5 Fun Facts About Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton

With music, lyrics, and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical tells the story of United States Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The award-winning musical is one of the most popular Broadway shows of the last 10 years, receiving a record-setting 16 nominations at the 2016 Tony Awards (winning 11, including Best Musical) and also received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Audiences who haven't yet had a chance to see Hamilton will soon be able to enjoy a live recording of the Broadway stage production on their screens. Lin-Manuel Miranda recently announced that the show will be available to stream on Disney+ from July 3rd – 15 months earlier than originally scheduled. With this news, we've compiled some fun facts about the musical to whet your appetite!

Download official sheet music for Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton

5 Fun Facts About Hamilton: An American Musical

1. It all started with some vacation reading

Lin-Manuel Miranda was on vacation in Mexico when he read Ron Chernow's biography about Alexander Hamilton and began to imagine it as a musical.

Miranda Googled "Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical" expecting to find that someone had already written it. To his surprise, they hadn't yet—so he got right to work!

2. The show wasn't written overnight

Lin-Manuel was already a Tony winner (In the Heights, Best Original Score) by the time he began work on Hamilton, but the show was seven long years in the making. It took him a full year to write the first song and another year to write the second.

3. The show contains very little dialogue

Unlike most other musicals, there is not much in the way of dialogue between songs. "We found that if you start with our opening number, you can't go back to speech. The ball is just thrown too high in the air," Miranda explains. "And that's when I would listen to 'Friend or Foe' by Jay-Z on a loop."

4. The word count is off the charts!

Miranda packs plenty of words into the show. FiveThiryEight did the math on the cast album and found that Hamilton's impressive 20,520 words equates to 144 words per minute—twice as many words per minute as its closest competitor, Steven Sater's Spring Awakening.

5. The musical helped save the real Hamilton's spot on the $10 bill

It was planned for Alexander Hamilton to be replaced on the ten dollar US bill by a different historical figure, but the US Treasury Department backtracked on this move in light of the musical's phenomenal success.

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