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Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton captures succinctly the frictions and alliances among the founders of the U.S. and their competing visions for its independence.Matthew Murphy/Handout

It ranks as one of the great musical pitches of the past two decades.

The year is 2009 and a 29-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda is at the White House. Invited to help provide an evening’s entertainment for then-U.S. president Barack Obama and his guests – and expected to perform something from his Tony Award-winning debut Broadway musical, In the Heights – Miranda instead seizes the day. Accompanied only by Alex Lacamoire on piano, he launches into Alexander Hamilton, a hip-hop number about the brilliant, doomed American founding father, from a new concept album he’s been working on.

The gambit pays off. At the end of a breathless, hilarious and poignant three minutes, in which Miranda quick-sketches the remarkable life of Hamilton from the viewpoint of his deadly political rival, Aaron Burr – “the damn fool that shot him” – Obama and his wife, Michelle, spring to their feet, leading a standing ovation. There’s a video of the performance online that’s been viewed, when last checked, 7.2 million times.

“You’ll never see me more afraid,” Miranda says with a laugh, recalling that auspicious evening, which launched the musical phenomenon that would become Hamilton.

“I sit here, staring down age 40, and I marvel at the chutzpah of that 29-year-old, trying out an untested song in that audience,” the writer-actor muses during a phone call from New York. He celebrated the big 4-0 on Jan. 16. No one, apart from Lacamoire and Miranda’s wife, lawyer Vanessa Nadal, had heard the song before. “But a part of me thought, ‘If it doesn’t work in this room, where’s it going to work?’ ”

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Joseph Morales, centre left, and Nik Walker, centre right, star as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, respectively, in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton.Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Mirvish

Pretty much everywhere, as it turned out. Since then, Hamilton has received countless standing ovations on Broadway, all over the United States and across the pond, along with a bundle of formal accolades: Eleven Tonys, seven Oliviers, a best-musical-album Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize, among others. It has its long-anticipated Canadian premiere on Feb. 11 at Toronto’s Ed Mirvish Theatre, where it’s scheduled to run through May 17. Like everywhere else it plays, tickets – at a top price of $550 – are virtually sold out.

Its enduring success is due not a little to its creator’s audacity and his stunning hip hop-meets-Broadway score, but also to its unforeseen relevance in America’s current tempestuous times.

When it first opened at New York’s Public Theater in 2015, Hamilton seemed the quintessential Obama-era musical: an inclusive take on America’s genesis as a country, with the West Indies-born Hamilton portrayed as a hard-working immigrant and his story retold by a cast of predominantly black, Hispanic and Asian actors.

But since the election of a divisive, immigrant-bashing U.S. President, it’s come to stand as a work of defiance, with a hero who is everything that Donald Trump is not. Just this past fall, historian Ron Chernow, author of the biography on which the musical is based, wrote an editorial in The Washington Post arguing that the President was the very kind of populist demagogue Alexander Hamilton had warned America about.

Yet, Miranda denies having created the great anti-Trump musical.

“I don’t believe it is that, and I don’t believe it’s the great pro-Obama musical, either. I think it’s a reflective surface,” he says. “The only true insight I had when writing it was the fights that we fought then are the fights that we’re fighting now. They’re family fights. And they’re always going to be relevant because we’re always going to be fighting them.”

The show captures succinctly the frictions and alliances among the founders of the U.S. and their competing visions for its independence. At its swirling centre is Hamilton, a penniless orphan, “young, scrappy and hungry,” who has to live by his wits and his pen, a man with a “top-notch brain” and prodigious energy whose meteoric rise as George Washington’s right-hand man and later, the first Secretary of the Treasury, comes to a bloody halt when he is killed in a duel with Burr.

It was that untimely death, in fact, that drew Miranda to pick up Chernow’s 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton, as a vacation read while on a break from performing In the Heights. Although not a big history buff, he says he’d written a paper on the founding father in high school. “I knew that Hamilton’s son died in a duel and that he himself died in a duel three years later. I remember thinking, ‘How do you not see that coming?’ That seems like the most avoidable pitfall, when you’ve suffered this unimaginable loss, to not fall into the same trap.”

But his big takeaways from Chernow’s book had more to do with Hamilton’s life. First, there were his humble beginnings on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, which spoke to Miranda’s own Puerto Rican roots. “Among the founders, Hamilton’s the one that was born somewhere else. So, without lineage, without money, he had to work three times as hard,” Miranda says. “It echoed the proto-immigrant story of the United States: ‘Yeah, you can come here, but you’re going to have to do the jobs that no one else wants to do and you’re going to have to work three times as hard to prove yourself.’ ”

Second, there was Hamilton’s relentless nature, which Miranda saw as perfect for a musical-theatre protagonist. “Relentlessness drives a musical beautifully, whether you’re Mama Rose [in Gypsy] or Sweeney Todd,” he says. And third, Hamilton was a writer, which to Miranda cried out “hip hop.”

“Most of my favourite hip-hop artists are writers themselves and they write specifically about their circumstances, but they transcend them. And that’s exactly what Hamilton did,” Miranda says. “That was when I realized this was a hip-hop artist.”

Miranda had already used hip hop to tell a contemporary story with In the Heights, his lively love letter to Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighbourhood, where he grew up. Doing the same thing to create a historical narrative set in 18th-century colonial America was a much bigger challenge, which is why Miranda took a page from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and wrote it first as a concept album, The Hamilton Mixtape. “But the thing was so big and the ghost of Hamilton so relentless, that it just kind of became a musical in spite of itself,” he says with a laugh.

He built the show with the help of his Heights teammates, director Thomas Kail, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and music director Lacamoire. In addition to writing the book, music and lyrics, Miranda played the title role in the original Public Theater and Broadway productions.

The show’s massive success has spawned three North American touring productions, in addition to the one still running on Broadway. They’ve been quaintly dubbed “Angelica,” “Philip” and “And Peggy,” after members of Hamilton’s wife’s family, the Schuylers. Toronto will see the Philip company, led by Joseph Morales as Hamilton. Miranda claims he, Kail, Blankenbuehler and Lacamoire continue to hand-pick the touring casts. “We pride ourselves on that. More people will see Hamilton on tour than will ever see it on Broadway.”

Given that the show has had separate London and Chicago productions (the latter just ended a three-year run), many expected the producers to mount a Canadian Hamilton in Toronto. That could still happen, Miranda says. “We wanted to bring an existing tour there and see what the appetite is before committing to a sit-down production,” he explains.

Ironically, the show’s biggest benefit to Miranda, career-wise, has been to boost his film presence. Onscreen, he’s co-starred in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns and, most recently, in the BBC-HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials. He’s also co-produced – and plays a minor role in – the coming movie of In the Heights, to be released this summer.

Right now, he’s eagerly preparing to direct his first film, Tick, Tick… Boom! Based on the autobiographical musical by the late Jonathan Larson of Rent fame, it tracks the hopes and anxieties of a young composer trying to make it in New York. Miranda saw the original Off-Broadway production in his senior year at college – “It was like a sneak preview of my 20s” – and it remains dear to his heart.

“I wanted to direct movies before I wanted to do anything – that was my first love,” he says. "So I’m finally going to do it! And I feel, if they only let me make one movie, it should be this one.”

Hamilton runs Feb. 11 to May 17 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto. (mirvish.com)

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