Moana and appeared as Jack the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins Returns, Miranda has become even more integral to his most recent projects.

He produced this year’s movie adaptation of In the Heights, as well as the filmed version of Hamilton, featuring the Broadway cast and him in the title role. Tick, Tick … Boom!, the musical biopic of Rent creator and Miranda’s long-time hero, Jonathan Larson, earned him praise for his first stint in the director’s chair when it dropped on Netflix this month.

He has also returned to the Disney animation world with Encanto, and was on board from the beginning to shape the story and the music at the same time.

He says the experience “surpassed my expectations” and he was delighted to see how the animaters rose to the challenge of illustrating his rapid-fire, free-associative lyrics.

A scene from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s animated Disney musical Encanto.

“I thrive on collaboration,” he says.

“Writing for the theatre is to collaborate – it’s to count on your director and your choreographer and musical team to have the ideas you didn’t have, throw them into the pot, make your music better and make the story richer. With animation, it’s that times hundreds of people and departments, so being in from the ground floor just feels like this music is marbled into the story in a way that I have never seen on an animated project that I have worked on.”

Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican descent, says he wanted to “capture the complexity of an intergenerational Latino family all living under one roof” in Encanto. The musical comedy tells the story of a Colombian clan in which each family member (bar one) has been granted a magical power they are expected to use for the benefit of their isolated village.

With a stern matriarch, bickering sisters, in-laws and cousins, Miranda hopes the movie will give audiences a whole new language to talk about ever-shifting family relationships in the same way that the acclaimed Pixar animation Inside Out helped families talk about children’s emotions.

“That was the way I felt after I saw Inside Out for the first time and suddenly I could talk to my kids about ‘who’s running the controls? Joy? Rage? Hunger? What’s going on in here?’,” he says.

It was fitting that Miranda chose Larson as the subject of his first film as a director – the famously-diverse and gritty Rent was the show that helped him evolve from an “angsty high school student” who wrote songs to actually thinking he could create a musical.

“That show felt so homemade and spoke so specifically to ‘now’, when I was experiencing it, it was the most diverse cast I had ever seen on a Broadway stage so I felt seen by the show and my New York felt seen by the show,” he says.

“So that journey is coming full circle with me being able to honour Jonathan Larson’s story and being able to direct his early work and bring it to the screen and bring a little more of Johnathan Larson into the world is a debt I can never really fully repay. But this is my attempt at it.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Andrew Garfield at Netflix's the Tick, Tick … BOOM New York premiere this month. Picture: Monica Schipper/Getty Images

And don’t expect him to abandon the genre that made him famous any time soon.

Miranda once responded to a fan on Twitter asking him to explain why they should love musicals with the words “they are like real life – but better”.

“Don’t you wish you had the perfect lyrics to embody how you were feeling for the right moment with the right melody for it to sit on and soar?,” he says with a laugh when asked to explain his theory.

“Don’t you wish you had that kind of catharsis at all times? I think they are the hardest thing to do – it’s so easy to burst into song too soon or sing a moment that feels unearned.

“There are so many ways to go wrong but man, when all departments work to make a musical moment click – and I am thinking of the climax of L’chaim (To Life) in Fiddler on the Roof, or Defying Gravity at the end of act one (of Wicked) or Sunday, at the end of Sunday In the Park With George, there is no greater feeling alive on Earth. So, my life is really about building towards those moments.”

Encanto opens in cinemas on December 2. Tick, Tick … Boom is now streaming on Netflix. Hamilton is now showing at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney until February 27 and opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne on March 16.

Tickets at hamiltonmusical.com.au

Originally published as Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on Encanto and his magical month Down Under