فصل 04

IV

IN WHICH THE CHARACTER OF NEW YORK CITY IS CONSIDERED IN ITS MUSICAL & SCENIC ASPECTS BY REFERENCE TO DAVID KORINS and a Curious Episode of HISTORICAL VERTIGO

The founders tended to be country boys. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and many other key figures of the revolution hailed from, and frequently returned to, estates and farms out of town. But like most of us living in America today, Alexander Hamilton called a city home. New York City, to be exact.

Just as Hamilton is the prototype of the immigrant striver (hard-working, ambitious, desperate to prove himself ), he is also the model New Yorker: opinionated, hyperverbal, always on the make. It’s no wonder that John Adams, who despised Hamilton, also despised the town and its citizens: “They talk very loud, very fast, and all together,” he complained before retreating to Massachusetts. Nor is it a surprise that hip-hop, which took root in Hamilton’s city like an orchid in a swamp, suits his life so well.

Before a performance of Hamilton reaches its 15-minute mark, Lin has planted the show squarely in New York. “The Schuyler Sisters,” his R&B ode to his hometown, arrived relatively late in the show’s development. Tommy liked the songs that Lin had written for Eliza and Angelica Schuyler, and wondered if there might be a way to introduce them sooner. The result is what Lin calls “a New York anthem.” It evokes the mixed blessings of living here: There are rich people and poor people, work is on everybody’s minds, sex is in the air, and violence is a constant possibility–in this case, a looming war with Britain. (Also–an absolute necessity for a New York anthem–it offers a fanfare of triumphalism. With the bluntness of a lifelong Manhattanite, Lin comes right out and calls it “the greatest city in the world.”)

In other words, Lin wrote a song about Hamilton’s New York that reveals it to be largely the same as our own New York. That poses a special challenge for a production of the show. Instead of helping theatergoers to make sense of a faraway historical land, they have to recognize the city that’s right outside the door. By the time Lin wrote this song, Hamilton was on its way to its world premiere production. It meant that Tommy had already found the collaborator who would work with him the most to crack this puzzle.

David Korins has a long string of Broadway credits, a handful of collaborations with the Hamilton creative team, and the experience of being Kanye West’s creative director, but he still prepared like crazy for his interview with Tommy: He listened to Lin’s demos obsessively, sketched ideas furiously, and even did a scene breakdown, something he normally does after he gets a job. He felt a fierce connection to the material: its ambition, its drive.

“We all have something to prove here,” Korins told Tommy in his interview. “I am not going to throw away my shot.” He got the job.

Listening to all of Lin’s demos–his many, many demos–told Korins that he couldn’t possibly depict all of the show’s settings realistically. He would have to suggest, evoke, imply. Plus, the action had to move almost instantly from one scene to the next. He had an early hunch that images of construction might help to unlock the visual world of the show. After all, the show was about builders–the men and women who created the nation. Korins imagined the Capitol dome being split in half, its beams and rafters exposed.

Research revealed that there was something special about carpenters in New York and other coastal towns in Alexander Hamilton’s era: Many of them were shipbuilders. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, told Korins and Tommy that his house in Brooklyn had been built by 19th-century laborers using techniques they had learned on the docks. Korins began to imagine immigrants coming to the New World, landing on unfamiliar shores, and building cities out of their ships.

How do you evoke then and now? How can scenery be both general and specific? How can a set be substantial yet nimble? Korins struck these balances by creating an onstage world that might have looked familiar to those early American workers. There’s lots of wood and masonry, all sorts of joists and beams. Part of it looks like scaffolding, part like the hull of a ship. There are burn marks on the wooden beams to mimic the effect of sawtooth friction. Coiled ropes are everywhere, along with details drawn from the corners of modern-day New York that remain truest to Hamilton’s time. The set’s chandeliers are inspired by the fixtures at Fraunce Tavern, in Lower Manhattan, where George Washington bid farewell to his officers. Korins visited MorrisJumel Mansion, which served as one of Washington’s headquarters during the war, and remains miraculously preserved in what Lin calls “this weird Brigadoon in the middle of Washington Heights.”

“The Schuyler Sisters,” in its writing and its staging, lets us glimpse a nation being built. In a town square, as people disseminate ideas–pamphlets, flyers, arguments–we watch a city going up around them. Members of the ensemble sling planks and boards around Korins’s set while they scope the Schuyler ladies, who scope them right back. There’s motion, energy, and lots of people-watching–all facilitated by the balcony that

“It looked like New York City–not in 1776 or in 2015, but some idealized version of itself, independent of time, where people of many races and backgrounds dance together.” rings three sides of the stage. Squint your eyes just right, and thanks to all the period touches, you could be looking at a Brooklyn restaurant today.

Zigzagging back and forth through history this way can make you dizzy–you can get vertigo from moving through time as well as space–but it’s a lovely disorientation. One day, as the show prepared for Broadway, the cast assembled onstage to sing “The Schuyler Sisters.” Because they were only doing a soundcheck, it didn’t matter how they moved, or if they moved at all, so everybody stood around. But as Lin’s song took hold, they began to dance–separately or together, however they pleased. All at once, Korins’s set stopped looking like the scenery of a Broadway musical and started to look like a club. It looked like New York City–not in 1776 or in 2015, but some idealized version of itself, independent of time, where people of many races and backgrounds dance together.

The actors didn’t have an audience that day and didn’t need one: They had been through a lot of ups and downs by that point. Twenty young New Yorkers sang Lin’s words to–and for–each other: “Look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now.”