Political discord coupled with the lingering effects of 2017’s Hurricane Maria challenged the arrival of the famed musical.
Heading into the opening night of Hamilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on January 11, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The musical was supposed to begin previews three days earlier at the theater of the University of Puerto Rico, the alma mater of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s father, Luis, under a new million-dollar roof financed by the show’s fundraising campaign to repair hurricane damage. Some students and staff had other ideas, however, leading to a controversy that redefined what it meant to take the show to Puerto Rico.
When Miranda went to the island in 2010 as the star of his Caribbean diaspora hip-hop musical, In the Heights, he received a joyous welcome. One festive number included a Spanish-language call to raise the Puerto Rican flag; the audience members pulled 500 banderas from their pockets, the producer Jeffrey Seller told me over lunch at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, in San Juan. Although Miranda was born in New York, he spent childhood summers in Puerto Rico in his family’s hometown of Vega Alta, where his grandfather ran the local credit union. Lacking fluent Spanish, Miranda passed many days alone making home movies. To be cheered by a Puerto Rican audience, he told Oprah last spring, “closed something in me I didn’t even know was open.”
Hamilton —another hip-hop story of a man born in the Caribbean who comes to New York to reinvent himself and his nation—opened on Broadway to rave reviews in 2015. Miranda then called Seller and said he wanted to take his second show to Puerto Rico. (Broadway tours seldom visit San Juan because of the time and cost of shipping sets from the mainland, the producer explained.) Then, in 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated the island. “The hurricane changed our mission,” Seller recalled. Instead of a simple homecoming, Hamilton in Puerto Rico would become a fundraising venture, a tourism lure, and a declaration of support for the island’s recovery. Miranda had already helped to raise $43 million through his father’s Hispanic Federation for immediate relief. Revenue from Hamilton in Puerto Rico, which runs until January 27, with Miranda returning to the title role, is expected to bring in $15 million to benefit arts organizations on the island.
Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda shapes history
At the center of the discord over the show was the fact that UPR, like much of the island’s education and economic system, is in crisis. Puerto Rico owes a reported $72 billion in municipal bonds, accumulated over the past two decades to pay for social services as businesses and residents left for the mainland. PROMESA, a financial oversight board appointed in 2016 by President Barack Obama, had imposed unpopular austerity measures: hundreds of school closures, along with tuition hikes and budget cuts at UPR.
Miranda initially supported PROMESA, invoking Hamilton’s plea for governmental relief after a hurricane hit the Caribbean in 1772, and implored Congress to pass a debt-restructuring bill. (“I write about Puerto Rico today just as Hamilton wrote about St. Croix in his time,” he said in a New York Times op-ed.) As the star and creator of a musical that champions America’s first Treasury secretary, and that was famously hatched and hallowed in Obama’s White House, Miranda appeared closely linked to the federal authority that had taken away Puerto Rico’s control over its own economy. When Miranda gave a talk at UPR in 2017 to announce a Hamilton production on the island, a group of students marched onstage with a sign that read, in Spanish, “Lin-Manuel, our lives are not your theater.” (According to Carmen Haydée Rivera, a UPR English professor who interviewed Miranda during the talk, he listened thoughtfully to the protest and explained afterward that his views on PROMESA had changed.)
More obstacles arose as hurricane restoration work continued at the UPR theater and Hamilton began rehearsing there in December 2018. A university-employee association, facing slashed benefits, sent Miranda a letter last November stating that demonstrations might occur if Hamilton were performed on campus.
