Since its inception, Hip Hop has found its way into so many facets of our culture. Not only has it been the fastest-growing genre of music for over 20 years, but it has had a tremendous impact on fashion, television, language, politics, literature, and countless other aspects of our daily lives.

However, it was not until recently that Hip Hop found a home in the world of musical theater. On February 8, 2007, Lin-Manuel Miranda premiered an unconventional show called In the Heights at the off-Broadway 37 Arts Theatre. Having worked on the show since his college days, Miranda infused it with two of his major influences having grown up in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights – Hip Hop and Latino culture.

From viewing Miranda’s viral advertising campaign, of which an example is shown below, it becomes apparent that In the Heights is truly a Hip Hop affair. Emceeing alongside friend and beatboxer Shock, Miranda’s commercial is indicative of what In the Heights is truly about: bringing Hip Hop and Latino culture to the forefront of mainstream musical theatre – a realm previously untouched by Hip Hop.

In the Heights tells the story of three days in the lives of several residents in Washington Heights. Miranda, who wrote the music, lyrics and dialogue, also plays Usnavi, the male lead who also functions as a narrator. The result of his efforts? A staggering 13 2008 Tony Award nominations, which included wins for “Best Orchestrations,” “Best Choreography,” “Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics)” and “Best Musical.” In doing so, Miranda not only casts Latinos in a positive light, but brings Hip Hop to thousands, many of whom may have never taken the time to understand the culture. He even rapped his first acceptance speech – a first in Tony Award history:

HipHopDX sat down with the Tony Award winner – in between shows, no less – and discussed his Hip Hop influences, the role of Latinos in theatre, and how he feels being named “The Big Pun of Broadway.”

HipHopDX: First of all, congratulations on your awards.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Thanks!

DX: How’s it feel?
LM: It feels good. Life’s not that different. [Laughing] The only thing that’s different is that I was on national TV, so I get stopped a lot more in Times Square than I used to. The show was selling well before the Tonys, and now it’s just selling out every night. It’s really fun to do the show for an audience that sort of comes ready to love the show and it’s just a great energy in the house every night. It’s made my job a lot more fun.

DX: The crazy thing to me – it finally hit me that you “made it” – was when I saw a kid on Youtube imitating you.
LM: You see that 10-year-old? How incredible is that kid?! I actually went and sought him out to be his friend on Facebook because I thought he did it really well!

DX: Yeah, he knew his stuff.
LM: He looked like a founding member of House of Pain or something! That was a full-circle moment for me, because you can find me at age eight on Youtube lip-synching other people’s songs. So to have someone singing along to the songs I wrote is a very surreal, sort of “circle-closing” moment.

DX: It becomes immediately apparent after listening to any song from In the Heights that Hip Hop has been a big influence on both you and the show. What emcees did you bump growing up?
LM: I think the first two albums I ever memorized were Black Sheep’s A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing [click to read] and Pharcyde – Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde [click to read]. [Pharcyde] never made an album quite like that first one with “Passing Me By” [click to read]. I’ve always loved Hip Hop. I memorized [DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's] “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

It’s actually funny…I had a bus driver who was sort of a frustrated rapper. He would teach us raps on the way to school. So when I was like seven, I was doing “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” [click to read] by the Geto Boys and all these sort of old school songs. But the moment I really got into Hip Hop and saw it as something I could possibly do, was that Pharcyde album, because they had songs about not being able to get girls and getting pulled over by cops. I always loved Hip Hop, but it was like "Oh, I could write this!" I can’t get girls! I get pulled over by cops [laughs]! From then on, it was a steady diet of Biggie, which led me to Jay-Z [click to read], which led me to Nas, which led me to Big Pun – I sort of memorized every Big Pun song I could get my hands on in college; Eminem, and all of the greats.

You can hear all of those influences all over the show. You can hear the "One, two, three…" on [the In the Heights song] “96 Thousand,” which is Black Star and [Boogie Down Productions] and The Fugees. What was fun about writing that number is that it was the only full, pure Hip Hop number in the show, so it was fun deciding who sounds like which rapper. For Sonny’s section in that song, he’s like the socially conscious one – so I listened to a lot of Nas’ Illmatic. I sort of made myself the Big Pun guy – as many syllables and triple-syllabic rhymes as I could fit in. It’s really fun to play “spot the influence” when you listen to these songs, because I pull from a lot of different places.

DX: Yeah, during the Tony Awards, you performed “96,000,” and it was clear from the lyrics of the song that it was influenced by KRS-One’s “Stop the Violence” [click to read]...
LM: The biggest influences for the show were sort of equal parts Big Pun and Jay-Z. Big Pun in terms of the amount of rhymes he was able to fit in per measure – he sort of “out-Kool G Rap's" Kool G Rap [click to read]. I played with that a lot… "Okay, let’s not just rhyme the ends of these sentences, but let’s put in as much internal rhyme as possible," which is a good rule of both musical theatre and Hip Hop. It’s one of the places where they interact.

And then there’s Jay-Z, whose storytelling is so natural. He’s got incredibly intricate worldplay, but it always feels as if it’s just sort of tossed off. I know he doesn’t write anything down; I think of that song off of Reasonable Doubt, “Friend or Foe” [click to read] where he’s like "Don’t do that, you’remakingmenervous!" Just the way it feels – it never feels written; it feels like this guy’s talking to you. That was really important for Usnavi the narrator. It can’t feel like [robotic voice] "We are rappity rappity rapping!" It’s got to feel like this guy is having a conversation with you. I think that’s one of the great strengths of Jay-Z’s writing.

DX: Tell us about Freestyle Love Supreme.
LM: Freestyle Love Supreme is sort of funny. We started it for shits and giggles as a break during In the Heights. Me and my friend Anthony, who is sort of one of the original people to work on In the Heights with us really early on, would say during breaks, "Let’s freestyle." We’d get around a piano or someone would beatbox, and we’d just rap about our day! Then he said, "We should do this, we should do this for people!" Our early shows were terrible! We’d get beats and we’d get suggestions from the audience, and we’d sort of just rap for like 45 minutes. Then we brought in Tommy Kail, who is the director of In the Heights, to create a structure with in the craziness. The best way to describe is sort of a Hip Hop Whose Line Is It Anyway? None of the show is scripted; we say, "We need a verb!" and the audience gives us a verb. We pull words out a bowl and say whatever the fuck comes to our head and rhymes. A lot of is based on the audience’s input. It’s not freestyling in the sense that I’m going on Hot 97 with this prepared verse that isn’t on my album – it’s freestyling in the sense that we don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna say until it’s already been said. We fuck up a lot, but that’s part of the comedy. Sometimes we’ll nail something, other times we’ll just go off the rails. Either way, it’s really fun. It’s this thing for fun, but it [took us all over the world].

DX: What came first for you, emceeing or writing – or did the two go hand in hand?
LM: Writing. I’m a theatre nerd at the end of the day. I don’t consider myself a rapper, other than that I’m really good at spitting the raps that I write. When I was a kid, I was always writing raps, but I was too shy to sort of show them. I don’t know what happened in college – there was sort of a switch that got flipped. I think maybe Hip Hop got worse? [Laughs] I thought, "I can write better than what I’m hearing!" So I started writing, and I really wanted it to sound like Washington Heights. So I wrote numbers that were not only Latin in feel, but you know, there was a scene where they’re freestyling outside of a bodega. There’s a scene where they’re getting into a fight over how hot it is outside and it becomes a rap.

Hip Hop is about 10 years older than I am. It sort of started in the '70s and I was born in the '80s, so I was never alive when Hip Hop wasn’t a part of the landscape. I’ve just been surrounded by it, and I sort of took a shot at it, and it’s been really well-received. What’s funny is when you see Hip Hop heads come to a show and they’ve got their arms crossed, and they’re like "Okay, what kind of bullshit Broadway version of Hip Hop are we gonna get?" And then they go, "Oh, wait, there’s a Big Pun reference in the show!" or ‘There’s a KRS-One [click to read] reference in the show!’ I come at it with a real love for it, and I think that it comes through.

DX: Moving on to the show itself, what made you think that a show with so much Hip Hop and Latino influence could find a home on Broadway, to say nothing of the critical and commercial response it has garnered?
LM: To be honest, I can’t believe that I’m really the first one here. There’s a big Hip Hop theater movement, and a lot of people have tried to do it. I’m just the first one to make it across the finish line, to be honest. It’s a natural fit for musical theater. At the end of the day, musical theater is about storytelling, and my favorite Hip Hop songs are the ones that tell stories. Whether it’s “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” or “Meet the Parents” [click to read] on Blueprint 2 [click to read], those are always the ones I’ve been most attracted to. I just want to write the kind of show I’d want to see – and you can’t worry about the rest of it.

DX: Because In the Heights has brought both Hip Hop and Latino culture to the forefront in Broadway, wouldn’t it be fair to say you’re “The Big Pun of Broadway?”
LM: No one will ever be Big Pun again, sadly. He remains unequaled. But I think a better analogy might be Run-DMC and Aerosmith's “Walk This Way,” in that a lot of people who had not been exposed to Hip Hop are seeing it in a different medium and context.

DX: Before your show, how much of a market was there for shows with Latino and Hip Hop influences?
LM: None. In fact, there was a sort of "Capeman Curse" named for Paul Simon's failed 1998 show. I can't tell you how many people predicted this show would die a quick, painful death. The conventional wisdom was, "Latinos don't go to Broadway."

DX: When you set out to do this show, were there stereotypes or barriers you hoped to overcome, or trends you had hoped to set by doing In the Heights?
LM: Prior to Heights, there have been two major musicals featuring Latinos: West Side Story, which is a masterpiece featuring Puerto Ricans as knife wielding murderers, and Paul Simon's The Capeman, which is about some real-life Puerto Ricans as knife wielding murderers. I just wanted to see if I could drop "knife-wielding murderers" from the equation.

DX: Do you feel that any of those goals come to fruition at this point?
LM: Absolutely. The fact that audiences have embraced the show indicates that they're hungry for something new, and that portraying Latinos positively and accurately aren't mutually exclusive.

DX: You did another interesting thing at the Tony Awards: your acceptance speech, which you decided to freestyle. The audience, many of whom who had probably never hear someone go off the dome before, seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Do you think that your speech endeared some people to the culture, or at least got them curious?
LM: Well, let me be perfectly honest: about half of that speech, I'd practiced in the shower. But about midway through, after I say "Chris Jackson," you can see the panic flood my face. The second half is freestyled. I think rhyming the speech was the only way to go, and frankly, I'm a lot more concise when I think in couplets.

DX: Did anyone there comment on the freestyle? I mean, it’s rare that anyone goes off the top these days, let alone at the Tonys.
LM: It was received pretty positively. I think anything unexpected that happens during a three-hour awards show is good. Those things are long.

DX: Hip Hop artists have, over the past few years, really taken to using the Internet as a method of self-promotion. You’ve done some viral promotion yourself, rapping in a few videos. When you made those, did you have in mind how receptive the Hip Hop community has been to that sort of advertising?
LM: Those videos serve two functions for me: They're a fun outlet that ISN'T In the Heights, and they're free advertising for the show. If people watch it and are curious about the show, all the better.

DX: Did you have concerns that taking that approach may have turned less open-minded audiences off from seeing the show?
LM: I had the same philosophy to making the videos as I did to writing the show: Do what I like, and what I think is good, and hopefully other people will too. The kind of people who close-mindedly disregard Hip Hop as an art form aren't checking for my Youtube videos anyway.

DX: Do you plan to keep working on the show indefinitely, or are you going to start working on others?
LM: Now is the fun part, because we've won what we're going to win, and we still get to do the show every night. I love my cast and the crew at the Richard Rodgers. I love the intensity of doing a show eight times a week. And slowly, my days are becoming my own, so I can start writing again.

DX: It’s the night of the show, and suddenly you lose your voice. Assuming you could pick any emcee and he would know your lines, who do you pick to take your place?
LM: Mos Def. Not only is he one of the greats, he's also a tremendous actor. I think he could actually play Usnavi pretty well.

DX: Is Whoopi Goldberg a good dancer?
LM: Yes! I grabbed her to dance when we won, because when I got up on stage, she was already doing the salsa step in time. She's also one of five living people who has a Tony, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar, so she's kind of good at everything.