فصل 23

XXIII

ON THE ORIGIN & PERSISTENCE of Our NATIONAL SHAME

A fter closing night at the Public, the Hamilton company took a few weeks off, then got back to work. Through the sixth-floor windows of New 42nd Street Studios, where they reconvened for rehearsals, they had a view that was captivating and bizarre, even by Times Square standards: They could look directly across 42nd Street to Madame Tussaud’s. Over there, crowds lined up to see lifelike wax replicas with no actual life; over here, actors who looked nothing like their historical counterparts were bursting with it.

Almost everyone in the company that summer was in their 20s or 30s, and the handful who were a little older could pass for 30-something. Do the grown-ups know what’s happening here? The rapturous reviews at the Public contributed to the loose, upbeat vibe: The cast and creative team had work to do, but they also knew the show was very unlikely to fail–a rare and enviable position for theater artists, or anybody else. In the larger of the two rehearsal rooms at New 42– the one with circles on the floor, which marked the location of the turntable, and made the place look like a high school gym–Andy drilled the ensemble. He added two swings (Neil Haskell and Morgan Marcell) to the three from downtown (Andrew Chappelle, Stephanie Klemons, and Voltaire Wade-Greene). They needed to be ready to jump in when a member of the ensemble missed a show because of illness or injury, which always happens in shows as demanding as this one. Alysha Deslorieux likewise stayed ready to jump in as one of the Schuyler sisters or Maria. Andy cleaned and sharpened everybody’s work, spending part of one day trying to achieve a tighter elbow drop in “Non-Stop.” He also chased a phantom.

“My whole career I’ve been wanting to make a Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat,’” he says. The showstopping number from Guys and Dolls knocked him out when he saw it on the 1992 Tony Award telecast. He thought he might finally have it within reach, thanks to the final chorus of “The Room Where It Happens.” It might sweep the audience away, it might create that kind of roof-shaking release.

“It killed me when I heard it, I loved it so much,” he says of Lin’s song. In workshops and at the Public, Andy never felt that his choreography did it justice. He wanted to find sharper ways to physicalize the envy that gnaws at Burr, who seethes at being left out of that famous dinner. He attacked it again at New 42, and kept after it when they got onstage at the Rodgers.

“You have to become a laser beam, not a spotlight,” he told the ensemble one day. “Think of ripping somebody’s flesh off their body.”

When someone asked him to demonstrate the arm extension he wanted, Andy seemed less like a dancer playing to the back row and more like a monster flexing its limbs: tight, chiseled, scary. Day by day, tweak by tweak, he kept coaxing the dancers into making Burr’s song a demonstration of how disfiguring ambition can be, and how sexy.

While Andy worked with the ensemble, Tommy rehearsed with the principals in a room next door. Actors would perform a scene or part of a song, then he would amble up to them, crack some jokes, toss off an observation or an idea, and walk back to his seat, having shaped the scene without appearing to have done so. The best part of directing, Tommy says, is “code-switching,” relating to dozens of different artists in dozens of different ways, finding the specific approach that will unlock each person’s most creative self. He’s a fan of Phil Jackson’s books.

“Open the bag up,” Tommy said to Renée one afternoon. He meant: Keep playing with different ways to perform one of Angelica’s scenes with Alexander.

That was his gospel throughout the development process. For if the most essential trait of the Hamilton team was relentless creativity, a close second was ruthless pragmatism. Lin, Tommy, and their collaborators shared an eagerness to try things–to try everything–to find what worked best. “New discoveries, new mistakes” was the daily goal that Tommy had announced for the company at their first rehearsal the previous November. It’s a way of affirming the very American view that Benjamin Franklin offered in 1786, when someone asked him how the new Union was getting along: “We are, I think, in the right road of improvement, for we are making experiments.”

Watching the show at the Public had revealed to Lin and the Cabinet many more things to try. Some changes came quickly, as when Tommy worked with Oak to retool his depiction of James Madison, giving the author of the Bill of Rights more stature, more strength. (“A testament to Oak’s nimbleness,” Tommy says of how easily the shift happened.) Other changes took weeks to click into place. Lin and Tommy thought that 25 things in the script needed fixing. Most were so small that the average audience member probably wouldn’t notice the change, but a few were substantial, none more so than “One Last Ride.”

At the Public, the song skipped from Washington asking Hamilton to draft his Farewell Address, to the two of them marching out to fight in the Whiskey Rebellion, to Washington singing the lofty words of Hamilton’s speech. The song had its delicious moments–Lin, standing at Chris Jackson’s elbow, always got a laugh when he screamed at the rebels, “Pay your fucking taxes!”–but it never did everything that Lin and Tommy wanted it to do. “You run out of time,” Tommy explains. “Chris made it work, and we did our best.”

The rewrite to “One Last Ride” illustrates what all those creative impulses, all those pragmatic experiments, were trying to achieve: to ensure that every single element in the show, at every moment, was serving The Story. The Story was not a list of events on a historical timeline, in Tommy’s view, it was the emotional journey that Hamilton and the other key characters needed to make. Partly at Oskar’s urging, Lin and Tommy decided to rework the event-heavy song for something simpler, more expressive. It needed to reveal how Hamilton was affected when his friend, mentor, and father figure retired from public life. That was an easy thing to say, a hard thing to do.

One day, Tommy ducked out of dance rehearsal to check on Lin, who had sequestered himself in a little side room at New 42, trying new approaches to the song, rejecting them, trying again. They kicked around some ways to musicalize Washington’s desire to go home, but didn’t get anywhere. As he was leaving, Tommy mentioned “the vine and fig stuff.” Lin sat up in his chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

This was unusual. They almost always caught each other’s references, finished each other’s thoughts. Tommy explained that Washington’s favorite verse from Scripture dealt with finding peace in seclusion, under each person’s own vine and fig tree.

“Where is this?” said Lin. “What is this?” He started googling. Tommy went back to rehearsal. A few minutes later, Lin appeared.

“I got it,” he said. The new song would be called “One Last Time.” Out went the Whiskey Rebellion, in came Micah 4:4, the Scripture passage so dear to Washington. Just as the revised lyrics came from Lin’s collaboration with Tommy, the new music was shaped by his friendship with Chris. “I know his voice really well–I know the sweet spot,” says Lin. When he turned the Bible passage into a lyric, he built the phrase “their own vine and fig tree” on the intervals that Chris sings best–which, if you think about it, is pretty much what Hamilton did for Washington when he drafted the Farewell Address. Lin and Tommy liked the personal nature of the Biblical verse: Washington wanted badly to return to Mt. Vernon, to depart what he called “the great theater of action.” But those lines from Scripture had a public meaning for him, too. In 1790, he cited the verse in a letter to a Jewish community that had immigrated to Rhode Island to seek relief from persecution. He was stating the principle that all men and women should find a safe haven in America, no matter who they are or where they come from.

This second meaning of the song took on unexpected weight in the summer of 2015. The night before the full company of Hamilton reassembled, a white supremacist violated the safest haven of all: He gunned down nine worshipers at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest black churches in the South.

“It stopped me cold,” says Chris. It was a brutal reminder of the gap that yawns between the hope he sings about in “One Last Time” and contemporary American reality. “To me, it encapsulated the thought that the struggle continues. The idea is perfect, the execution is not.

It’s never been perfect.” From the beginning of the show’s development, Chris had been wrestling with the founders’ failure to eradicate slavery when they formed the Union. “They lied about it. They lied to themselves about it. It’s the great shame of our glorious country,” he says.

“It’s still affecting me, my parents, our lives.” He tried to rationalize Washington’s slaveholding for the sake of stepping into the man’s shoes, but after a lot of inward struggle, he had to give it up. “I won’t reconcile that,” he concluded. “But it doesn’t keep me from getting to the heart of who he was, and trying to portray the truth in that.” In the last moments of the show, when Eliza sings that Hamilton would have done more to fight slavery if he’d had more time, Chris, as Washington, bows his head in shame. It’s his way of having Washington accept responsibility for what he did and didn’t do.

Chris knows that plenty of people in America are uncomfortable with a black president. He also knows the symbolic power of Hamilton having three of them. As the show rehearsed that summer, the aftermath of the Charleston shootings demonstrated how real symbolic power can be. Activists renewed their efforts to remove Confederate flags from statehouses, stores, and everywhere else.

From the day Alexander Hamilton arrived in what would become the United States, he fought against everything that flag would come to stand for. “If they break this Union, they will break my heart,” he said on his deathbed. His fight isn’t over, Chris thinks: “It’s living and breathing.” When he looks around today, he sees a battle of ideas going on, one in which even a Broadway musical has a role to play, in every word, note, and gesture. “This is our own form of protest.”