On Broadway and In The Heights! Game Changers: Lin-Manuel Miranda by Stephanie Kraus

Lin-Manuel Miranda was looking around a bookstore one day when he came across Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. He bought the best-selling biography and began reading it on vacation. The book describes how Hamilton, an orphan from the Caribbean, wrote his way out of poverty and helped shape a new nation.

How does a young guy turn the story of one of America's founding fathers into a record-breaking Broadway musical hit?

Lin-Manuel Miranda grew up with lot of music in his house--pop songs, salsa, and Broadway show tunes, which he loved, and although his family couldn't see all of them, he did see and love Cats, Les Miserable, and The Phantom of the Opera. He loved his piano recitals and he and his school bus driver led rap competitions on the way to grade school. Miranda played in school productions, as Conrad Birdie of Bye Bye, Birdie and the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Pirates of Penzance. He was hooked.

The musical theater was his calling!

After college Miranda helped composer Steven Sondheim translate the famous musical West Side Story (based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) into Spanish, and after some roles on stage, Miranda decided to compose a show that took advantage of a diverse cast, and his result was the hit Broadway musical In the Heights, which won 13 Tony Awards. A hit like that is hard to follow, and that is why Miranda was in that bookstore, searching diligently for a subject that would inspire a different sort of show, and inexplicably, he settled on the subject of Alexander Hamilton, born in the Caribbean, a Revolutionary War general, member of the Constitutional Convention, and first secretary of the treasury of the U.S. in George Washington's first cabinet, and the only member of that administration killed in a duel by another politician.

In 2009, after a year of work on his idea, Miranda previewed his signature song "In the Room Where It Happened" at a White House gala with a standing ovation, and his complete musical Hamilton: An American Musical opened in 2015 to even more Tony Awards and even a Pulitzer.

Author Stephanie Kraus tells the amazing story of the Puerto Rican composer who brings American patriot Alexander Hamilton into Broadway history with new rap style, along with many other musical forms, in her biography, Beyond Words: Lin-Manuel Miranda (Time for Kids(r) Nonfiction Readers) (Time For Kids). As nonfiction for middle-school and high-school students, this book is illustrated with lively color photos, and the biographical part of the text is broken up with fact boxes, "Stop and Think," boxes, pie-graphs of the racial composition of Broadway plays, and other eye-catching features, along with basics such as an appendix that boasts a glossary, index, "Try It Out!" and "Stop and Think!" sections, and a bibliography with books, video, and websites. This stylish biography has much to offer readers in showing how success in any area involves everything a person learns--at home, in school, from associates, and in the life around him or her.