فصل 20

Chapter twenty: IN WHICH ADVANTAGES ARE DERIVED from Listening to the BROADWAY OLD MASTERS and JASMINE CEPHAS JONES

Hamilton made a leap in ambition and sophistication over its predecessor, In the Heights. Partly this is the natural course of a career, the result of Lin having matured as a man and an artist. But it also reflected a changed relationship to the Broadway traditions that inspired him. Beneath all the flashy rapping of In the Heights, Lin’s ballads showed a serious apprenticeship to his illustrious forebears. His lyrics were precise, evocative, moving. When he wrote Hamilton, he wasn’t just listening to their cast albums anymore: He was listening to his actual forebears. The final form of Hamilton reflects the counsel he received from some living legends of musical theater, a kitchen cabinet of his heroes.

In 2007, John Kander saw In the Heights, then did something he almost never does: He stuck around to meet the guy who wrote it. He and Lin became friends. “I was terrifically impressed with him, with his energy and his talent,” says the composer of Cabaret and Chicago–an all-around giant of the profession since before Lin was born.

As The Hamilton Mixtape began to emerge, Lin invited him to the American Songbook concert and other early workshops, which afforded Kander a rare pleasure: “I came away feeling like writing. Not writing like Lin, or doing a project like that–it was just that really, really good work makes me want to go to work.” In the audience after one presentation, Kander shared his enthusiasm with his friend Mike Nichols–the last conversation they had before the great director’s death. It meant a lot to Tommy to spend time with Nichols, one of the directors on his personal Mt. Rushmore. The other is Hal Prince, who directed Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, and The Phantom of the Opera on his way to racking up a record 21 Tony Awards. “It’s those two guys on the mountain, twice,” Tommy says.

Spending time with Kander reinforced Lin’s natural tendency toward extreme diligence. “This guy is 80-plus years old and he’s still chasing moments, and chasing the way to articulate those moments perfectly,” marvels Lin. And he found in Kander a model of how to do this without being eaten alive. “The myth of You have to be a tortured artist’ is a myth,” says Lin. “You can have a happy, healthy life and still go to all these crazy dark places in your writing, and then go play with your child and hug your wife.”

John Weidman first came to know Lin as a talented and apparently inexhaustible schoolmate of his daughter at Hunter College High School. The librettist (that is, the person who wrote the scenes and dialogue that accompany the songs) of three shows with Stephen Sondheim found it “slightly disorienting, in a pleasing way,” to watch that young man grow up to take a spot next to him in the front ranks of Broadway storytellers. He was glad to help Lin get there. In 2009, when Lin was at what he called a crossroads in the show’s creation, he reached out to Weidman for advice.

He admired the way that Weidman and Sondheim had distilled sprawling history into the concise drama of Pacific Overtures (about the first contact between America and Japan) and Assassins (about men and women who have tried to kill a president). How did they do it? Weidman answered Lin’s many questions at length. He took him to lunch for what Lin called “hummus and knowledge.” He shared technical insights derived from 40 years of facing precisely the challenges that Lin faced. He reassured Lin that it would be provocative and significant to reveal what a Founding Father had in common with somebody like Kanye West.

By writing about Hamilton you’re really writing about America today,” he wrote after listening to a new Hamilton song in 2011. “In the end I guess I’m saying stay with this even when it seems opaque and impossible and drives you crazy.”

The result of Lin’s persistence gave Weidman hope. “If you’ve done this work for most of your life, and you care about it, to see something like this, which represents where a next generation artist can take it, is both thrilling and reassuring,” he says. When the show reached Broadway, New York magazine asked Lin to list the top influences on its creation. Weidman was number eight.

“People in my life not excluding my wife consider this the pinnacle of my career,” Weidman says.

Another special influence on the show came from the writer who looms largest in Lin’s Hall of Fame bigger even than Big Pun. In fall 2008, he got to meet Stephen Sondheim, the composer/lyricist whose name is synonymous with what’s best and most boundary pushing in musical theater, thanks to Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and other masterworks dating back to the 1950s. Sondheim remembers that first conversation with Lin, and how much he liked the Hamilton idea, even though “I didn’t know what a mixtape was.”

During the next few years, when Lin was laying the groundwork for the show, he was also spending a lot of time in Sondheim’s brain. They had that meeting in 2008 because Lin had been hired to do Spanish translations of the lyrics that Sondheim had written for the Puerto Rican characters in West Side Story. “It’s an unusual assignment, like when I did crossword puzzles,” Sondheim says, referring to the contributions he made to New York magazine in its first year of publication.

(Eminem has drawn a similar comparison between lyric writing and puzzle-solving, a coincidence that doesn’t surprise Sondheim, or even seem remarkable: “Every creative act is a puzzle. It’s trying to make form out of chaos.”)

Lin was proud of his work on West Side Story, but felt that the real value lay in forging a relationship with “The God MC Sondheezy,” as he called him in a tweet. (Lin had heard Sondheim laugh at the “bursar” line in “Aaron Burr, Sir,” and tweeted: “I wish I could bottle that laugh.”)

Lin gave him a hip-hop name because more than any one else on Broadway, Sondheim writes lyrics that achieve the density and ingenuity of the best rap verses.

In fact, when the early audiences for Hamilton marveled at how hip-hop allowed Lin to deliver a lot of exposition very quickly, they were only catching up to something that Sondheim had grasped 30 years earlier, when he decided to have the Witch rap her backstory in the opening number of Into the Woods: “It’s an attempt to delight the ear while filling it full of information, which ordinarily would be extremely boring,” he explains.

Sondheim knew the rat- a-tat power of hip-hop, but he warned Lin of its limitations.

After listening to some Hamilton demos, he imparted a lesson that Lin took to heart: “The only caution I can raise is monotony of rhythmic and verbal attack over the evening–and, occasionally, over the song,” he wrote. In other words: Musicals depend on variety. Like republics, they need a multiplicity of voices to thrive.

When Lin achieved the kind of variety that Sondheim liked, the enthusiastic response meant the world to him.

The reaction that struck him the most in the early going was Sondheim’s enthusiasm for “Say No to This.” Here is all the variety that you could desire: Hamilton raps about his affair with Maria Reynolds, who sings her side of the story in R&B. Now and then Maria’s husband pops in to extort money from Hamilton in another rap, and the rest of the company chimes in by singing “No!” in disbelief.

The variety in the music helps to express the rich and shadowy complexity of the subject. No wonder the guy who wrote Company liked it. Jasmine Cephas Jones liked it too. “This is my jam,” she said the first time she heard it, when she was preparing to audition for Maria. On the page, her affair with Hamilton could be a mere scheme of extortion, a trap she sets because it’ll help her survive in her abusive marriage. “What makes Say No to This’ interesting is the possibility that she’s also falling in love with him,” she says. “That’s what makes the stakes so high.”

Jasmine admired the song’s variety too, but the word meant something different to her than it did to Sondheim. She had grown up in New York theater, tagging along to rehearsals with her father, the actor Ron Cephas Jones, doing her homework backstage, studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. When she went to Berklee College of Music to train as a singer, she gravitated toward jazz and contemporary music–styles closer to the Miles Davis, Prince, and Stevie Wonder records she had grown up with, and the songs she had heard her mother sing. (Kim Lesley, a jazz singer, played gigs while pregnant with Jasmine, which brings her near to being the embodiment of the old showbiz accolade that a performer was born onstage.) Maria Reynolds stood apart from many of the roles that Jasmine auditioned to play: Here was a great musical-

theater character that wasn’t tailored for a conventional musical-theater voice. “I just went into the audition like Jasmine, and how I would normally sing,” she says. It made her feel good to land a role not in spite of her distinctive R&B voice but because of it. “No one is trying to be something else,” she says of her castmates, many of whom had similar experiences.

Like Daveed and Oak, Jasmine plays two roles in the show: She’s Peggy, the youngest Schuyler sister, before she reemerges as Maria. One night during the run at the Public, Lin heard Jasmine and her onstage sisters, Renée and Pippa, singing R&B songs in their dressing room. He loved their harmonies so much that he rearranged “The Schuyler Sisters” to showcase them better.

If you want to know how Lin made something that combined tradition and innovation so seamlessly, a big reason is that he listened to his young castmates with the same absorbing interest he lavished on the old masters, and let himself be guided by both. “We are influencing the piece by just being who we are,” says Jasmine.