Alexander Hamilton Musical!

Lin-Manuel Miranda has a rap concept album in the works on Alexander Hamilton. I’m a big Hamilton fan (doesn’t everybody have a favorite founding father?) and so this gives me great joy, as does this video of him debuting the first song at the White House:

Who was Alexander Hamilton? Bastard, immigrant, Federalist, Secretary of the Treasury,speechwriter, philanderer, industrialist, duelist.

Or as Miranda puts it:

He’s very much like a Charles Dickens-type character. Here is a guy who really pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He was a penniless orphan, both of his parents were dead by the time he was 10. He ended up working for a trading company in St. Croix and was basically running the company by the time he was 14 because he was just this prodigy kid. [At the time] he had written a poem about a hurricane that had devastated the island. The poem gained notoriety and he was sent to the mainland on a scholarship literally on the strength of his writing. He taught himself French and Latin and soon became indispensable to George Washington during the Revolution and his career flourished from there. Only in America could his career flourish. But he was also as self destructive as he was brilliant and got into these epic fights with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Aaron Burr the last of which ended in him getting shot in Weehawken, NJ. And as I’m reading this, I’m thinking ‘This is Biggie, this is Tupac…this is hip-hop!’

(via)