A Conversation with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is the author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist, out September 9th from Simon & Schuster. Drawing from unprecedented access to Miranda’s inner circle and more than 150 original interviews, Pollack-Pelzner traces Miranda’s journey from passionate child to global theatrical force—with Stephen Sondheim appearing throughout as the “presiding deity” of the book.
We discussed the craft of biographical distillation, the surprising insights that emerged from his research, how Sondheim’s own apprenticeship under Oscar Hammerstein became a template for understanding artistic mentorship across generations, and much more. Our conversation begins below:
First, huge congratulations on this book. I loved it so much. Reading it, I found myself thinking about Lin-Manuel digesting Chernow’s Hamilton biography, trying to distill a huge life into something manageable for the stage. Did you find yourself experiencing something similar?
That’s a perfect analogy. In fact, the process of distillation that Lin-Manuel used to get a Chernow doorstopper into a two-hour, forty-five-minute musical was a great model for me. My mantra was “Coast Guard.”
You might remember in Hamilton, Aaron Burr says, “How does Hamilton, the short-tempered, Protean creator of the Coast Guard, founder of the New York Post, ardently abuse his cab’net post?” I thought, well, you could do a whole number about Hamilton founding the Coast Guard! But there is just not space in that story to include that part of his life. So every time I wanted to write an extra chapter about Lin writing songs for Star Wars, or writing one of my favorite mini-musicals, 21 Chump Street, I just told myself, “Coast Guard.”
Instead, the real through-line of the story was Lin-Manuel’s education as an artist: how he went from being somebody who really wanted to make musicals and movies and hadn’t yet learned how to do it, to the process of apprenticeship and collaboration and mentorship that got him to the point where he could create these great works.
And the entry point, actually, in my conversation with Lin, was Stephen Sondheim.
The first time we met, Lin said he liked this teaching angle because he felt the founding moment in modern musical theatre was Oscar Hammerstein taking Sondheim on as his young apprentice. I think he was interested in the idea that, as Hammerstein was to Sondheim, Sondheim and many other people have been to him, and that could be reflected in the book. He was excited about that.
In our email correspondence, you described Sondheim as “the presiding deity of the book, appearing every few chapters like Pallas Athena guiding Odysseus.” I love that characterization so much, and in particular the idea of an almost mythic relationship between these two artists. When you’re writing about so many mentor figures, how do you best draw out what each person uniquely brings to the table?
There was a kind of fallacy in my initial approach to the book. I thought, “Oh, I’ll interview all these teachers, and they’ll tell me what Lin-Manuel learned.” Then I wrote to Lin’s wonderful eighth-grade English teacher, Dr. Herbert, who has become another kind of fabled figure—the Dumbledore to his Harry—who gives him the initial encouragement to say “you could be a writer” and introduces him to the high school theatre club. I wrote to Dr. Herbert, and he said, “How do I know what Lin learned from me thirty years ago? I think very fondly of him. I love the work that he’s gone on to do. I had a ton of students. Many of them were great writers. I was glad to give him a nudge.” So I realized that the book had to be focalized, that the narrative point of view had to be through Lin, and then these other figures would appear along the way.
I do think of The Odyssey, or of other episodic quest journeys. Someone will give you the cow as white as milk, and somebody else will give you the cape as red as blood, and somebody else will give you the slipper as pure as gold, and once you have all these ingredients, then you can start to create something magical. And I found that it was as much a thrill to talk to Lin’s high school classmates, who helped him figure out how to do chord progressions for his initial musical, Nightmare in D Major, as it was to get a masterclass from folks like Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Menken about the craft of musical theatre composition.
My goal was that in each chapter, Lin would learn something and would end up in a different place, either emotionally or artistically or geographically, from where he started. The initial drafts would have so many different guiding figures, and the feedback I got from my early readers was, “We cannot keep track of these people unless they’re named Stephen Sondheim.” I had to restrict myself usually to one or two mentors per chapter. But I do hope that people reading this book will come away revering Dr. Herbert, or Matt Korahais, or Aileen Payumo, or Meredith Summerville, as much as they already do Kander and Menken and Schwartz.
Among the 150 people you spoke to, were there particular conversations that unlocked unexpected doors as the book took shape?
The interviews were really helpfully reinforcing. Each one gave me a little puzzle piece that I could put together. For instance, a scene that I knew had to be in the book was Sondheim’s visit to Hunter College High School, when Lin was directing West Side Story his senior year. I knew this was a canonical episode in his education, but I hadn’t read a thorough account of what happened there. I talked to ten different people who were in Room 210, Miss Dooley’s classroom at Hunter, during the lunch period when John Weidman brought Sondheim to visit the musical rep class.
Each person gave me a different detail. Miss Dooley, the theatre advisor, could tell me the shape of the desks that Sondheim was sitting at. David Davidson, who was the bass singer in Lin’s a cappella group, remembered that Sondheim was wearing a brown sweater and had a newspaper rolled up in his hand. Lona Kaplan-Werner, who was the director of Lin’s second musical, remembered running up to the room from a jazz chorus rehearsal, stopping in the doorway and freezing because Stephen Sondheim was sitting there. Lin remembered the question that he had asked, and Weidman remembered the answer that Sondheim had given him. Sometimes, it really was that putting-it-together model.
Other times, it was getting an insight into a part of Lin that I didn’t know as much about. I would say there were two currents that surprised me. One was the importance of Lin’s mother in his education. Many people do know and revere his mother, but his father has been a wonderful and more public persona. There’s an HBO documentary about him, and his role as an advocate is pretty well established. But Lin’s parents met in an NYU psychology graduate program. His dad got fed up with therapy practice. When patients would come back the next week, he’d say, “You told me that problem last week. Why didn’t you do what I told you to do?” He’s a fix-it guy, whereas Lin’s mom, Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda, became a child psychologist and was really attuned to her son’s emotional life.
Lin has talked about being a sensitive child—but according to his sister, according to his parents, according to his aunts and uncles, he was a deep empath. He would see a homeless person on the street and would start crying. He would hear a chord change in “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and burst into tears. He was somebody who felt the world very deeply, and he says it was his mom who helped him feel that it was okay to have these deep feelings—and, in fact, that it would become his superpower as an artist.
I didn’t know then how much those feelings were exactly what he channeled into his first musical. The first musical he wrote, Nightmare in D Major, was about his memory of a childhood friend dying in a tragic drowning accident that had happened when he was in preschool, and his fear that the same thing was going to happen to his girlfriend in high school. It was very, very funny and artful, but also a very emotionally sensitive depiction of what he was most afraid of. Partially, that was because he’d just seen Rent, and Jonathan Larson, he felt, had given him permission to write about his own fears and fantasies on stage. But I think another big part of it was that his mom had given him this emotional training to know that the deep feelings he was experiencing were not things that he had to be ashamed of or shy away from. They were, in fact, the resources that he could draw on.
Here’s the other thing that I didn’t fully understand before I started my research. Everybody knows that he’s not a piano virtuoso in the way that a Kander or a Tom Kitt or many composers are very comfortable on the piano. But I hadn’t realized that his high school classmates really did not think of him as a musician or composer at all. They thought of him as the film guy who carried around a camcorder. For an early film he wanted to do, which was about a battle of the bands in high school, he asked his friends who were more comfortable composing than he was to write a score, and then he showed up having written a song. They were like, “This guy wrote a song?”
That film element is so compelling. You beautifully trace Lin-Manuel’s evolution from the young filmmaker with a camcorder to the director of Tick, Tick... Boom!. At times I was reminded of those scenes in The Fabelmans where the young Spielberg surrogate processes his parents’ divorce through a lens. And Tick, Tick... Boom! brings together so many threads: Larson, Sondheim, his directing dreams... Was that chapter always conceived as a kind of climax, where so many narrative strands would converge?
In the original outline of the book, the first and last chapter were both called “Home Movies,” exactly because of what you described. The movie is a love letter to Jonathan Larson. It’s a love letter to Stephen Sondheim. It’s a love letter to theatre during the pandemic. And it is the fulfilment of Lin’s lifelong dream to become a movie director.
Something Lin-Manuel told me is that his favorite tools in the musical theatre composer’s toolkit are themes and reprises. He loves to introduce a motif and bring it back. He was dazzled by Merrily We Roll Along. He said, “How do you compose backwards and forwards at the same time? How do you set up “Not a Day Goes By” and then we later realize we were actually hearing a reprise of something that happened earlier?”
The first draft of this book came in at 200,000 words, so I had to cut almost half of it. I told Lin, “You’ve read the first draft. A lot’s going to go.” He said, “Yeah, of course! You’ve got to figure out what your themes are in Act I, so you can figure out what your reprises are in Act II.” And I really felt that when writing about Tick, Tick... Boom!. I had set up all of these motifs, and now I could bring them back where they were most moving to me.
We return to Sondheim, of course. Sondheim rewrites and voices the voicemail he left for Jonathan Larson. Lin tells him how meaningful he is for him and for so many people that he’s mentored. Sondheim writes back, “I feel as if I’ve repaid (partially, at least) what I owe Oscar.”
But just as meaningful to me is to return to Barbara Ames, Lin’s elementary school teacher, who cast him in the sixth-grade play and launched him on the way to musical theatre stardom back in the very first chapter. Lin brings her back for the movie to play the role of Jonathan Larson’s music teacher on a recreation of the Hunter auditorium stage, when Larson is recalling his own introduction to musical theatre as a child. That was a treat to write.
Notoriously, and beautifully, Lin-Manuel acts as he writes, and his wife Vanessa told me that she can’t really work in the same room as him when he’s composing, because if he’s writing something funny, he’s laughing out loud, and if he’s writing something sad, he is crying into a box of Kleenex. My initial reaction to that was, “Okay, actors are at a different level of emotional availability than the rest of us.” But then I found myself tearing up as I was writing these scenes with Barbara Ames and with Sondheim, knowing that he was going to die the next week, and I thought, Oh, this is something I’ve learned from Lin about the composition process.
I love that you made the Fabelmans connection, too, because I was thinking of exactly that movie, and Lin brought it up when we spoke. You remember the scene where the young Spielberg surrogate thinks he’s filming the family camping trip, and what he’s actually revealing instead is his mom’s affair? The true story of the video is a different story than the filmmaker thinks he’s telling.
There’s a canonical video within the Miranda world of the moment in high school where Dr. Herbert anoints Lin as the musical theatre composer for Hunter, and says, “Lin, you’re on.” Lin has posted the video of that moment to YouTube, and that’s the official story of the video. But if you watch the video, that’s not what Lin is filming. What he’s filming is his love for all of the older theatre students in the room. Dr. Herbert keeps talking, and he films these close-ups of each of the students who have mentored him. He’s so enraptured with filming each of these students that he almost doesn’t even hear Dr. Herbert say, “Lin, you’re on.”
So it felt to me just like one of these Fabelmans moments. The story you think you’re telling is different than the story the video actually ends up revealing. But both stories end up shaping the future of your life.
Text and subtext! That’s beautiful. Do you remember when you personally first heard about Lin-Manuel? I’d love to hear about your own introduction to his work.
Yes, absolutely. My grandmother grew up in Washington Heights above her immigrant father’s kosher deli. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, but spending every spring break in New York, visiting my grandparents, and they would take me to see Broadway shows. My first show was Into the Woods. My grandparents were divorced, and they would compete against each other for my sister’s and my affection with Broadway show tickets. So I got to see Into the Woods twice.
My grandma set up a theatre scholarship fund. She was a retired elementary school teacher, loved Broadway, and loved introducing me to the works that she loved. She took me to see In the Heights in 2008 with Lin. I was like, “As long as you buy ‘em, l’chaim!” and we had a great time. I remember her being most moved at the song “Inútil,” about the father who worries that he’ll be useless. She thought of her own immigrant father, trying to provide for the family.
I will say, the person that I became obsessed with was Quiara Alegría Hudes, the book writer of the show. I saw some other plays that she wrote, and I was totally blown away. I wrote a profile of her for The New Yorker, when she had a wonderful musical, Miss You Like Hell, opening at the Public, and I asked her if she would put me in touch with some of her collaborators so I could get perspectives on what it was like to work with her. Five minutes later I got an email from Lin-Manuel Miranda saying, “Hey! I hear you’re writing about Quiara. Lucky you! What do you want to know? Siempre, Lin-Manuel.” I was so thrilled to get that message. I remember my sister saying, “Poor Lin-Manuel! He doesn’t know how literally you’re going to take siempre.”
I had become a Shakespeare professor and a drama professor, and I was kind of curious about who our Shakespeares are today. Who’s creating big-scale national stories in innovative dramatic forms that help reflect back who we are as a culture and a people? I was talking to Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater. He said, “Listen, if you want to think about modern-day Shakespeares, you gotta talk to this guy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s just written a hip-hop version of the American Revolution.”
I was in New York for my grandma’s ninetieth birthday, July 2015, and we had one night of babysitting. My wife offered to take me out for my birthday, and she said, “I could take you out to a fancy dinner, or I could take you to see this new thing in previews called Hamilton.” I said, “Fancy dinner, please. That sounds delicious.” It was my grandma who said, “No, you’ve got to see Hamilton. This is going to be the next big thing.”
Down the row from us was Joe Biden. I remember thinking, watching Biden watch the origins of American political power on stage is the closest I could ever come to seeing Macbeth down the row from King James in 1606 or whatever. I was like, “I missed the first 400 years of Shakespeare reception history, but I can be here on the ground floor for what happens when this show takes off.”
I became a kind of Hamilton groupie. I went to London when it opened in the West End to write about what happens when the American Revolution goes back to the origins of the British Empire. I went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, when Lin-Manuel brought Hamilton to help boost the island’s economy, and had the occasion to interview Lin a couple of times there. I got really interested in him as an artist. I was really struck that he would always talk about what he was going to take on next in terms of what he was going to learn from the people that he’d be working with.
Then one of my own mentors said, “Daniel, you need to write a book. Not about Shakespeare. Write a book about this guy Lin-Manuel that you’ve been stalking around the globe for the last decade.” And I realized that the thing I would like to write is something that would be of use to my students. How did he learn to be an artist? That was what I pitched to Lin-Manuel, and he—at a moment right after Sondheim’s death, when I think he was really thinking about mentorship and legacy—said, “Okay, let’s meet.”
I’d love to ask you about something that comes up constantly in these conversations: Sondheim being referred to as musical theatre’s Shakespeare. It’s so common it can almost feel like a reflex. Given your expertise here, and since the same has been said of Lin-Manuel, what’s your perspective on this? Do you find the Shakespeare comparison illuminating, or does it risk being reductive? What might it most usefully teach us about Lin-Manuel’s (or Sondheim’s) work?
The topos of “our Shakespeare” is a very old one. That was part of what I wrote my dissertation about: the way that Victorian novelists were considered the Shakespeares of their day, and how they tried consciously to establish themselves as latter-day Shakespeares in a different dramatic form. So who our Shakespeare is, like the great American novel, is a kind of shifting signifier that gets applied to lots of different people. Part of me thinks it’s way too soon to know, because Shakespeare wasn’t “our Shakespeare” until he was canonized, arguably 100, 150, 200 years after his death. He went from being one of a number of esteemed Renaissance dramatists, but one often seen as faulty for not following neoclassical unities, or just one among Johnson and Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher and lots of other people, to being the supreme national poet. That took about 150 years to happen, so I think we’ve got to wait a little bit to see how today’s canons get formed.
But I do think that the popular quality is really important. As Oskar Eustis frequently says, Lin, like Shakespeare, is taking the everyday vernacular and elevating it to the status of national chronicle through rhythm and poetry. That is a kind of unique thing that Lin-Manuel has done in dramatic verse. You can certainly see August Wilson doing it in a different way with African-American speech, or Quiara Alegría Hudes doing it with Puerto Rican and American poetic styles.
I feel Lin-Manuel is closest to Shakespeare with his wordplay. There are moments in the history plays where you can see Shakespeare’s been playing around with a name for a long time. You get somebody opposed to a Plantagenet saying, “I am going to plant this Plantagenet in the ground, where somebody will have to water him,” or they’re tired of the Earl of Suffolk and they say, “I’m going to suffocate this Suffolk.” When, in 21 Chump Street, young Justin has fallen in love with a new girl named Naomi, and you get “Naomi / you know me” and “Justin / just in time,” I can feel that sort of Shakespearean intelligence and playfulness with language shining through.
Also, Shakespeare was an actor. We believe he played several parts in his works, and was writing from the standpoint of a practicing man of the theatre. I think that's another good analogy to the way that Lin-Manuel works. We of course strongly identify him with the central roles that he’s played on stage, but he says that he was crying just as much writing Eliza’s epilogue to Hamilton as he was writing “It’s Quiet Uptown” or “Hurricane.”
I remember interviewing Lin-Manuel in London, and he talked about Shakespeare, and about what he learned from Oskar Eustis: that, in essence, verse drama was the main current of English drama until the advent of realism in the late nineteenth century. He was conscious of that lineage. He had just been to Stratford on that trip, and somebody had asked him if he was going to come back and play Hamilton again. He said he could imagine Shakespeare watching Hamlet and saying, “Oh, Hamlet’s a good part. That might be fun to play.”
For more information about Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist, and to pre-order the book, simply click here.
