(The assignment from October 2018 was to write a quick PR bio of Lin-Manuel Miranda, as if you were preparing to interview him.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda, born in New York to a chiefly Puerto Rican family, and fluent in Spanish, is a richly talented music artist and enthusiastic performer whose creativity, inventiveness, and energy is probably best experienced in a live television interview. He himself is keenly visual and musically interactive, phrases which are apt descriptors of his work and applicable indicators to their wide-ranging appeal.
Not yet 40-years-old, Miranda memorably downplayed his considerable accomplishments at the end of a 2016 60 Minutes interview with Charlie Rose, saying, “Yeah. I wrote two plays.” Make that two Broadway musicals, In the Heights and Hamilton, for which he wrote all of the lyrics and music and which both took Best Musical honors at the Tony Awards, as well as both won Miranda Best Original Score. Miranda also led the onstage casts of both, so confidently bringing rap and urban hip-hop rhythms to the Great White Way that they sounded like they’d always been there—-which was definitely not the case. Both musicals also picked up Grammy Awards for their cast albums. The full bounty of awards Miranda won for his “two plays”, including the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Hamilton, appear on his official linmanuel.com website.
The website also lists Manuel’s other works, including his guest television appearances, cartoon voice work, audiobook recordings, and songs he’s written for TV and films.
However, Miranda is not one to rest on his considerable laurels. What will matter to Miranda in any interview is whatever project he most recently completed and will soon be released, and the project he is scheduled to handle next.
The end of 2018 will see Miranda promoting both his forthcoming book, Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me and You, illustrated by Jonny Sun, which will also be available in Spanish, as well as his participation in Disney’s highly-anticipated Christmas film release, Mary Poppins Returns. He is next scheduled to open a run of Hamilton in Puerto Rico in January 2019, in an effort to help restore and rebuild his ancestral home from the destruction and devastation of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. His attention will then turn to readying a film adaptation of In the Heights for release in 2020. Feel free to ask Miranda about any and all of these projects. And ask if there’s anything new on the horizon that he can discuss.
What will best keep these projects in the public eye is Miranda himself, with his mastery of social media. The book Gmorning, Gnight! grew rather organically, from poems Miranda wrote and posted twice daily, morning and night, on his @Lin_Manuel Twitter account. Miranda has partnered with online fundraiser Prizeo to present free tickets, travel, and accommodations to the Hamilton Puerto Rico premiere in a random drawing to a single winner, as he had done previously with the show’s San Francisco and UK launches, supplying self-directed cell phone videos to promote the contests via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other outlets.
Miranda’s Twitter account also serves as a way to find out what is currently on his mind, in addition to promoting his projects. It is not a secret that he was unhappy with the Trump administration’s failures regarding assisting Puerto Rico with the hurricanes damage, and before that situation, Miranda had visited and lobbied Congress for Puerto Rico to be granted statehood in order to better deal with its debts, as its hands were tied as long as it remained strictly a U.S. Territory. The hurricanes complicated the entire issue. Ask if he still sees statehood as the answer.
References
Gmorning, Gnight! by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Retrieved from https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/603592/gmorning-gnight-by-lin-manuel-miranda/9781984854278/
Hamilton. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hamilton-encore-60-minutes-charlie-rose-2/
linmanuel. Retrieved from http://www.linmanuel.com/
Meet Lin-Manuel Miranda on opening night when he returns to HAMILTON in Puerto Rico. Retrieved from https://www.prizeo.com/campaigns/lin-manuel-miranda/Ham-PR
Miranda, L.(@Lin_Manuel). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel
Feel free to visit my Amazon Storefront for Lin-Manuel Miranda to see all of Miranda’s projects mentioned here, as well as several, several others–!
I’d written before about Puerto Rico — and Lin-Manuel, by extension — at Helping Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. See the accompanying Helping Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands Wakelet collection of information, which was featured on the website of the Wakelet app! And my Helping Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands Twitter List is still active and you can either view it here on this page below, or subscribe to it on Twitter itself. And (!) I was so taken with Hamilton that in order to learn how to use the Flipboard app, I created an e- magazine of news items and videos from and about Hamilton:
TODAY 03-29-2019, if you visit the @Wakelet Explore page https://t.co/h6Y7tCgUJN which feature their *Top Picks*, you will see MY “joint” @LibrariesVal /@Valsadie #PRStrong #USVIStrong collection:
Helping Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Wakelet
Created by @Valsadie pic.twitter.com/FdddbyMTIS— Valerie Hawkins (@librariesval) March 29, 2019
A Twitter List by valsadie
