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WHAT IS A LEGACY? Or, a Sketch of O P E N I N G N I G H T, AND WHAT CAME AFTER, AND WHAT MIGHT COME NEXT

Lin couldn’t see the people, but the people could see Lin. He entered at the back of the stage and strode all the way to the front. “What’s your name, man?” asked Leslie, and he replied,”Alexander Hamilton.”The audience roared. For 27 seconds he stood there, bombarded by a crowd he couldn’t see. (Afterwards, he compared the sensation to death: the bright lights, the screaming, the void.) Finally he gave a slight nod to signal that they had better let him finish the song. It was August 6, 2015, and the opening night performance of Hamilton had begun.

The first time Lin performed that song publicly, there had been a few hundred people in front of him at the White House, and he had only Lac by his side. Now there were 1,300 people in the audience, 20 other performers onstage, 10 musicians in the pit, and a dozen dressers and stage managers backstage. All of them turned the dial all the way up that night, trying to make it the best possible show for their families and the various VIPs. It wasn’t the most technically precise performance, but it was the most impassioned: “The Room Where It Happens,” which had grown into precisely the showstopper that Andy hoped it would be, got applause before it ended.

Nearly three hours later, Lin exited the way he had entered, disappearing upstage after the duel. But Hamilton’s death doesn’t end his story. The last song in the show captures the bitter historical truth that every one of Hamilton’s enemies outlived him, and they did all they could to efface his memory. By ending with Hamilton’s afterlife, not his death, the show asks us to think about what we leave behind when we’re gone: It invites us to think about legacies.

Hamilton thought about them a lot. So does Lin. “I think we all dream–or it might be just me–that when we pass on, the people we love are going to keep us alive in some way, whether that’s talking about us or keeping our picture up,” he says. He thinks about his grandfather, who lived in a small town in Puerto Rico, occupying a position roughly equivalent to George Bailey’s in It’s a Wonderful Life. When he died, crowds of mourners filled the streets. (“Like the beginning of Evita,” Lin says.) He thinks, too, about the legacy of his father, Luis, who has spent decades as a political consultant and activist, who has helped to get mayors elected, who was a constant presence around the show during its development. “My dad will shut down New York when he dies, or at least Latino New York, political New York,” Lin says.

As the show depicts, there was widespread grief when Hamilton died, but it passed quickly, leaving his legacy to be protected by one person: Eliza. She lived for 50 years after his death, and devoted them to maintaining his reputation, to publishing his papers, to reminding future generations of what he had achieved. Serving his legacy didn’t just mean commemorating him, though: It also meant continuing his work. She crusaded against slavery, as Hamilton had. And this widow of an orphan helped to found the first private orphanage in New York. That’s the real power of a legacy: We tell stories of people who are gone because like any powerful stories, they have the potential to inspire, and to change the world.

A new thought about legacies struck Lin on opening night, and several hundred people got to watch it happen. He presented that day’s Ham4Ham show, the short performance that one or several company members (or surprise guests) give outside the theater to entertain people who had entered the lottery for front-row seats. In honor of opening night, he returned to the place where his Hamilton experience had started: He read the first few pages of Ron Chernow’s book, an account of Eliza’s lonely struggle on behalf of Alexander’s legacy. He had read these passages dozens of times. But that day, he started to cry.

“Her whole life was to have her husband’s story be told, and we’re about to open this big honking Broadway musical about him,” he says. On opening night, standing under the Rodgers’s marquee, he realized that if Eliza’s struggle was the element of Hamilton’s story that had inspired him the most, then the show itself was a part of her legacy. To borrow an image from his script, she had planted seeds in a garden that she didn’t get to see, and one of them turned out to be Hamilton.

“Is the ghost of Alexander Hamilton nonplussed that a Nuyorican kid has written a giant musical about his life? Probably!” says Lin. “He’s gonna go, What’s a Nuyorican?’”

A caravan of double-decker buses was ferrying the audience across town and down the West Side Highway when the reviews went online. The consensus was that Hamilton had grown more polished and more powerful in its uptown incarnation, that it was “radical,”“stunning in its audaciousness,”“vibrantly democratic,” and “audaciously ambitious.” Somehow it really did live up to its mountainous hype. Nobody seemed to mind that it wasn’t 15 minutes shorter than it had been at the Public.

The buses deposited everybody at Chelsea Piers, a sports and fitness complex along the Hudson River. For Jeffrey, the choice of Pier 60, the hangar-sized party space, had been instinctive: He has been throwing opening-night parties there since Rent back in 1996. But since he thinks that Hamilton is the best show he has produced, he was motivated to make this the best opening-night party he has thrown. It meant, among other things, that only one band would do. The Roots, the best live act in hip-hop, tore the place up.

“One love, one game, one desire,” rapped Black Thought. “One flame, one bonfire, let it burn higher.”

At the end of hourlong set, he looked over the dancing crowd, several hundred strong. “Where’s my man? Lin-Manuel Miranda.”

Lin was standing directly in front the stage, wearing a dark suit, his hair in a ponytail: Travolta in Pulp Fiction, but Puerto Rican. Hands pushed him onto the stage. For the third time that day, he turned to face an audience. He looked delighted. Also alarmed. Black Thought handed him a mic, Questlove lay down a beat, and Lin’s freestyling instincts kicked in. “I worked for seven years, these are the fruits,” he rapped. “I’m standing onstage with the fucking Roots!” Everybody screamed.

Rapping alongside giants of hip-hop was only the most visible sign of how radically Lin’s life had changed. “This puts my dreams to shame,” he said of the whole experience in a laudatory segment on 60 Minutes, the existence of which underscores the point he was making. Thanks to Hamilton, the word “genius” started popping up in front of his name before he was named a MacArthur “genius” fellow. Extraordinarily eminent people started inviting him to do things, to go places, to write this, to say that. Performing seven shows a week can be a grind, he says, but it also grants him seven pockets of peace in his hurricane of a life.

Many of his castmates can tell similar stories. For all the subtle, long-aborning things that will change because of Hamilton, the revolution in some of their lives has been immediate and profound. By opening night, Pippa, Leslie, Renée, Daveed, and the rest were becoming stars. People wanted to know about the clothes they wore, where they ate, the kind of music they listened to. They appeared on magazine covers, they went to stadiums to sing the national anthem.

“I get to be in rooms I have no business being in,” Anthony says. He can’t put into words how this feels. He mimes his forehead blowing up.

A voice on the p.a. system invited everybody to move onto the long platform that runs along the edge of Pier 60, facing the Hudson. A thousand people streamed out into the dark. Considering the story that brought everybody together that night, walking out there felt like a pilgrimage. If you had been standing on this exact spot in the early hours of July 11, 1804, you would have seen Alexander Hamilton being rowed from a Manhattan pier (downstream, on your left) to the dueling grounds of Weehawken (upstream, on your right). In fact, if you had waved to him, he might have waved back, for we know that he was looking at New York on that journey. One of his last observations before Burr shot him was to reflect on his city and how much it had grown, and his great hopes for the people who would find their way there, as he had. The crowd out there on this night was a happy jumble of celebrities, producers, spouses, press, and friends. Lin and Tommy were laughing about something, or everything. Andy stood behind his wife, Elly, hugging her and beaming: They had learned that the chemo had worked, and that their daughter, Sofia, was going to be fine.

A few people pointed out something unusual about this opening-night crowd: Lots and lots of parents of Hamilton cast members had come to celebrate what their children had made. Lin’s mother and father came from Upper Manhattan, and Anthony’s came from Brooklyn. Jasmine’s father came from Manhattan and her mother from upstate. Neil’s parents drove down from Buffalo. Those were just the New Yorkers.

Stephanie’s parents came from New Jersey. So did Oak’s mom. Pippa’s parents came from Chicago, as did Austin’s. Carleigh’s mother came up from Delray Beach, Florida, and Ephraim’s came from West Palm Beach, and Ariana’s came from Raleigh, North Carolina. Leslie’s parents came up from Philly; Sasha’s from Macon, Georgia. Renée’s father came from Detroit and her mother from Houston. Daveed’s mother came from Northern California, Andrew’s came from Southern, and Voltaire’s came from Bakersfield, which is in-between. Chris’s mother came from his hometown, Cairo, Illinois, and Alysha’s from hers, Dallas, and Seth’s from his, in Ohio.

Plot those places on a map, and you’d see that the company drew on extraordinarily talented performers who hailed from all over America. They worked insanely hard to get to opening night. And the parents who came to cheer them on sacrificed God-knows-what to make it possible for them to have a career in the first place. Every performance of Hamilton features 21 performers giving 21 performances, and each one is a legacy in its own right. No wonder it was such a good party.

All those mothers and fathers would have one more story to tell when they got home: Jeffrey had ordered up fireworks. In a final flurry of creativity, Lin had put together a playlist to go with them. He mixed up all sorts of styles, but he put special emphasis on New York anthems of every variety: old ones like Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “New York, New York,” new ones like Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind,” even a very new one, “The Schuyler Sisters.” It sounded right at home in that company. The music started. The show began. Everybody cheered and lots of people sang along. The sky flashed and the river turned colors. It looked like the Fourth of July.