فصل 21

XXI

ON BEING IN “THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS” WITH THE CAST OF A CHORUS LINE Plus a Brief Account of NEVIN STEINBERG BRINGING BOOM-BAP TO BROADWAY WITH SPEAKERS THE SIZE OF REFRIGERATORS

After t he bows and the clapping and the cheering on April 16, the members of the Hamilton cast formed a line that stretched the full width of the Newman Theater stage. They raised their headshots (the glossy photos that performers give to casting directors at auditions) and held them in front of their faces. They were standing on the same spots where the original cast members of A Chorus Line had struck that iconic pose for the first time exactly 40 years earlier.

The connection between Hamilton and its legendary predecessor meant the world to people involved with the show. Early in his career, Jeffrey saw A Chorus Line again and again, trying to understand how Michael Bennett had given the struggles of Broadway dancers such a powerful, universal appeal. Andy says that even amid the commotion of tech rehearsals at the Public, he would get chills when he thought about working on the same stage where Bennett had worked: A Chorus Line is the show that inspired him to forgo acting, and to commit his professional life to choreography.

There was even a physical connection between the two. In 2012, on the night that Marvin Hamlisch died, Jay Duckworth honored the composer of A Chorus Line by lighting a candle on the Newman stage, and playing the original cast album in its entirety. That candleholder sat on Hamilton’s desk throughout the run at the Public.

On the night of the 40th anniversary, arrayed across the stage, the members of the Hamilton ensemble led a rendition of “What I Did for Love,” Hamlisch and Ed Kleban’s song about the sacrifices that artists make for their art. Tommy thought this would be a powerful way to honor the dancers whose lives had formed the basis of Bennett’s show, 19 of whom returned to the Public that night. It was also a way to showcase the men and women of the Hamilton ensemble itself.

That ensemble–the actors and dancers who weren’t playing the lead roles–had been working nightly wonders of dancing, singing, and endurance, performing the exhausting combinations that sprang from Andy’s inexhaustible brain. Their skills had allowed them to be stars and featured performers in other shows: “an ensemble of soloists,” Andy calls them. Here, they merged their talents to create a powerful cumulative effect, a living embodiment of Alexander Hamilton’s energy and the dynamic young country he helped to found. There were five men and four women in the Hamilton ensemble at the Public, badasses all.

At some points in the show you would see them front and center, as when Carleigh Bettiol sashayed through the room, champagne in hand, elegantly setting the stage for “A Winter’s Ball,” or when Ariana DeBose seemed to pinch a bullet in her fingers, tracing its slow and deadly trajectory toward Hamilton’s body.

At other times, their exuberance enlivened a scene, as when Jon Rua would slingshot himself under a wooden plank, spin on one heel, and flex a bicep to catch Angelica’s eye in “The Schuyler Sisters,” or Thayne Jasperson flung himself up the side of the set to spread revolutionary fervor in “My Shot.” Their moves could be small and evocative, as when Sydney James Harcourt slowly raised a hand to quiet the chattering Hamilton, who had come to seek his blessing to marry Eliza, or when Sasha Hutchings held herself ramrod straight in a lift, high over her castmates’ heads, as the memory of Hamilton’s mother flashed through his mind. They could also be flashy, brilliantly so, as when Seth Stewart loaded, twirled, and fired a musket with precise grace, or Ephraim Sykes spun through a bending, whirling, sliding combination in “My Shot,” all precise limbs and pyrotechnics.

You could also watch, throughout the show, the three female dancers with distinctive short blond hair. Actually there was only one such dancer, she just had a remarkable capacity for seeming to be everywhere all the time. That would be Betsy Struxness. In an onstage ceremony just before the first performance on Broadway, she was awarded the Gypsy Robe, which recognizes a chorus member with the most Broadway credits–the one whose career resembles the stories that make up A Chorus Line.

When “What I Did for Love” ended that night, the Chorus Line veterans walked onstage to join the full Hamilton cast. The audience stood for a long, loud ovation. It was a tribute and a torch-passing, a union of past and present. It was a chance to thank the dancers who weren’t in the spotlight, but still made a triumphant musical possible– and their predecessors who had done it 40 years before.

The chorus line celebration was glorious, and it almost didn’t happen. Back in February, Jeffrey and Oskar had called a press conference in the Public’s lobby to announce plans for Hamilton’s future. Press conferences in downtown theater lobbies are about as rare as rapturously received hiphop musicals about the Founding Fathers, so most people assumed that the show would cancel the extension it had announced, and make a dash for Broadway. It was the safe bet, and maybe the smart one. If Hamilton could reopen before the Tony Award deadline in late April, it stood a good chance to win Best Musical, which might make the difference between a long run and a quick exit. Who knew how much momentum the show could sustain, or what next season might bring?

When Oskar climbed on top of the bar that day in February, he surprised the crowd by saying that Hamilton was going to finish its run as planned, then restart performances on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in July. By staying downtown a little longer, Lin and Tommy were making the same calculation that had brought Michael Bennett to the Public 40 years earlier: Before going to Broadway, let’s take the time to get it right. For if Hamilton had made the quick move to Midtown, there would have been no time to make changes. Tommy and Andy would have needed to scramble to replicate what they had done at the Public. Jeffrey calls the decision “a powerful expression of Tommy’s self-assurance.”

With that gamble, the last busy phase of Hamilton’s development began. Lin and his collaborators had bought themselves five months. They would use it to rewrite, restage, and refine the show. They would add two new members to the ensemble, Emmy Raver-Lampman and Austin Smith. The critics liked what they had seen the first time, but Lin and his Cabinet planned to keep working until the critics saw it again–the moment in late July when the calendar was going to tell them “Pencils down,” in Tommy’s words. In short, they were going to apply one of the ringing lessons of A Chorus Line– and of Alexander Hamilton’s life, for that matter: Your time is short, use it all.

All that spring and summer, Tommy and his collaborators fine-tuned Hamilton, both figuratively and, in one case, literally. Just as Andy worked wonders large and small in weaving together his dancers, the sound designer Nevin Steinberg needed to find intricate ways to coordinate amps, mics, and wires to produce the clarity that Lin’s score demanded. In his two decades on Broadway, he had designed dozens of shows, including In the Heights, but Hamilton made him feel the same pressure that Paul Tazewell felt when designing the costumes.

“It’s a constant challenge to live up to what Lin wrote,” Nevin says. “To make sure people hear it and understand it and feel it in way that you know is possible. It haunts me.” Like Paul, he tears up as he talks about it.

You can hear a compact demonstration of why Hamilton proved so tricky, and how Nevin’s labors paid off, in “The Room Where It Happens.” Lin wrote the song to dramatize a dinner that Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson shared on June 20, 1790, that decided the location of the United States capital. (The conversations that cemented the plan to move uptown resembled that momentous dinner: In a series of meetings in the days leading up to the press conference, a handful of people– Lin, Tommy, Jeffrey, and Oskar–had made big decisions in a little room.)

One morning after the Public run ended, Nevin sat in the audience of the empty Richard Rodgers Theatre, with Lac by his side. All around them, the familiar Mission Control tables had reappeared for Hamilton’s final round of tech rehearsals. The 10 members of the band were getting situated in the orchestra pit beneath the stage, and Nevin and Lac were trying to find the right levels and balances to bring out every color and texture in their playing.

Since the Lincoln Center concert three years earlier, the lineup had remained consistent: a rock band with a string section. For “The Room Where It Happens,” though, Lac wanted something extra. Lin’s demo recording had reminded him of Kander and Ebb, which had made him think of their show Chicago, which had given him a crazy idea. “If I want to be remembered for anything in the show,” he says, “I want people to say, Hey, that’s the guy that put a banjo in Hamilton.’”

Nevin was trying to balance that twangy banjo sound against the fact that “The Room Where It Happens” is one of the most banging, boom-bap, straight-ahead hiphop songs in this show–or in any that preceded it. That morning, he was experimenting with how best to use the new and fearsome toys he had acquired for the move uptown: a pair of refrigerator-sized Meyer 1100-LFC subwoofers. He had positioned them on either side of the proscenium arch, trying to make these chest-high speaker cabinets as inconspicuous as possible. (This model is designed for stadiums, not Broadway theaters, since why would a Broadway show need this much sonic energy in ranges so low that you can feel them? “It’s a monster,” promises the brochure.) As the band began to play, Nevin flicked the iPad on his lap, then flicked it again. The subwoofers started booming; a water bottle on the table began to shake.

That’s when Lin walked in. He was carrying his lunch and wearing a red “Where’s Waldo?” T-shirt. (Waldo peeked over the text “You can’t see me.”) He didn’t know that after six years of hearing his Hamilton songs in his head, or on headphones, or in a medium-sized downtown theater, he was about to hear them on an exactingly calibrated, extraordinarily powerful Broadway sound system for the very first time.

Jason Bassett, who stage managed Hamilton on Broadway (and In the Heights before that) has noticed that Lin has a distinctive way of reacting to such moments: “What I’ve always loved about him is that he’s as much an observer of his remarkable life as everybody else. His excitement is genuine, so you can genuinely share it with him.”

The band paused just as Lin arrived, so the theater was quiet as he took a seat at one of the tables in the audience. He said his hellos and unwrapped his burger. Then Lac cued the band, and “The Room Where It Happens” came roaring out of Nevin’s system again: the rinky-dink banjo, the booming bass, the thumping drums.

Lin froze, burger halfway to his face. He gaped at the stage. He shouted to no one in particular, “Oh fuck everybody!”