فصل 10

X

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED, with Allusion to L E S L I E O D O M , J R. Plus Remarks on the VIRTUES AND MERITS OF UNION

Looking back now, success seems foreordained. It wasn’t. No colonists in the history of the world had defeated their mother country on the battlefield to win their independence. Few republics had managed–or even attempted–to govern an area bigger than a city-state. Somehow, in defiance of all precedent, Washington, Hamilton, and the other founders pulled off both.

Their deliriously unlikely success–first as soldiers, then as statesmen–tends to obscure the true lessons of the American Revolution. The past places no absolute limit on the future. Even the unlikeliest changes can occur. But change requires hope–in the case of both of those unlikely victories, the hope that the American people could defy all expectation to overcome their differences and set each other free.

In the summer of 1788, Alexander Hamilton carried this message to Poughkeepsie, where he pleaded with New York’s leaders to trust in the possibilities of union, and vote to ratify the new federal Constitution. Yes, he conceded, the 13 newborn states included many different kinds of people. But this did not mean that the government was bound to fail. It took an immigrant to fully understand the new nation, and to declare a fundamental hope of the American experiment: Under wise government, these diverse men and women “will be constantly assimilating, till they embrace each other, and assume the same complexion.”

Two hundred twenty-five years later, and about two miles up the road from where Hamilton gave that speech, Lin, Tommy, Lac, and a group of actors assembled to make a crucial step in their own bold experiment. They had been invited to Poughkeepsie to take part in the New York Stage and Film series of developmental workshops at Vassar College. For a week, they would live together in Vassar dorms, refining Lin’s songs. Beyond providing time to work, the program gave them blessed isolation, a chance to get away from other projects for a while. Tommy exaggerates only slightly when he says that Lin would wake up in the morning and find him sitting next to the bed, primed with another idea.

They had made an important break with precedent before they arrived–the most important, maybe, in the entire development of the show. When they decided that The Hamilton Mixtape was going to be a stage musical and not an album, they assumed that they would need spoken dialogue to connect the songs. Song-scenesong-scene has been the standard structure of the modern Broadway musical since Rodgers and Hammerstein perfected the form in the 1940s. Tommy asked a playwright they both respected enormously to write a libretto. But a single reading with a few scenes of spoken dialogue, in January 2013, convinced them that through no fault of the script, everyday speech couldn’t sustain the energy of the rapped lyrics.

That meant that all of the writing duties would fall to Lin. Every textual problem was now his to solve. Tommy and Jeffrey pep-talked him: He was more skilled now than during In the Heights, they told him. Anyway, nobody else would be able to catch up to him at this point. Fortunately, Lin was already feeling “just super preggo,” by which he meant: “Well it’s coming out one way or the other, and nobody else is going to deliver it.”

At the end of that week in Poughkeepsie, on a hot Saturday afternoon, 150 friends of the production and Broadway professionals crowded into Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater to see what Lin had birthed. There was no scenery and no blocking. The only accompaniment came from Lac, who played an upright piano, and Scott Wasserman, who supplied loops created on Ableton, the potent musical-production software. Still the audience got to hear something remarkably close to the final version of Act One. When it ended, Lin treated the crowd to a couple of songs from Act Two. That was as far as he had written.

Sitting in the last row of the audience, more than a little amazed, was Leslie Odom, Jr. The young actor was in Poughkeepsie that day to watch his wife, Nicolette Robinson, take part in another reading at New York Stage and Film. When the audience erupted at the end of the encore, Leslie was on his feet too. He sent Lin a text afterwards to say that he would be the show’s biggest cheerleader when it got staged.

Lin and Tommy didn’t want him to cheer–they wanted him to act. As they took stock after the week at Vassar, they realized that the actors who had played Burr so far had been too similar to Lin. “What was great about Leslie is that in every way he’s a contrast to me,” says Lin.

“He is cool, his blood runs cool, he is elegant. It sounds like I’m reverse-describing myself as feral monster. Anyway he’s my opposite.” Or, as Lin said of Leslie around that time: “Dude makes me look scruffy.”

Lin and Tommy had approached Leslie about taking part in an early workshop of Hamilton, but his schedule had prevented him. That fall, they tried again, inviting him to read Burr the next time they gathered some actors to test new material. He said yes and immediately got to work. A lot of work.

“How do you let people know what you want?” Leslie asks. “You let them know through preparation. You show them.” By the time the reading came around, he had memorized the role. For a brief workshop with no audience, learning a part as big as Aaron Burr is a preposterous display of dedication. The role seemed to be his.

But once again something that seems inevitable in retrospect almost didn’t happen at all. Like most young actors, Leslie had operated on the theory that the road to stage success lay through television. As he puts it, “You get the cover of EW, then you come back to Broadway.”

After 10 years of struggling, a guest role on Smash had finally paved the way for a lead role on a new network drama, State of Affairs. This posed a dilemma: move to Los Angeles for his shot at TV success, or stay in New York to play Burr? It was a choice, he says, “between my Grey’s Anatomy and my childhood dream.” Going to Los Angeles, he knew, was the smart thing to do–the adult thing to do. “I want to buy my mama a house too.”

Even if he chose to stay in New York, his fate wasn’t entirely up to him. He had already signed a network contract. What was he supposed to do, go to war with NBC?

After some sleepless nights, he got on an airplane. He went to Los Angeles and sought out his patrons in the TV business. He explained his situation. They let him go. And nobody else has gotten near the role of Aaron Burr since.

So there is no house in the Hills for Leslie just yet. Instead he spent a lot of 2014 working on Burr’s songs with Lac. (“He gets in the sandbox with you,” says Leslie. “He helped me so much.”) He also hit the books. He lugged a two-volume biography of Burr–a gift from Oskar–back and forth from his apartment in Brooklyn to rehearsals all over Manhattan. It requires some imagination to think of Leslie straining under a heavy bag.

Besides being the best-dressed person in almost every room he enters, he exudes an easy grace that makes it hard to imagine him being weighed down by anything.

After a long day and night of rehearsal, Leslie still lights up when he talks about playing Aaron Burr. “Lin is asking you to bring your complete and total self to the stage–all your joy, all your rage, all your pain, your capacity for fun.” Burr, he says, is “arguably the best role for a male actor of color in the musical theater canon.”

“Ever?”

“Ever. You get to show all your colors. Nobody asks us to do that.” It’s true that there’s something new and potent about Burr. We’ve seen the nemesis-as-narrator before: Think of Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. But even in the songs that Leslie first heard at Vassar, there are depths and capacity for fun.” make him the equal of the title character. One song in particular captivated Leslie that day. He didn’t catch its name–he only knew it had something to do with “waiting,” and that whoever got to sing it would be one lucky actor.

Now Leslie is the one who gets to sing “Wait for It,” Burr’s musical declaration of his code. When he talks about the song, he sounds like a mountain climber just returned from a treacherous peak, or a bullfighter back from the ring. “You don’t have to put anything on Wait For It,’” he says. “Just sing it with honesty, and as much vulnerability as you can. Don’t get ahead of it”–which is a very Burr-like thing to say.

“I love it. God, I love it,” he says of the song. “I’ll sing it for the rest of my life.” And every time he does, it’ll be a little different from the times he sang it before. Leslie says that it is vital to sing the song to the audience: “They’re my confidants.” That means the song changes as the crowd changes–its size, its composition, the way it emits a million little signals that a first-rate actor can detect from the stage. In other words–to state the revolutionary lesson one more time–what happened yesterday never guarantees what’ll happen tonight.