Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical, Hamilton, was the winner of 11 Tony Awards, including best musical. The musical is a retelling of America’s founding fathers that uses hip-hop and rap to tell the story. Miranda’s inspiration to use hip-hop and rap was due to those genres of music being as a form of storytelling, just like theatre. In addition to the innovative music that Lin-Manuel created, the founding fathers, along with a majority of the cast, are and were played by people of color – a way for Lin-Manuel to refuse assimilation into the usually white dominate genre that is musical theatre. The musical serves as a way to blur the line between the stories of the historical figures and people of color today (Walsh). Lin-Manuel himself says that the immigrant character of Hamilton is similar to 21st century immigrants because of the excessive amount of effort Hamilton had to put in to prove that he was just as capable as everyone else – he acted as a “prototype for millions of men and women who followed him, and continue to arrive today” (Miranda 15).

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Watch the videos below for clips of the show and to hear the Hamilton soundtrack.