فصل 14

chapter fourteen.

ON PAUL TAZEWELL AND THE FASHION OF REVOLUTION

This is a day of firsts,” said tommy. It was May 9, 2014, and he was looking up at the 150 people who packed the top-floor theater at the 52nd Street Project, a program that specializes in plays created for and by kids, and sometimes offers space to shows like Hamilton. They had come for what he called “the first time we will have ever done the first act and the second act back to back.” Going for a laugh, he said, “You’re the first audience in the history of the world to have seen that.” The show’s title was another first that day. Jeffrey had persuaded Lin to drop “Mixtape” a few months earlier. He joked that it might be the most important contribution he made to the show. “Hamilton’ sounds like a blockbuster,” he says. “At least it does now.”

Tommy warned the audience that Lin had been adding and changing things until the night before. “You’ll be hearing things that not even he has heard out loud,” he said. (Lin couldn’t–can’t–help himself. “Finishing a tune at 10:30 for actors who are learning it at 11,” he had tweeted during a workshop the previous fall. “Horrible horrible when will I stop doing my homework on the bus I’m 33. The company had spent five weeks experimenting with different ways to move people (and furniture) around the stage. Five weeks was an unusually long time, but not nearly long enough to figure out how to stage this show. Tommy had been feeling stressed about how to speed up the process when Lac reminded him that nobody was forcing them to do anything. Tommy realized he was right. They decided to stage Act One and fall back to music stands for Act Two.

But the biggest first of that workshop, and its real revelation, was what the cast wore. Looking back now, the costume choices of Hamilton seem obvious.

Nobody thought so in May 2014, not even the man who made them.

In his 20 years on Broadway, Paul Tazewell had designed costumes for shows set in the distant past (The Color Purple, Doctor Zhivago, and our own time Magic Bird, In the Heights).

When he heard Lin’s demos, he knew that Hamilton would need to combine both sensibilities. But as with Korins’s scenic design, the question was: How? “The challenge was figuring out where those two eras meet, and what percentage of this world is hip-hop and what percentage is 18th century,” he says.

He looked at a lot of street fashion from our time and John Trumbull’s paintings from Alexander Hamilton’s time.

He studied the work of fashion design to had tried to mash up the two eras: Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano. Everyone has riffed on the 18th century at one time or another,” he says.

In spite of his experience, his well-stocked toolkit, and that formidable pile of research, Paul couldn’t locate the right point of intersection between past and present.

Luckily he and Tommy had collaborated on five productions before this, developing enough mutual trust to remain untroubled by the fact that they weren’t sure what to do. “We thought the only way to figure this out is to try it,” says Paul.

Since they knew what the cast looked like in contemporary clothes–because that’s what the actors wore to rehearsal every day Paul used the workshop to experiment with an intensely authentic design. Period from the neck down, modern from the neck up” became the rule. “I didn’t want Chris to be in a powdered wig as Washington, Paul says.

This choice, by itself, didn’t constitute a first. Joe Papp started putting black and Latino actors in period costumes for his free Shakespeare productions more than half a century ago.

More recently, visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley some of whose work Paul consulted during his research have painted contemporary black men in the trappings of Old Master portraits.

Still, the sight of this cast in Paul’s costumes made the show seem doubly, triply audacious.

The biggest jolt came toward the end of Act One, when the actors came onstage wearing blue coats with red trim and brass buttons: unmistakably the uniforms of George Washington’s Continental Army.

That day, for the first time, 150 audience members had the mind altering experience of watching black and Latino actors, young men and women from communities that have seen their freedom infringed for hundreds of years, win freedom for us all.

People wept at intermission. They screamed at the finale. In the cramped lobby afterwards, you could hear a potent clatter of emotions: euphoria, disbelief, desperation (this last from people who wanted to invest in the show).

There were four presentations between Thursday and Saturday, which meant that 600 people fanned out that weekend to tell their friends what they had seen. By Monday, Hamilton had become the most talked-about not-quite-show in New York.

For Tommy, the experiment of putting actors in period costumes had been a complete success. One choice that had seemed like a concession to the spare nature of workshops, putting all of the actors in parchment-toned clothes, and adding colors only when they distinguished themselves as specific characters, carried all the way to Broadway. Paul was delighted by the outcome too. He had received five Tony Award nominations in his career, but still wanted badly to get this one right.

“This piece is so humbling,” he says, tears rising in his eyes. “I really didn’t want to fuck it up, and get in the way of it. There are certain places where it resonates, where I remember, Oh yeah, I’m a part of this.’ Not this production–I know what I bring to the production–but being an American. I am a part of it, as opposed to being”–he searched for the right word–“an afterthought.”

When the Battle of Yorktown sequence ended that day, the largely black and Latino cast (singing a song written by a Puerto Rican composer, wearing costumes selected by an African-American designer) climbed on top of boxes and chairs to celebrate having done the impossible. Andy Blankenbuehler would spend the next 16 months trying to recapture how exhilarating the moment felt. It took him until a week before opening night on Broadway to feel that he had succeeded.