Hamilton’s America

Well, this is the easiest Lazy Sunday ever: settle in for a spectacular hour and a half with the brand-new PBS Great Performances documentary, Hamilton’s America. It streams right out of your computer, voila. Free!

I’m a sucker for going behind the scenes.

(From Hamilton’s America, Aaron Burr checking his email.)

I’ll go behind the scenes anywhere—a hydraulic dam, a saree factory, a grits mill, the dead bird collection at the Smithsonian? Bring it on. What is striking about this documentary is that it goes all the way back to the moment when Lin-Manuel Miranda is writing the first song of the show, back in 2008, when he thought he was simply writing one song, not an epic musical. His hair is shorter. He looks better rested. As you see him in his vacation hammock reading a copy of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, you get the rare opportunity to see someone whose life is about to change forever, before it changes.

He’s not an idiot. He knows he’s up to something pretty extraordinary. I love seeing someone in the midst of creating, operating on a lot of bandwidth, confident yet humble about the whole thing.

What on earth will he do next?

(Photos from Hamilton’s America.)