Alexander Hamilton: The Man and the Play

as a journalist you know I I drop in and out of worlds and come and spend a few months with with a person or a group of people and I was lucky enough to be invited into the world of Hamilton in early 2014 by Oscar who wrote to me saying I think this is the most exciting thing I've worked on since angels in America and of which he was the first director and drama Turk and I went along and saw a workshop production of the show and agreed it was the most astonishing thing I'd ever seen in any form of arts or media and and it was thereafter a kind of tremendously exciting nine months for me until the the opening the opening day I I don't think I've ever felt sit quite so clearly that I was witnessing the making of history and the making of a masterpiece and I wanted to ask you both but maybe start with Ron because you would have you were in this first how did you get how did this happen for you with what how did how did you know this this this audience right yeah you know songwriter approached you and what happens is held madness started in Brooklyn Heights I was back in the fall of 2008 you know I'm a neighborhood resident I was a strolling I ran into my friend Gera who said something that startled me he told me that his daughter Oona who had gone to Wesleyan was a best of friends with a hip-hop artist named Lin Manuel Miranda who had read my Hamilton book and had become obsessed with it and as the IRA said that Lin got very excited to find out that gara and Oona were friends anyway he put us in touch and I went to see a Sunday matinee of Lin's first musical in the heights and I went backstage afterwards and I said to him so I gathered my book made an impression on you and he said to me Ron as I was reading the book on vacation in Mexico hip hop song started rising off the page I said really yeah you know said that this is not at all a typical reaction ha ha ha to one of my it's the same thing happens to me I just go down and at that time he knew that he wanted to do a hip hop concept album based on Hamilton I'm still not quite clear but a concept album is but he said if all went according to plan that Hamilton would be his second musical and you know being a complete ignoramus about hip hop I said how can hip hop be the vehicle for telling this story because I could offer in the very beginning he didn't want to do something that was satirical or outrageous he wanted to do a serious dramatic rendering of Hamilton's life and he said to me said Ron I'm going to educate you in hip hop and he pointed out two things that are extremely important to the show one he pointed out that because the hip-hop lyrics are very dense and rapid you can pack enormous amount of information into the lyrics so much information in the show that it's almost as Lin's as an Advanced Placement history course and the other thing that he pointed out very important to the show is rhyme and word play not only rhymed endings but internal rhyme and wordplay which is what makes I think the hip hop so absolutely delightful and poetic to the to the year so that was the story of my relationship mm-hmm did he school you in hip hop did he give you like mixtapes and stuff like that no no chewed now I'm thinking in real I think he looked at made me realize that was gonna be a slow pupil with that but he didn't ask me on the spot on the spot because again this was November 2008 to be the historical advisor and so I said to him mean you want me to tell you when something is wrong and he smiled and nodded his head and he said yes I want the historians to take it seriously well that of course was music to my ears and that spirit was there throughout the you know last seven years so at that point he had had he written anything or was it just that he had this idea that he wanted to when did you first hear anything he then came over in February 2009 came over to my place on State Street sat down on my livingroom couch started snapping his fingers and this is what he sang hih does a bastard orphan son of a and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the crib you know he went through the entire first song and when he finished he said to me what do you think I said that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard in my life he had taken the first 40 pages of my book and condensed it up and danced I went to a four and a half minutes song I didn't remember thinking to myself either I write very long and he writes very tight in one of the two things but I and I didn't know this at the time you know we've kind of all learned a lot about each other this year I think reading each other's interviews and I didn't realize until Lin started doing interviews and he said that that first song which he then performed at the White House two months after he performed it in my living room he spent an entire year writing the first song and then entire writing the second song that may sound strange except that I think that the big breakthrough mm-hmm was those first two songs because that established the idiom this fusion of 21st century slang an 18th century formal speech cast in this hip-hop idiom I want to know if you can do the whole thing I don't not ask you to do it I just I mean unless you want to I know you've been done I I was at one of the performances with Ron and he and he was joking about hoping you know sort of one day when Leslie Odom who plays burr is sick that he wants to step into the this is a running gag that I have with Leslie I don't want Leslie to miss an entire perform that would not be fair to anybody's I just want him to arrive about ten minutes later I have to in desperation push me out onto the stage I get to kind of snap my finger to do most of it that's great um Oscar you came in a little later but not so much later what was your how did you at this come to you well it was pretty simple which is Jeremy McCarter was a close friend of mine him at the time of critic um we since brought him over to the good side he works at the theater night um but he he kept telling me that lin-manuel Miranda was better than I thought because my relationship to Lynn was that he was the guy who was doing in the heights while I was doing my first Broadway show passing strange and he won and we lost so he was bad and inadequate um but actually I went to see Laurie and I went to see in the heights and I was actually completely charmed by him and astonishing talent and I didn't love the show but I thought he was incredibly charming and Jeremy kept going he's more than that he's more than happy you're under estimating and then about a couple of months after the scene you're describing Jeremy showed me the YouTube right of Lin Manuel's performance at the White House because Hamilton is the only musical in American history that had his development period at the White House in front of the President and the president now claims credit for the show he was invited Lin was invited the White House for during the very early months of the Obama administration for a spoken-word festival and he was asked to do something from in the heights he said I could do that but what I would rather do is this new song that I'm writing about the first secretary of the Treasury who is of course a natural hip-hop hero and they let him do it and you can still see it as many of you have probably seen it on whitehouse.gov that song was recorded in the White House put it up and I saw it and instantly knew I was in the presence of genius which doesn't happen very often my profession it's pretty amazing when it does and Lynn did indeed spin as I ran after him tugging on his shirtsleeves as I'm want to do for the next couple of years trying to get him to come to this show at the public he spent two years stiff-arming me much as a football player will and saying no no no it's not a musical it's a concept album I'll talk to you about the musical after I've done the concept album as I've since become more intimate with land it was absolutely clear to me that that was his defense mechanism and a brilliant defense mechanism not only against me but against the overwhelming terror of saying I am going to write my first book musical because he had never written the book for Musical 4 he didn't write the book for tonight he only wrote the lyrics and the songs I am going to write this as a hip hop life of Alexander Hamilton this is so terrifying that the way that I can avoid the terror is by saying it's not a musical it's an album and he said that to himself and everybody around him until that night at American Songbook at Jazz at Lincoln Center Ron and I were both there where he presented the first half of it and it became unmistakable that he was writing a musical and at that point he began to seriously talk to me and we began to actually work on his muse he talked to me I interviewed him at The New Yorker festival just a couple of weeks ago and perhaps even some of you were there and he called Oscar the greatest living drama Turk and said that having access to your brain six hours where it's just take it Oscar just greatest living two-headed aardvark and having access to your brain was a great a great great gift what you know as you were developing this with it I mean when it when he came to it was how much done um well he had written the entirety the first end and a couple of songs in the second act and that was when I got to come on board where he allowed me to come on board and from there till then we've been continuing to work and I've been just thrilled you know partly of course we get to triangulate a relationship so I'm working with lin-manuel but that suddenly allows me to actually have an active working relationship with Ron chernow which is what a fantastic job I have can you and I get paid for this to sit and talk to lin-manuel into runter what he's tapped into is a vision about what America was meant to be and that's the thing that has elevated this it's why this room is full of people because somehow lin-manuel has figured out how to tap into our original vision of what America was supposed to be and you know it's a great it's a real it's a hot ticket right we know that it's a great musical there have been a few others in the last few years Book of Mormon was a great mute the producers you can but Hamilton is the first musical in this generation that is both an unbelievably hot ticket and is not ironic there's nothing about it that is knowing and Winky and snarky and deconstructing itself it is fundamentally earnest and I think the reason that we have had this incredible cultural response to it is it has allowed us to feel patriotic is allowed so many of us who thought that our patriotic days were well in the past to love what America's vision of itself is again and that's so I went off go from York oh oh but don't you know that's what I feel like we were trying to figure out how to do every step of the way how can we make that what this show is about and how can we communicate them did Lin this is the kind of thing that Oscar you're very very good at which is explaining to people what it is that they're trying to do in ways that sometimes they don't know themselves it's what they're trying to do you know I think that's your great genius did Lin know what he was doing as he was doing it was he as as conscious of that frame as you were sure um Lin is incredibly smart and incredibly aware of what he's doing but what he is also brilliant at is figuring out how to take aging white guys like Ron and me and figure out how to use us figure out how do you I mean he's he's one of the things and actually I compare him to Tony this way Kushner is the same way is he figures out how to harness the talents of the people around him so that he can use them to fully unleash what he does so I think of course he knew what he was doing but on the other hand I think it was very useful for him to have reflected back to him a mirror of what he was doing an articulation just as frankly Rebecca you did that for me that thing you just said is what you wrote in 2010 about what I do you wrote that I was able to see what a show wanted to be and wasn't yet capable I had never articulated that now Tony Kushner quotes that to me all the time I moved it but you know because in a way that's what collaboration is is we're providing a series of mirrors for each other in which we're trying to say oh I see what you're doing and here's the Platonic version of what you're doing I think that one of the things that Unleashed limb that I was very proud I did was say to him you are Shakespeare you are doing exactly what Shakespeare did which is taking the language of the people turning it into verse and by turning it into verse you're elevating it so you're taking common people and you're making them heroic you're giving them stage as the heroes and the subjects not the objects of history and I think all I was doing was saying to Lynn what he was doing but I think it was useful for him to hear somebody say that because then he can raise his game to consciously do that right you know y'all so yeah just in my experience with him over the last seven years he's a very very intuitive artist the nature of our relationship was such that every time there was a new version of the show I would always have an hour to afterwards you know with Lynn where I would just give my critique and again I don't know maybe your relationship was very different with him we wouldn't have these long sustained analytical discussions in fact I would start talking as I want to do and then very often would just kind of stare at me and I remember the first time we had one of these discussions he just kept staring at me without saying anything and I said to myself oh my god Ron you're laying such a big egg here he's not responding to anything that you're saying until then when I saw the next version of the show I realized how powerfully he had responded how closely he had listened but he didn't write it down it wasn't what happened it was you know later on very often or what happened he would be sitting there with the laptop and if I said something that didn't strike home he wouldn't say anything and he wouldn't move you stare at me if I said something that did strike him as useful suddenly he would be madly tapping away and his laptop it was kind of interesting because I think that somebody else in that situation might have kind of engaged me you know in a an analytical discussion which was really not his not his style it was that correspond to you were a little different for me but but but I'm not an expert in American history Ronnie and the thing the thing I think is so key about this is that the portrait of Alexander Hamilton that Lin is painting there is a portrait that is drawn directly from Ron's book it's not simply from the facts of Hamilton's life it's you know what you wrote in that book where you said that like it or hate it Hamilton is actually the architect of the America that one this is the America we actually live in in terms of the financial system the meritocracy the those values are values that succeeded over Jeffersonian values and that is something I think struck a chord for Lynn and so really that portrait is um and you know I know his unbelievable respect for you and it's not simply for you as a fact-checker it's you as somebody who understood something that the essence of Hamilton's contribution to America that he was interested in taking and bringing to contemporary line no I mean he had a you know such a powerful emotional and imaginative response to the book it was not at all that he was just soaking up the the facts of the story in fact it was it was fascinating for me recently Lynne every night before the show two hours before they do a lottery for $10 tickets and the in the front row and I think you know Lynne having a strong populist bent always goes out there with one or two members of the cast and they do this kind of like buskers they do this ham for ham entertainment available on YouTube for anybody who hasn't seen them they're very very funny very distracting well you know the the opening night on Broadway he went outside on the sidewalk two hours before the show carry my book and he said to the must been six or seven hundred people out there and he said I'd like to read to you the opening paragraphs the puncher ha ha and he read it's a first in Broadway history huh I mean he was standing there in his shorts and t-shirt carrying this thick very well thumbed book I noticed but he read the first five paragraphs and it was very was very moving very instructive for me there were two moments where he nearly broke down in tears reading it I opened the book with Eliza as an old woman actually opened and closed the book with Eliza's an old woman and because I wanted to kind of since the story and sadly ends violently I wanted to wrap the story into kind of golden elegiac mood which he really has picked up very brilliantly in the final scene of the of the book but as strongly as I had known Lynn had reacted to my book to actually see him twice uh-huh on the verge of tears as he was reading it gave me a sense of his private experience with the book that I had never quite had all these years it was fast that's amazing and he of course as you said Oscar he doesn't just this isn't just a musical about the life it really is the musical of your book of the life right down to the framing of Eliza closing the show I mean one of it one of one of my secret pleasures during the waning weeks of the preview period was watching various producers who have various voices arguing against ending the show with Eliza anyway just going well you can say what you want but Ron's book ends that way it's not going to change Jessica you just said it's a done deal but the other thing I want to say about the the specific thing is that in a way he's been incredibly complicated and that there's more information in Hamilton than I dare say in any Broadway musical history more content and it's because as you say hip hop is able to contain that but also it's all resting on the apex of a really simple idea Hamilton was a founding father who was not a Virginian aristocrat but who was a bastard immigrant orphan from the West Indies and just the idea that you can tell the story of the founding of America from that point of view from an immigrant bastard orphans point of view is something that unleashes a power about what America is and it's so simple it's and it's those first lines that he's saying to you sitting on your couch so it's very first stated that the entire edifice is built on that and that's the thing about drama it's it's fundamentally it's got to be simple you can build mountains on top of it but the basic insight has to be a simple insight and it was that simple insight that he got from your book that everything else arose from it's also the the line that that in the times that I've seen it gets the most joyous response right both of us are great yeah and actually as an immigrant myself I'm I'm good yes when Lafayette and Hamilton meet on the will do the whole thing out but they meet on the battlefield in command at Yorktown the decisive battle of the American Revolution a war and they say immigrants we get we get the job done no fact then I started to say to Rebekah backstage when I first met Lynn because in the heights was really an autobiographical show it was almost like a wonderful first novel growing up in a Latino neighborhood on the Upper West Side and when he told me he wants to do Hamilton it seemed like he was doing a topic that was completely unrelated to his first show as time went on I said that they were you know a thousand and one secret subterranean connections between the the two and as you all know who've seen the show there's tremendous emphasis on Hamilton as an immigrant which might seem like an obvious thing but it's not okay this is not an immigrant working in a sweatshop I mean this is kind of you know immigration on a very very high level but linin many of the interviews has talked about the fact that he identified Hamilton's story particularly with his father his father came I think was it was late teens early 20s spoke very little English toward himself English ended up getting a PhD and so it was really an inspired decision to see Hamilton as an immigrant story and you know and also when I first met him in he told me that he said Oh Hamilton this is a classic hip-hop narrative of course I had no idea what the hell he was talking about when he said that but as time went on the fact that Hamilton was self-created that he escaped from poverty by the power of words and also that there was this very frenetic driven relentless quality to the life which you know so perfectly matches up with the driving pulsating music when you think about it there not a lot of figures who would work in that in that way but I think that it was interesting the opening night at the Public Theater there was a party afterwards and I said till then I said there's much more of you in Hamilton than in the heights even when the height seemed to be you know superficially be more autobiographical show and he said to me with great fervor Ron why can't everyone see that I mean and and then he paused and said something that was no less dart league which was and there's also a lot of me and Aaron Burr and I think that he is playing out the two sides of his own psyche with Hamilton and and Berbick is one side of Lin is brilliant and creative and ambitious maybe a bit driven the way that Hamilton is but I think there also I think he remembers being the shy kid in the class who always remembered there was that bright kid who always knew all the answers and was the first one to raise his hand whereas he identified with the shy kid who was always hanging back who was afraid to compete with that kid and it was the birth side so and I think it's you know one reason that he so humanized her because there also was strong identification right there this said the story was like filtered through his life in his mind on many different levels yeah you know yeah um as historical consultant he came to you and said you showed you drafts or how did it how did it well actually what he told me he told me the other day that on the night before the first preview he there was a phone call with you or it or email exchange with you meeting with you and there was still like nine things in it that aren't actually true and he sort of had to go through them with you and and you either signed off or didn't and he would tell us a little bit about the that behind the scene without presenting you know 2009-2010 I was saying before you know you spend a year of working on the first song you're working on the second and then his director in great pal Tommy Kail said to him Lynn we better speed up pace a little bit or we'll all be dead you know before this show is finished and so when a Tommy put Lynn on a kind of regimen I think it was maybe one song a month two songs I'm on and so Lynn would send me the songs by email and I would just hear Lynn alone at the keyboard right attending to be the scylla sister exactly yeah and he would always send them with these kind of psychedelic screens that I would be watching would seem like I'd of another era in another style with this was Lynn there was always something creative and unpredictable about it so initially I was just reacting to the songs and the portrayal of the characters and the in the in the songs and he was sending them he was composing them completely completely out of sequence right Oscar I mean Terry I see because he was working your way towards the end but you know I think that I was at a disadvantage that Oscar for instance would not have had I mean this is obviously the first time that I had been involved with the creation of a musical and so sometimes it was very hard for me to picture the scene that would be surrounding that song but Len was able to maintain a psychological continuity with the show because he was doing so many different things he was appearing in movies and television series and he was performing and he had this group freestyle Love Supreme this hip-hop group that does improv and comedy and and actually when I look back the more I think about that group the more I see the influence of that on the the show for instance my very favorite scene in the show is satisfied the so called rewind sing a scene where first you have the song help us where Eliza falls in love with Hamilton and then it's the scene where Angelica keeps running through her mind introducing Hamilton to Eliza and so you first see that relationship in very kind of joyous and romantic terms of the lies in Hamilton falling in love with each other and then suddenly find out that Angelica is also in love with her future brother-in-law but she sees much more deeply into his nature she sees his flaws and so she's has this tragic view of her very pure and innocent sister you know marrying someone who is very driven and uncomplicated and so it's this rewind scene because they redo the scene three three times each time you see it from a slightly different perspective and the rewind comes from the freestyle Love Supreme because people in the audience would throw out the name like that might say give us a color they would ask the audience to throw out words and then they would start improvising and wrapping with the words thrown out by the audience and one of the and then they would create a whole story and they would start dancing to the story how in the world they did this have no idea it was very impressive but what they would do they would say rewind and then they would then the story that they had create give you the same story with a different right ending different point of view so I think that that's where he got that and that Angelica story I mean it's so perfect for a musical and and but at all I mean there really was this connection between them when I read your book I my reaction was well if he'd married Angelica he'd have been president you know it's not quite how I feel watching the musical but I certainly you know felt that reading about her and actually you know one things that very much impressed me with Lynn's integrity is that I leave ambiguous in the book as to whether the relationship between Angelica and Alexander Hamilton was ever consummated that there was a mutual fascination everyone testified to that whether this actually led to romance I'm doubtful of it but anyway it was ambiguous in the book and I like the fact that Lin kept it ambiguous in the show and he's creative enough to have made the ambiguity utterly fascinating but I'm sure that 99 out of 100 people creating a show with the Angelica story would have had scenes of them sleeping together you know there wouldn't have been that kind of subtlety and mystery which required you know Talent of a much higher order well that what the other wonderful thing about that of course is that it's it's based around a comma isn't it that's a discussion in the show of whether and whether he in a letter to Angelica he put a comma before dearest so whether he's calling her dearest or or not and as a as a writer it's thrilling to see him doing things with the punctuation you know haha very romantic very very no and this is this is I mean that was pure invention on Lynn sport but what's subtlety delicacy I mean that's like a touch out of a Jane Austen right no that's so much weight is carried by that comma yeah so he told me about this this list of things that he discussed with you that you he took out and things that things like George Washington's he had George Washington had wooden teeth at one point in you said don't do that everybody will blame me he didn't help well what about more more substantial historical deviations from the truth that happened that does it does it is there anything there that matters do you think that it's changed around and and and Oscar perhaps you can talk about dramatic truth as opposed to historical truth well look um I think on the one hand Lynn wanted something that would be taken seriously by historians as he said to you and who quoted me many times and on the other hand he recognized that there were certain clarifications that were not worth it the one that I have the hardest time with but I think is correct is that of course Bern ever ran for president and that the the whole last section where Burr and Jefferson seemed to be running against each other in Jefferson beats burr is really in historical terms just you know a complete parody of what actually happened at that point but the important thing is he was getting at a dramatic truth that was also a historical truth namely that Jefferson and burr were competitive that burr was breaking the rules of what Jefferson felt and what was at that time felt an appropriate electoral and that it led to burrs humiliating defeat that is all accurate however if you actually tried to write the history based on Hamilton it would be wildly inaccurate and that was the hardest one for me to swallow but I think the correct decision was made at the end that this is something that gets at the essence of historical truth without ever being something you teach in history class you know I think both Oscar and I met much much were impressed by how much accurate history that then dramatic license in the show one thing that I've kept saying to people might take away from seven years of being involved with the musical is that history is long messy and complicated a Broadway show has to be short coherent and tightly constructed and there is a tension between the two I think Lynne did something that's very in yes in those cases where there is dramatic license he always introduces accurate elements there's always something real even if he's a you know inventing a scene so with Aaron Burr you see Aaron Burr going door to door he's campaigning which was completely novel at the time because that was considered very unseemly to actually go out and campaign and so now Aaron Burr been campaigning door to door in the 1804 New York City elections you know Lin kind of interpolates it back into the 1800 enchilada sauce said it never really happened but I think that I think that the show has worked so well as history because there's always an element of truth in everything so that for instance you know there's that scene where Madison Jefferson and burr confront Hamilton with the payments to a mr. James Reynolds which they think for the purposes of speculation Hamilton says no it's because I was sleeping with his wife and paying off mr. Reynolds now it's kind of interesting this is the way that Lynn's mine works revving is wonderful there really were three politicians who confront it and one of the three was James Monroe who was not a character in the show none of the three characters in reality who confronted Hamilton with the evidence are the three characters who do in the show but it's interesting that he kept that structure of the three Jeffersonians including in this case Jefferson doing it and so there's really not a moment in the show because we would agree where there's not some basis of truth and lo and I both completely agree with that run and for me the focus is a little different there is no moment in the show where I feel like he's distorting the underlying historical truth of what was going on that in other words that the details may be fudged or change but it's to get at something that is actually accurate I mean to the point that I'm sorry to say he resisted dramaturgy I was trying to get him to clean up certain things and to make clear some of the points he was making and he danced he resisted he wouldn't do it at certain crucial moments and we we had a lot of tension and then I suddenly had a realization one point I said oh my god Lin the complaints that I'm making about your dramaturg in this scene are exactly the complaints that I have about Shakespeare which is there's places where Shakespeare frustratingly refuses to make clear exactly what he's saying just as for those of you seen Hamilton I mean for me the the climax of this you cannot see Hamilton and know why Hamilton threw away his shot in that last deal with Burr you can speculate you can think of it there's a lot of clues but Lin will not tell you why Hamilton lifted his gun in the air and didn't know shoot back at burr and that's because he's a genius and I'm a drama Turk that's seriously that's because he knows that there's a place he has to leave open for speculation in order for the full richness of the story which is what you do as a historian as wife but you know if I could just pick up Oscars reference to the Shakespeare because another parallel between no lid that Shakespeare is just the love of puns and it's it's a fatal weakness and oh I don't know Shakespeare survived me but I always loved dr. Johnson's comment on Shakespeare and Pouncy said that for Shakespeare the pun was the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it you know and this is Lenin I realized how wedded he became to depends early on because there's a scene it's actually won Hamilton meets Aaron Burr at the beginning of the of the shell and Hamilton had wanted to go to Princeton he wanted to you know have this accelerated course of study which the president Princeton denied him and then he went to what to Kings College and in the show on Hamilton meets Burr who had gone to Princeton he tells him this story that he punished the bursar and I said to Lynne I said Lynn where did that come from I was really kind of puzzled by it it didn't happen but I could tell he didn't want to discuss it and I could also tell that he was very wedded to this or some reason and then you know I'm a little bit slow on the draw every time Hamilton in the show meets Burr he says well if it is an Aaron Burr sir and when I realized that it was a pun I realized I'm never gonna get him to change that he was so proud of that pun the fatal Cleopatra yeah I'm gonna open it up to questions in a minute but I just want to ask Oscar to talk a little bit about that final duel scene when and the way in which it changed very subtly but very significantly from the public to Broadway Lynn was talking the other day about the shift that he made in consult in consultation with you from the declarative to the interrogative in that final sequence so can you tell us a bit about that did he actually say that he changed nickel no that's me yeah giving you your cue um the you know we we spent a lot of time on the final his final monologue which is without underscore is just no music no B L melody it's just the last time we hear from Hamilton before he dies it's the last thing he says at the end of the show and it's literally as the bullet from burrs gun is speeding towards him his final thoughts and the change was pretty simple which was that at the public he said I must throw away my shot right at the top of that speech and then basically went through much of the rest of the speech as it is now but my feeling was it was dramatically in art because once he announced he was throwing away his shot all he was is basically clearing his throat until he was dead it's there's no long and he changed it to if I throw away my shot what will be my legacy and what it meant was it was just and I was very pleased dramaturgical a dramaturg have very small victories not very tightly is that by doing that it meant that it was not until the moment when the chorus announces he aims his pistol at the sky and he does so that we knew what was going to happen and that everything became it went from the realm of I'm going to die and this is what I'm thinking about the other side too if I die this is who's waiting for me on the other side and it just felt like it lifted it didn't do what I wanted him to do which to explain that he was needing to die for the sake of the proletarian revolution that's why they don't let me write the play yes because it's just so dogmatic and terrible but but what it did do was it just suddenly elevated it all in the in the simplest of ways which is that it became a question of if well what might happen yeah well as he said he wanted to get gasps and now he gets gasps when he performs that line so you did it you did it you all did it congratulations I was wondering if you guys could speak at all about like the casting of Hamilton and how the story of the founding fathers is about mostly white people and told by mostly minorities and what your thoughts are my thought is that was a very very good idea and it was built into the central dramaturgical principle of the show which is to tell the story of the founding of this country through the eyes of an immigrant from the West Indies and as soon as you did that as soon as you made that intellectual leap which is what Lin did it made the casting inevitable and of course there were individual people I mean the one of the one of the great fun things was um when Lin would write something and call up de'vide and say I've got something you can't pronounce now debaters oh yes I can in other he was definitely he was writing for individual voices but even more than that what he was doing was saying this writing this musical is a way for me my people and those like me to take ownership of the story of the founding of America to say this is our story and that is again it's an incredibly simple idea but it's the idea that underlies the entire show and it's why you can feel it I hope when you see the show it's not that you're waiting to the first ad to decide whether you like it or not within three minutes from the very foot you could feel the others go oh because they get it and the casting of people of color and all those roles is central to the idea of the show you know you know just they had one thing that because I absolutely agree with what Oscars said this young multiracial cast you know has a feel for the passion the idealism of the of the period that is extraordinary you know I remember growing up as I'm sure many in the audience did with the musical 1776 and the it was overwhelmingly you know late middle-aged white males and one thing that has not I think gotten attention which is very significant in addition to the you know black latino Eurasian biracial casting of the show is how young the cast is I can think of 1776 you know the Revolution seemed to be the property of late you know middle-aged men almost the entire cast is under 35 or 40 a lot of them are in their twenties and I think that as a result it really communicates the spirit of a revolutionary period revolutions are made by people you know it has that fire and dynamism to it so it's it's so essential to them to the show but the revolution back in the Revolutionary honor yeah is a minute so in the middle there yeah oh can you tell us about the decision to include the king as a character and how his musical style and songs developed sure the the actual you'll be back the the McCartney Eska ballad that was for King George was written relatively early it was one of the first dozen songs written and you know it sounds like a Beatles tune and it is one of my aspirations to actually hear Paul McCartney sing it before he loves the show so there's a chance but in the early workshops it was definitely questioned whether that would be a separate character we actually had various members of the ensemble specifically the the actor playing David's character the Marquis de Lafayette actually sang George in a number of the early workshops and it was great it was fantastic but you know Tommy and Lynn always thought you know it might be good to have a role for a white guy and the the workshop that we did in January of 2014 was the first time that there was an additional member of the ensemble who was a white guy who sang King George and it was Brian D'Arcy James and by the end of that weekend of performances it was written in lead that that was going to be a separate white guy because it worked so well you know also I think what happened because Brian is just a master actor as is Jonathan Groff the actors who did George the third before the dead it was the the songs were hilarious they didn't create a fully fledged character I think that this was really Brian's great contribution to the show of this kind of haughty sneering richly detailed character that he created which then Jonathan who saw him do it five times before he started doing it Jonathan has varied it in a lot of different ways but I think that the great contribution that he inherited from Brian was that this haughty sneering character that really became the essence of Georgia third and we now have a third King stepping in for a month or so and everyone else it's a great you can switch in whoever whoever can gets that we're gonna have so much fun at benefit concerts you know with accessing King George um yes there's another one there in the middle I already grabbed the microphone so that makes me so I have a question one of the things that makes the musical a masterpiece and so powerful is that the women have such a powerful voice and that they are they have their own kind of agency and I'm especially curious about the staging and the character the historical character of Eliza she opens the book yeah she ends the book she is a powerful narrator and she's the only one to talk about narrative so she's kind of the historian pending throughout the musical but at the same time one gets the impression both from reading your book and from other sources that Hamilton didn't have a lot of faith in Eliza that he that you know he tells her to improve her mind he wouldn't have her at his deathbed at the beginning there was kind of this feeling you know kind of cautions that he doesn't give to Angelica who he seems to see much more on his intellectual level and I kind of want to hear from you about the role of Eliza as a historical character and then in the staging where she's very powerful in almost an anchor yeah well I mean there's nothing that touches me more than just the centrality of Eliza in the musical I started writing the book in 1998 and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton was a completely forgotten historical figure everyone knew Martha Washington and Dolly Madison and Abigail Adams but if you stop people on the street they'd never heard of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton people couldn't tell you a single fact about her and so I feel between the book and Lynn's writing and now the brilliant performance by Philippa sue Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton is really becoming a true founding mother in a way that she never was before which is which is really great I think you're absolutely right as she wasn't she wasn't an intellectual sparring partner with Hamilton he wasn't looking for that in in why Hamilton and I think that the three-month in the shower are quite extraordinary and each one represents a different side of his character Eliza the goodness in the purity Angelica the worldliness and the sophistication and fascination with politics and then alas Mariah Reynolds the sensuality and even in her case the sled ashiness and somehow you kind of you know it put those three women together and they add up to an interesting composite portrait of Alexander Hamilton and the women are just breathtakingly good in it and again it's a tribute to lin-manuel that he can create women characters as beautifully drawn as any of them the men we keep mentioning Shakespeare which I think says something about Lynn that he has that kind of range yeah you you the phrase music is exactly right is Eliza's the only person it was constantly conscious of her presence or absence in the narrative and the decision to remove herself from the narrative in the face of her husband's betrayal is breathtaking as breathtaking as her decision to put herself back in so Ron kind of did it for us he put her back in the narrative but in the musical she puts herself back in the narrative and that choice that she makes that she is going to actually become part of the story by the way she tells that story is something that is immensely resonant for me not partly as a storyteller is that you make the choice that you are going to actually influence the world by telling stories and she does that and it's a gorgeous way to end the show mr. Eustace this is a little I mean the play was wonderful enjoyed it immensely I know something about the founding fathers and I learned more things that I didn't know including one of the things the most important things I guess that Hamilton's son himself was in the duel on the same spot where his father was killed and you know I'd never known that before loves I actually got linden originally wrote the same spot and I got him to change that to be here it wasn't ok but there it was one thing if I have a question that goes to musicals today in general and it certainly came up in passing strange there is this tendency more and more for the music the instrument instrument patient to be at LA as loud and even louder in some cases than the lyrics and it is playing like Hamilton where every word is very important because it's you know this is these are not empty lyrics these are you need to follow them and that's what instructs to play more than many other musicals and on top of that it's rapid because it's hip-hop a number of people I know complain that when the music is that loud as loud even louder than the lyrics it's very difficult to understand each of the words and words are important here why is music getting so loud in Broadway musicals that it drowns out no this is your bailiwick it drowns out the words especially where words are important um sir I suspect the problem of the music being too loud is just going to get worse for you and me as the years go by what what I will tell you is there there are two distinguishable elements here and one of them is taste and there is no question that the entire world of pop music and rock music the taste to make the music louder more propulsive more rhythmic has been going on for 50 years and is not going to change that is sorry it's not going backwards that's moving forwards we work like you wouldn't believe to make every word he Roble it's actually better on Broadway than it is in the public because we have a lot more money to spend on equipment one I mean the equipment the cost of the sound equipment that the Rodgers would be enough to float my enterprise downtown for a year and because there's more volume of space so it's easier to control actually it's harder in the the Newman the theater at the public but we worry about all that time about that all the time we work on it all the time and to my ears as best we've done a spectacular job now that's going to be different at different points in the theater it's going to be different on different nights because it's all being mixed live this is not there's a real band there this isn't a tape so sometimes we get it wrong sometimes the actors are more tired their voice is a hoarse ER their enunciation is less sharp sometimes the mixer is a bit too enthusiastic about the bass which is something we talk about a lot and the bass gets a little out and frankly when the bass gets loud it's harder on my aging years to distinguish the treble of that you know it's but it's a delicate thing in which it believe me if there was a simple yes-or-no answer to this it would be yes but the fact is that the balance we're trying to do is what retains the visceral integrity of this music which is absolutely meant to be driving and lively and alive and balance that with the clarity of the lyrics when we get it wrong I'm really sorry but we're working hard to do it we're not ignoring it I promise you we think about it all the time okay we have time for one more question I'll let you pick okay do you want to choose anybody nobody wants to nobody own it that's most people that's a lady I have an observation uh we've seen in the heights and it's foremost a love affair to New York I feel and I think many people would that because New York is organically New York if you're an immigrant there are so many chances there are so many different places to be and I I think that for those of us that have studied our American history or come from other states that that have grabbed on to the torch of being like Massachusetts Virginia the torch of being the foremost States for the rebirth for the birth of our country that this show shows very clearly that if there hadn't been in New York most of this might not have happened absolutely although I'm fairly convinced that without Brooklyn the American Revolution well we know that although as Lynn Lynn said to me the other night that of course people the the people that do have a legitimate beef with him as he put it uh people from Philly because so much happened to Philadelphia that it's all been no I really like that - Oscar I remember one night when I was at the the public I was terrified we were gonna wake up one morning and there be a front-page article in the Philadelphia Enquirer Philly dist in new Hamilton music because Aaron's I fail to be terrified because who cares what it is sorry it's you know I moved here so of course but-but-but what is correct I mean history is happening in Manhattan and we just happen to be in the greatest city in the world how lucky we are to be alive right now it is a celebration of New York but it's not of new your hopefully it is not of New York as a geographical district is the New York that has that lady in the harbor that says give me your tired your poor it is the New York that is devoted to the idea that you can come here from wherever you are and start your life again that you hear you will be judged by the content of your character not by the color of your skin or the contents of your wallet that New York is that idea of New York I grew up with in Minnesota I grew so that's the idea of America and that's an idea of America that's very different from the idea that an awful lot of Virginians had and still have and that and it's a struggle the American Revolution isn't over the American we are still fighting about the meaning of the American Revolution the content of the American Revolution and that aspect of it is something that I just utterly support New York parochialism well we are all lucky to be here tonight listening to Oscar and Ron so thank you very much

Channel: Center for Brooklyn History

Views: 35,791

Rating: 4.9146919 out of 5

Keywords: brooklyn historical society, bhs, brooklyn heights, brooklyn history, ron chernow, american history, alexander hamilton, oskar eustis, the public theater, lin-manuel miranda, hamilton, theater, nyc theater, broadway, rebecca mead

Id: U9s2K5UjTKs

Length: 59min 18sec (3558 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2016