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XXvi

IN WHICH THE HERO BLOWS UP HIS SPOT, with the Assistance of HOWELL BINKLEY’S LIGHTS and OTHER FORMS of INGENIOUS STAGECRAFT

When lin told the audience at the White House that Alexander Hamilton “embodies the word’s ability to make a difference,” he was thinking of all the good things that language can do.

Hamilton reminds us that the American Revolution was a writers’ revolution, that the founders created the nation one paragraph at a time. But words can also wreak havoc. They also tear down. The heart of Act Two is a sequence of four songs that illustrate the destructive potential of language, and the perplexing fact that Alexander Hamilton never used words more devastatingly than when he used them against himself.

The sequence of songs almost a play-within-a play is shaped by Lin’s historical compression. On December 15, 1792, three congressmen confronted Hamilton with what they thought was evidence that he had misused Treasury funds, only to discover that they had stumbled upon very different offense: that he’d had a three-year affair with Maria Reynolds, and paid her husband to keep it clandestinely going. Those charges stayed private until 1797, when a journalist who was friendly with Jefferson leveled charges of improper financial speculation against Hamilton and Reynolds’s husband. Feeling what he called a “desire to destroy this slander completely,”

Hamilton published a shockingly detailed pamphlet describing the whole affair, trying to salvage his professional integrity even at the expense of shaming his wife and children.

In Lin’s compact version of the story, the three politicians who confront Hamilton in “We Know” are Jefferson, Madison, and Burr, and the decision to pre-empt their attack comes almost immediately after the meeting. Both acts of dramatic license make it easier for the audience to grasp the bewildering truth about America’s first sex scandal: Hamilton made a conscious decision to write something that blew up his own life.

That decision was dramatic, but it wasn’t necessarily theatrical: A man scratches parchment with a quill, somebody else flips through a pamphlet–where’s the visual interest in that? Tommy’s challenge, as he put it, was to find a vivid way to show “how a couple strokes of the pen can ricochet around the world and explode.” He and his designers spent tech rehearsals at the Rodgers experimenting with new and more potent ways of depicting this crisis in Hamilton’s life. It took cleverness to make that play-within-a-play a theatrical climax of the show, but even more than that, it took extraordinary integration, many veteran artists working in harmony. In “Hurricane,” the second of the four songs, Lin depicts Hamilton looking all the way back to his childhood, trying to find some way out of his mess. A prior collaboration gave Tommy and Andy an idea for how to stage this introspection. In a production of The Wiz, they had dramatized a tornado by having a little model house get blown to pieces and scattered around. “Here it became not just the things that make up a house but the things he was made of,” says Tommy. As Hamilton reflects on his past, figures from his life whirl around him: his mother, his friends, his enemies. Howell Binkley gave the song an eerie dreamlike power.

After 20 years as a professional lighting designer, and more than 40 shows on Broadway, he called Hamilton “the biggest challenge of my career in terms of storytelling.” There are four dozen songs in the show, and many of them skip from one part of the story to another: It required immense resourcefulness to generate hundreds of different looks. Luckily, as Tommy has found in his four collaborations with Howell, “he is incredibly fast.” In “Hurricane,” Howell used purplish light at center stage and whirling instruments around the perimeter to make it seem as though Hamilton were in the eye of a swirling storm. Lin says the sensation of standing in the middle of these unsettling effects is a distilled version of how he feels throughout the show: “I am staying in my lane and doing what I’m supposed to do while everyone is doing what they do at the height of their abilities, and if I move to the left or right, I’ll get hit with a desk.”

When Hamilton has decided what to do, and the third song in the sequence begins, the action “needs to detonate, and it needs to be messy,” according to Tommy. Bright white flares from six powerful lights–stronger instruments than Howell had downtown–fire the opening salvo. (“A nice sledgehammer effect,” in the words of his associate designer, Ryan O’Gara.) Up to this point in the show, Nevin holds back on what his monster sound system can do, saving its extremes for when he really needs them. “The Reynolds Pamphlet” is when he really needs them. “The Earth does move there–Hamilton’s whole world has moved,” he says. You don’t just hear the murky, snarly opening chords of the song: You feel them. As the pamphlet circulates, and Howell’s lights flash, and Nevin’s speakers boom, the ensemble dancers erupt. “They just go buck wild and play,” says associate choreographer Stephanie Klemons. Some of them spin a pamphlet in front of their faces as if it’s the steering wheel of an out-of-control car. King George joins in the evil glee, taunting Hamilton to his face. Jefferson flings pamphlets like he’s dealing a pack of cards, or tossing Benjamins in a P. Diddy video. He even hands a pamphlet to Lac in the orchestra pit. For a delirious few seconds, every kind of stage effect adds up to create the sense that with a few ill-advised strokes of his quill, Hamilton has put himself in a living nightmare. Then, in a heartbeat, the stage grows still. “All that’s left is the remains of that explosion, the rubble,” says Nevin.

Eliza steps into a pool of patterned moonlight to sing the last song in the sequence, “Burn.” Lin’s lyrics convey Eliza’s bewilderment, the shock that she must have felt at her betrayal. “Indeed my angelic Betsey, I would not for the world do any thing that would hazard your esteem,” Hamilton had vowed during their courtship. “’Tis to me a jewel of inestimable price & I think you may rely I shall never make you blush.” The staging contributes to her feeling of shame.

When Pippa stands in the wings, waiting to enter, she can hear the fury and chaos of “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” the laughing and jeering onstage and in the audience. “I like to imagine that’s the feeling Eliza had when she read the pamphlet for the first time,” she says. Paul Tazewell designed her gown to emphasize her innocence. “The very open neckline suggests a vulnerability and allows the audience access to her emotionally,” he says. “Pippa, that’s a good look for you,” Tommy told her one day during tech. “Moonlight. Tazewell gown. Now all you need is fire.” She got it. The sequence of songs ends with Eliza taking revenge for what her husband had done, and what he had written. What retribution could be crueler or more fitting? She burned the letters he had written to her–she destroyed his words.