WHRO and PBS present “Great Performances: Hamilton’s America” Sunday, August 19 at 9:30 p.m.

The Grammy, Pulitzer and eleven-time Tony Award-winning musical, “Hamilton”, has swept Broadway defying every stereotype from the sound and diversity of the cast to the audience itself. Therefore, it is only fitting that PBS’s “Great Performances”, known for bringing insights into the world’s greatest performing arts, would catch the Hamilton fever.

Great Performances, now in its 45th season, follows Lin-Manual Miranda throughout the creation of Hamilton including interviews from Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Nas, Questlove, Stephen Sodheim and more.

Miranda, the playwright, composer, star and lyricist behind “Hamilton,” a musical about the lives of the founding fathers, found a way to entertain our fast-paced, attention span-less world as well as educate us on our country’s complex history. With a cast made up almost entirely of performers of color and a soundtrack that sounds nothing like what you’d expect from Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda has become a household name.

The Wall Street Journal called “Hamilton” “the best and most important Broadway musical of the past decade,” and Entertainment Weekly said, “Miranda's singular gift for storytelling and wordplay makes even the Federalist Papers sound sexy, but the play's intrigue comes mostly from its potent stew of friendship and romance and outsize ambition; it's as if House of Cards were folded into a sort of Days of Our Colonial Lives fever dream, then filtered through the minds of Tupac and Sondheim. It's that strange and that spectacular, and you'd be crazy to miss it.”

Miranda, a native of Puerto Rico, has since composed the music for Disney’s, “Moana,” and is set to co-star in a remake film of Mary Poppins, “Mary Poppins Returns.”

“Great Performances: Hamilton’s America” airs Sunday, August 19 from 9:30-11 p.m.

 

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