فصل 25

XXv

ON KILLING YOUR DAR LINGS, with Reference to “ T H E A D A M S A D M I N I S T R A T I O N, “ the SEDUCTIONS of BEN FRANKLIN, AND SONGS ON THE CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR

W h i l e t h e h a m i lt o n c o m p a n y prepared for Broadway, Lin collected one last accolade from the show’s downtown run: the Best Musical prize from the New York Drama Critics Circle.

At 54 Below, a cabaret venue in Midtown, John Kander presented the award, saying such nice things that Lin cried on his way to the stage. He recovered sufficiently to tell the room full of critics, politely but firmly, that he would not be following the advice that several of them had volunteered in their reviews: “I’m not going to cut 15 minutes.”

Hamilton had been, and was destined to remain, torrential. “What you can feel is the overflowing generosity of somebody who has tapped into the well of his subject, and it just keeps giving more and more. And this does feel like Angels,” says Oskar, whose work on Tony Kushner’s seven-hour masterpiece Angels in America makes him an authority on volcanic literary hyperproduction.

“You just feel like, Oh my God, there’s no bottom to this. Lin is unleashing the energy of crossing boundaries. He is saying, I can tell American history using popular song, I can mix Broadway and hip-hop. I can fly high and fly low.’ It feels like it’s unlimited. And that liberatory feeling spills out into the audience.”

Even in its early incarnations, when the show was longer than it became, Hamilton never felt messy or scattershot. Lin was profusely productive–he needed to be, to write a score with four dozen songs, more than double the usual number–but he was also efficient. As Jeffrey points out, “Lin wrote exactly one opening number. He wrote exactly one I want’ song for the protagonist. That is not often said. This show does not have 20 or 30 songs in the trash heap.”

The few songs that did disappear help illustrate what Lin and the Cabinet were after, and how different Hamilton could have been. Sometimes Lin and Tommy rethought the tone of a particular moment. Lin made an early demo recording of a boozy Hamilton, Laurens, and Lafayette slinging filthy innuendo about Alexander’s sexual conquests, but replaced it with the better-behaved “A Winter’s Ball.” He made another early demo of “Val-Forge,” a spooky dirge-like song about the carnage of the Revolutionary War, but decided to drop all but a few of its lines, which he folded into the more propulsive “Stay Alive.” One of them is Washington’s grim declaration, “We’re gonna fly a lot of flags half-mast.” (The public mourning for Washington once had a song of its own, but Lin felt that they could do without it, since Chris ends Washington’s Farewell Address by singing the lights out.)

Sometimes, Lin dropped a song because he narrowed his cast of characters. He started to write a country-rock tune for Benjamin Franklin, in which the wily diplomat seduced rich French ladies to help the American cause. But Franklin was also seducing Lin, who realized that Franklin would run away with any show in which he appeared. Lin said adieu to Franklin, the French ladies, and the song.

The most common reason for putting a song aside was to keep the audience focused on the story that Lin and Tommy were trying to tell. In one cut song, “Let It Go,” Eliza tried to get Alexander to stop being so belligerent to his enemies, even as Burr campaigned for and won the Senate seat held by her father. (A long, fruitless discussion among Lin and his Cabinet about how to speed up the song ended when Lac proposed that they skip Burr’s campaign altogether, thereby saving precious minutes–and eliminating a song that shared a title with the monster hit from Disney’s Frozen.) For a time, Burr sang a tearful reprise of “Dear Theodosia” to tell his daughter that her mother had died. The third “Cabinet Battle,” the fierce fight over slavery, didn’t shed new light on the characters–the point, after all, is that none of the Founding Fathers did anything to stop it–so the song had to go. That’s not a lot of misfires for six years of writing. “It was a very direct ascent up the mountain,” Jeffrey says.

Lin and his collaborators needed the creativity to generate thousands of ideas and the pragmatism to test them all–both of which are key Hamiltonian virtues. But the show only works because they possessed a quality that their subject lacked: self-restraint. Again and again they sacrificed little pleasures (a beautiful melody, a big laugh) in pursuit of an overarching goal.

“The Adams Administration” demonstrates Hamilton’s lack of discipline and Lin and Tommy’s abundance of it. Hamilton despised Washington’s successor, John Adams, and the contempt was mutual. Adams insulted Hamilton’s parentage, calling him “a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” and belittled his morals by declaring that Hamilton’s ambitions were due to “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.”

Once Washington retired to Mt. Vernon, there was nobody around to quell Hamilton’s destructive (and self-destructive) tendencies. In 1800, he unleashed a scathing 54-page pamphlet attacking Adams. Hamilton wreaked havoc on his own prospects and the Federalist Party that the two men led.

Lin’s original version of the song included all of the lyrics printed on page 224, an explosion of pure fury, which must have been even more fun to deliver than it was to hear. But the song asked the audience to spend two minutes thinking about a character they never get to meet. For the final version, Lin cut all but his last two lines. Hamilton would have been wise to do the same.