Lin-Manuel Miranda had a stellar night at the Tonys as Hamilton took home a more-than-respectable 11 awards. But while his acceptance speech for Best Original Score was delivered as a moving sonnet for his wife, we didn’t get to see Miranda’s other speech, which he gave after being awarded Best Book of a Musical. (They played just a snippet during the broadcast.)
Now there’s video of Miranda receiving his other award and delivering a half-poem, half-rap about his Hamilton collaborators:
This envelope says Lin, but it’s not entirely Lin’s
’Cause when you work with Tommy Kail the best idea wins.
When Alex finds a place to cut or Andy needs more bars,
You can’t think “this is mine”; you can only think “this is ours.”
Is it ours or is it hours? Well, it’s hours of rewriting
You talk Burr with Oskar and Jeffrey and keep igniting
That spark into a flame. Make a mark,
Arrange the frame, hit your target and change the game,
Earn the hyphenate in your name.
You let Daveed Diggs turn your couplet into a triplet.
You give him the mic, he grips it and spits it, rips it and flips it.
But the most emotional portion of the speech came when Miranda spoke about his father:
You turn back to this envelope that says you win.
You think about your father and how scared he must have been
When he came to New York City and he didn’t speak the language
So you give Hamilton all his hunger, genius, and anguish,
And you vanquish self-doubt by perfecting your lines of text
And you call Tommy Kail and you say, “what’s next?”
Wow.
