Everything I Know - Mandy Gonzalez sings Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lead Season Sponsor
Saturday, September 20, 2025, 7:30pm
BOSTON POPS ORCHESTRA
KEITH LOCKHART conducting
MANDY GONZALEZ, vocalist
Dan Lipton, music director
Dick Scanlan, writer/stage director
Philippe Arroyo, guest vocalist
Boston Children’s Chorus
Everything I Know
Mandy Gonzalez Sings Lin-Manuel Miranda
EVERYTHING I KNOW-VERTURE
music by Lin-Manuel Miranda and various
arranged by Dan Lipton
orchestration by Julio César Barreto
ONE OF A KIND (from Vivo)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement by Alex Lacamoire
original orchestration by Jeff Kryka
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
SPANISH ME, ENGLISH ME (from Sesame Street)
music by Lin-Manuel Miranda
lyrics by Luis Santeiro
original arrangement by Bill Sherman
original orchestration by Joe Fiedler
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Kim Scharnberg
KEEP THE BEAT (from Vivo)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement by Alex Lacamoire
original orchestration by Jeff Kryka
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
PART OF YOUR WORLD / FOR THE FIRST TIME (from The Little Mermaid)
music by Alan Menken
lyrics by Howard Ashman & Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangements by Robby Merkin & Alan Menken
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
orchestration by Jim Abbott
BREATHE (from In the Heights)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement and orchestration by Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman
concert orchestration by Ryan Shirar
PRECIOSA / ALMOST LIKE PRAYING
words and music by Rafael Hernández Marín / words by Lin-Manuel Miranda & Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein & Lin-Manuel Miranda
arranged by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
orchestration by Julio César Barreto
ONE SCHOOL / WHAT THE HECK I GOTTA DO?
(from 21 Chump Street - The Musical on This American Life)
words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original orchestration by Michael Starobin
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Kim Scharnberg
THE HAMILTON SUITE (from Hamilton)
words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangements by Alex Lacamoire & Lin-Manuel Miranda
original orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire
PART 1: HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU / MY SHOT
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
PART 2: SATISFIED
concert orchestration by Ryan Shirar
PART 3: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
PART 4: WAIT FOR IT
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
INTERMISSION
ENTR'ACTE: THE CLUB (from In the Heights)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement and orchestration by Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman
concert arrangement and orchestration by Jaime Lozano & Jesús Altamira
WE DON'T TALK ABOUT BRUNO (from Encanto)
words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda
arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
orchestration by Julio César Barreto
BIENVENIDO A LA FAMILIA (from Vivo)
composed by Alex Lacamoire
orchestration by Jeff Kryka
DOS ORUGUITAS (from Encanto)
words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda
arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
orchestration by Julio César Barreto
DELIVERY (from Working)
words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement and orchestration by Alex Lacamoire
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
HOW FAR I'LL GO (from Moana)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
orchestration by Kim Scharnberg
EVERYTHING I KNOW (from In the Heights)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement and orchestration by Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman
concert orchestration by Peter L. Mansfield
ONE MORE SONG (from Vivo)
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangement by Alex Lacamoire
original orchestration by Jeff Kryka
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
concert orchestration by Julio César Barreto
BUT THE WORLD GOES 'ROUND (from New York, New York)
music by John Kander
lyrics by Fred Ebb
orchestration by Kim Scharnberg
CHEERING FOR ME NOW / NEW YORK, NEW YORK (from New York, New York)
music by John Kander
lyrics by Fred Ebb & Lin-Manuel Miranda
original arrangements by Sam Davis & Alex Lacamoire
concert arrangement by Dan Lipton & Dick Scanlan
orchestration by Larry Hochman
FEARLESS
music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
orchestration by Bill Elliott
Music copying by Jim Abbott, Daniel Gittler, Eugene Gwozdz, Dan Lipton, Kim Scharnberg, Lynne Shankel, Asher Shectman, Ryan Shirar, Evan Trotter-Wright
Program Note
LIN-MAN: ACROSS THE MIRANDA-VERSE
by DAN LIPTON (music director, arranger, and pianist)
If you ever spend any time developing musical theater in New York City, you may find yourself in the room where it happens with just about anybody in show business.
And so it was, way back in 2005, when I first met Mandy Gonzalez while workshopping a show by Duncan Sheik. We hit it off quickly because she hits it off quickly with everyone… but I think really because we’re both Gen X cultural omnivores, game to check out anything that promises to entertain, inspire or blow our minds.
One day Mandy mentioned she was heading to Ars Nova Theater after rehearsal to see a rap comedy improv group called Freestyle Love Supreme. That sounded so weird yet potentially amazing to me, I tagged along… and it turned out to be intimidatingly fantastic. Not a weak link in the group, and one particular rapper seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all pop culture… including Broadway, a genre not exactly known for its proximity to hip-hop.
It’s that sense of Lin-Manuel Miranda as a fellow cultural omnivore that we aimed to capture in this concert program, and that I took to heart in arranging our overture, which proceeds largely chronologically through his life and times.
“Everything I Know-verture” begins at Hunter College High School in 1995, with young Lin turning in his 9th grade final project for Mr. Stratechuk’s music class. Why, you ask? Because the roots of any major artist go deep, and when I dug down through old YouTube and SoundCloud pages to find them, I came upon Lin leading a scrappy band of high school jazz musicians with a toy laser gun.
Lo and behold, his piece “Sound Laser!” is as charming and catchy as anything else the guy’s written. And really, is there a better metaphor for Lin’s work than a sound laser?
Dude’s been zapping our brains with ear candy for decades now! Strains of melodies from other Hunter-era songs (“Fetal Pig” and “Say Goodbye”), which were unearthed for a tribute to Lin-Manuel at Town Hall earlier this year, bubble up from the texture and swoosh us forward to…
2003, when Freestyle Love Supreme emerged, their “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme” theme song closing out every improvised show: a rap with Shockwave beatboxing and funky chords from Arthur the Geniuses and King Sherman. Why have an orchestra do this?? Well, fun fact: FLS has already gone symphonic, at the 2021 Tony Awards, when the orchestra played Two-Touch on to accept their special Tony with this version of their theme, initially arranged by Ian Weinberger.
The development of any new musical is a long and winding road of rewrites. The final draft of a show might have completely different songs than its first draft. Did you know that, from the initial Wesleyan University production of In the Heights in 2000 all the way through to its Broadway bow in 2008, only one phrase of music, one single motif, remained the same? It’s “En Washington Heights,” the last lyric of the opening number, and I began to think of it as a kind of “life raft” that Lin clung onto through close to a decade of working toward his dream. So that little cell of music leads our ears, and his career, into the show’s now-classic opener, a salute to his home base neighborhood.
After the success of Heights, Lin and friends were recruited to the musical world of Sesame Street, where he provided some prime material for Latin kids through characters like Mando. Do you remember what “Rhymes With Mando?” The Emmy Awards do; this calypso was nominated for a 2013 Daytime Emmy for Original Song.
Another exciting opportunity that followed Heights was Bring It On: The Musical (2012), a musical adaptation of the hit cheerleading movie. Amanda Green, Tom Kitt and Lin- Manuel proved that cheering chants can cut as hard and rhyme as intricately as any rap. This show’s opening number “What I Was Born To Do” is a pulsing slice of electropop that sounds absolutely slamming with a 75-piece orchestra.
Back over at Sesame Workshop, the FLS team was hired to help reboot the classic ‘70s show The Electric Company in 2009. In their very first episode, Lin-Man and Shockwave throw down the sneaky alphabetical lesson “Silent ‘E’ Is A Ninja” and it might be one of the catchiest hooks I’ve ever heard.
Somewhere down my rabbit hole of research, I landed on a Reddit page where Gen Z was discussing how they were today years old when they discovered that the Hamilton guy’s been unwittingly soundtracking their lives with earworms since pre-school. I then stumbled on Lin’s original “Ninja” demo, where the beat is on bongos. Voila! The perfect breather here, before we deliver two of the most streamed songs from Hamilton (2015). And what’s there to say about that juggernaut other than… we expect you to sing along!
Hamilton immediately led to the craziest credit of Lin-Manuel’s career: the track “Jabba Flow” from 2015 blockbuster Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens. This “new cantina” music was created by Lin and director J.J. Abrams (a totally legit musician!) for intergalactic band Shag Kava, rocking steady onscreen in Maz Kanata’s castle.
A job secured before Hamilton that released after its success, Moana (2016) was the first Disney animated film with songs by Lin-Manuel. And in a flash of synergy that could only happen in the Miranda-verse, this lifelong WWE fan got to write “You’re Welcome,” a swingin’ showstopper for… wrestling legend The Rock!
As his career then blasted into hyperdrive, there were simply too many cool things for me to choose from. My own cratedigger mentality wanted to hit everything from the Emmy- winning Tonys opener “Bigger” to theater kid anthem “Crucible Cast Party” from Saturday Night Live, but there’s a whole Mandy Gonzalez concert to get to, Lipton…
“The Family Madrigal” from Encanto (2021) gallops ahead, and a baroque snatch of “Esperando Pelitos” from animated TV show Big Mouth (2023) bridges us to “I Always Wanted A Brother” from Mufasa: The Lion King (2024), a total banger. It turns out even Nicholas Britell, composer of the Succession theme, is now a Lin collaborator.
Having covered 3 decades of Miranda music in 4 minutes, there’s only one place to end this ride… En Washington Heights! That aforementioned “life raft” motif lands us back uptown, where the reggaeton lottery anthem “96,000” is on blast, closing out our musical survey with explosive urgency.
Show business is a lot like the lottery, all about timing and luck… and speaking of, how lucky are we to be alive right now, while pop culture’s #1 fan (the greatest artists are also the biggest FANS) consistently gifts us perfectly crafted pop culture? Tonight, we get to experience the whole scope of this body of work through the iconic voice of Mandy Gonzalez. You’ll hear Puerto Rico and New York, rhyme and reason, humor and humanity, beloved modern classics and surprising deep cuts.
We’re so grateful to Lin-Manuel Miranda for the musical embarrassment of riches, and for trusting us to take you on this rollercoaster ride through his songbook.
Ladies and gentleman, the show is right this way… presenting Everything I Know!
Artists
-
![]()
Keith Lockhart
Keith Lockhart is the second longest-tenured conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra since its founding in 1885. He took over as conductor in 1995, following John Williams’s thirteen-year tenure from 1980 to 1993; Mr. Williams succeeded the legendary Arthur Fiedler, who was at the helm of the orchestra for nearly fifty years. Keith Lockhart, who occupies the Julian and Eunice Cohen Boston Pops Conductor chair, has conducted more than 2,100 Boston Pops concerts and annual Boston Pops appearances at Tanglewood, as well as 45 national tours and 5 international tours to Japan and Korea. The annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular conducted by Mr. Lockhart draws a live audience of over half a million to the Charles River Esplanade and millions more who view it on television or live webcast. He has led eight albums on RCA Victor/BMG Classics; recent releases on Boston Pops Recordings include A Boston Pops Christmas–Live from Symphony Hall, The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers, and Lights, Camera… Music! Six Decades of John Williams. The list of nearly 300 guest artists with whom Keith Lockhart has collaborated represents performers from virtually every corner of the entertainment world. Having recently completed an eight- year tenure as principal conductor, he is now chief guest conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra in London; he is also artistic director of the Brevard Music Center summer institute and festival in North Carolina. Prior to his BBC appointment, he spent eleven years as music director of the Utah Symphony. He has appeared as a guest conductor with virtually every major symphonic ensemble in North America and many in Asia and Europe. Before coming to Boston, he was the associate conductor of both the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops orchestras, as well as music director of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. For more on Keith Lockhart, visit www.bso.org/keith-lockhart or bostonpops.org.
-
![Mandy Gonzalez Headshot]()
Mandy Gonzalez
Mandy Gonzalez is an accomplished film, TV, stage actor and author, and she possesses one of the most powerful and versatile contemporary voices of our time. Gonzalez has starred on Broadway in the megahit musical Hamilton as Angelica Schuyler. She originated the role of Nina Rosario in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical In The Heights, for which she received a Drama Desk Award. Gonzalez also starred as Elphaba in the Broadway production of Wicked, blowing the roof off of New York’s Gershwin Theatre every night as she belted out the signature song, “Defying Gravity.” She has received an Obie Award and overwhelming critical praise for her performance in the off-Broadway production of Eli’s Comin’.
-
![]()
Philippe Arroyo
Philippe Arroyo is a proud alumni of Carnegie Mellon University and is honored to join Mandy and the Boston Pops! Broadway/theater credits include: & Juliet (Francois Dubois), 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Chip), Disney’s Aladdin national tour (Omar), the York Theatre’s Penelope (Telemachus), Joe Iconis’s Punk Rock Girl (Dudley), The Karate Kid Musical (Freddie), Into the Woods first national tour (Jack), Pittsburgh Public Theater’s Little Shop of Horrors (Seymour), and Theatre Under the Stars' In the Heights (Sonny). TV credits: Uncoupled on Netflix, Evil on CBS, Helpsters on Apple Plus, and Truth Slash Fiction.
-
![Boston Children's Chorus performing at Symphony Hall]()
Boston Children's Chorus
Boston Children’s Chorus (BCC) was founded in 2003 by Hubie Jones, a civic leader who has worked for six decades to address the social challenges facing Boston’s underserved children and communities. Named Boston’s “Ambassadors of Harmony” by the Boston Globe, BCC harnesses the power of music to connect Boston’s diverse communities, cultivate empathy, and inspire social inquiry. BCC's choir programs include 11 choirs with singers from 110 different ZIP codes in and around Boston. In addition to its after-school programming, BCC partners with schools to develop in-school choral programs in Mattapan, Roxbury, South Boston, East Boston, Allston, and Chelsea.
BCC presents more than 50 performances per season at a wide range of public and private events. The chorus has performed at venues including Symphony Hall and TD Garden in Boston, Royal Albert Hall in London, the Sydney Opera House, and the White House. BCC has appeared in TED Talks, made regular appearances on local TV and radio networks, and performed with high-profile artists such as Idina Menzel, Javier Muñoz, Hugh Jackman, and Leslie Odom Jr.
In 2020, it was announced that the album "Fantastic Mr. Fox" won a Grammy Award for best opera recording. This recording featured the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in collaboration with Odyssey Opera and the Boston Children’s Chorus, under the baton of Gil Rose. Additionally, BCC was presented with the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award in 2013, distinguishing the chorus as one of the top arts and humanities-based programs in the nation. BCC accepted the award from First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House.
Boston Pops Major Corporate Sponsors, 2025-26 Season
The Boston Pops and Symphony Hall major corporate sponsorships reflect the increasing importance of alliance between business and the arts. The Boston Pops is honored to be associated with the following companies and gratefully acknowledges their partnership. For information regarding BSO, Boston Pops, and/or Tanglewood sponsorship opportunities, contact Joan Jolley, Director of Corporate Partnerships, at (617) 638-9279 or jjolley@bso.org.