The Mixed Reception of the <em>Hamilton</em> Premiere in Puerto Rico

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, , he received a joyous welcome. One festive number included a Spanish-language call to raise the Puerto Rican flag; the audience members pulled 500 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 . To be cheered by a Puerto Rican audience, he last spring, “closed something in me I didn’t even