فصل 15

XV

By Which It Will Appear That GOOD HISTORY MAKES GOOD DRAMA AND IN WHICH SEBASTIAN MIRANDA MAKES HIS DEBUT

“Yorktown” could have been a rousing finale for Act One, a way to send the audience to the lobby feeling precisely what they wanted to feel about the country’s birth. After all, didn’t it happen just as the song suggests? The unerring Washington led us to freedom, with military victory and crisp dances, and then everybody lived happily ever after?

That sunny view is radically incomplete, as the founders themselves tried to tell us. John Adams, who lived long enough to see the legend taking root, begged us to remember that the country’s birth was painful, contentious, and not remotely finished when the British went home: “It was patched and piebald policy then, as it is now, ever was and ever will be, world without end.” The show spends much of Act Two making Adams look like a fat fool, but in refusing to treat the victory at Yorktown as the tidy end of the nation’s birth, it takes his side. And the surprise is that good history also makes for good drama.

Instead of letting the audience spend intermission basking in a false view of the founders’ infallibility, Lin and Tommy decided to extend Act One with a pair of songs that are explicit about the mistakes that they’re going to make, the “patched and piebald” things about to go down. There was only one song that could follow “Yorktown,” or at least one character. “After Yorktown,’ King George is the only person you’re willing to have start singing,” says Oskar. “Anybody else–” and here he mimed looking at his watch.

Lin could have made “What Comes Next?” a simple comic turn, a lament by a petulant sore loser. Actually, the king is a petulant sore loser. But he asks the leaders of the new nation an unexpectedly sobering question: “Do you know how hard it is to lead?” And then he offers a stark bit of wisdom: “It’s much harder when it’s all your call.” Those lines set up the fights that will animate the rest of the show, something “Yorktown” couldn’t do. “You have to end an act with a dramatic question,” says Tommy. “Ending a war is not a question. What you do with that is the question.”

Lin paired the king’s warning of political dangers with an admission of personal flaws. His research had turned up a coincidence that intrigued him: Alexander Hamilton became a parent at the same time that he was trying to birth a new nation. And–a double coincidence–so did Aaron Burr. Philip Hamilton was born in January 1782, Theodosia Burr in June 1783. Lin wrote “Dear Theodosia,” a duet for the new fathers that is joyous but remarkably uncertain: “If we lay a strong enough foundation,/We’ll pass it on to you,” they sing.

The only thing that’s sure is how much they’re going to screw it up. “I’ll make a million mistakes,” sings Burr.

Chernow was impressed by this refusal to deify the founders–one reason he calls the show “American history for grown-ups.” Of course, most people are too busy fumbling for Kleenex during “Dear Theodosia” to admire the song’s historiographical rigor. This is particularly true of the people who welcomed new children during the show’s development.

Like Jeffrey Seller and Sander Jacobs, Jill Furman is an above-the-title producer of Hamilton. She went to Lin’s American Songbook concert in 2012, and came away just as exhilarated as she had been on the night she went to the little theater in the basement of the Drama Book Shop and discovered a Nuyorican rapper-actor-composer-play-wright who was writing a show about Washington Heights. Jill had a son just before the Public run began, and even now, she turns into what she calls “a total basket base” when she hears the song. Lin can’t make eye contact with her until it ends.

So how did he write a song so evocative, one that is both precise and universal, one that made us see our babies’ faces? “New fatherhood inspires young composer to write beautiful duet” is a simple, lovely story, but it’s just as false as the simple, lovely view of the nation’s founding. “I wrote Dear Theodosia’ the week I adopted our dog,” Lin says–although even this isn’t the full story, as he explains in his annotations to the song.

Fatherhood didn’t shape the way Lin wrote “Dear Theodosia,” but it has changed the way he performs it. On November 10, 2014, Lin’s wife, Vanessa, gave birth their first son, Sebastian. “I play it differently because I have a real kid in my head now. I have access to a new depth of feeling . . .” of This is a life I am responsible for, the main purpose of my life is this kid’s life, everything else is secondary,’” he says. “It’s not an abstract my child’ now, it’s my child.”

Hamilton’s love for Philip was just as deep as Lin’s for his son, but, as “Dear Theodosia” anticipates, he sometimes did a lousy job of putting it into effect. A question that recurred in script meetings over the years was: Is the flawed, historically accurate Hamilton too unsympathetic? Were his failures as a husband, leader, and father alienating the audience? That has not been the experience of Javier Muٌoz. As Lin’s alternate, he needs to embody Hamilton’s complexities as fully as the man who dramatized them. But since he only performs the role once a week, he spends most of his working hours getting to observe how an audience responds to them.

Nobody associated with Hamilton combines a view from the center and a view from the periphery more completely than he does.

Hamilton’s failures don’t strike Javier as obstacles: On the contrary, they are how he finds his way into the role. “Most characters in musicals make one or two mistakes, but otherwise they’re perfect. I get bored with characters like those.” He knows what he’s talking about: Born and raised in Brooklyn, he spent years stringing together gigs in regional theater, finally getting a shot at Broadway as an ensemble member of In the Heights. “That’s the life I live–I live an openly flawed life,” he says. And he thinks these flaws are precisely why Hamilton’s story exerts such a potent hold on people. “They allow the audience to say, I’m okay the way I am–flawed and human.’ It pulls them in closer.”

Playing Hamilton presents all sorts of challenges; serving as the other Hamilton amplifies those challenges and adds some fresh ones. Since the primary Hamilton was also the show’s writer–and a fearless improviser, thanks to Free-style Love Supreme–Javier had to track Lin’s every move throughout rehearsals. There was no telling when he might try something and like it enough to keep it. “If he has done something a certain way two times, that’s when I would ask him, Is that a change?’” says Javier.

Still “Javilton,” as Lin calls him, is palpably grateful for the chance to play the role. “They’ve given me their baby to take care of and watch,” he says. “It feels that precious.” When he comes to the theater six times a week to perform the role in the wings-every line, every song– without going on-stage, it’s not out of an abstract sense of duty. “This is live theater,” he explains. “It’s always changing.”

The only way to stay in sync with his castmates as they continually discover new things and deepen their relationships is to change with them. It’s not a metaphor to call a play like Hamilton a living, changing thing: It has the same surprising life as a baby, or a new nation.