10 Best Moments from Hamilton’s America

NEW YORK, NY – FEBRUARY 24: Lin-Manuel Miranda (C) attends The Public Theaters’s ‘Hamilton’ cast and creative team announcement and photo call at The Public Theater on February 24, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images)

7. How the Sausage Gets Made

If you are only a casual Hamilton fan (do those exist?), you may not know the story of how the play was made. And if you are a diehard, you never truly get tired of hearing the story. Reading about how LMM picked up a random biography to take with him on vacation is one thing, but to hear him tell it is another. The documentary tells the story of Hamilton and Miranda discovering the treasury secretary through images and words that make both stories come to life.

We see a clip of the first performance at the White House in 2009, the one where people laughed at the idea of a musical about one of the Founding Fathers. We see Miranda listening to the debates of then Clinton vs. Obama while writing the first song. We even see the first night of previews of the play at the Public Theater. These events have become a part of history in their own right. They are folded now into the mythology of the show. Seeing them all laid out here and how the play seemed so inevitable and at the same time so close to not happening is what makes Hamilton’s America so successful.