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S TA K E S I S H I G H; O R, WHAT HAPPENED AT LINCOLN CENTER AND WHAT CAME AFTER, Including Lunch with JEFFREY SELLER

When lin accepted lincoln center’s offer to perform an American Songbook concert, he and Tommy viewed it as a festive, freewheeling gig.

Tommy recalls thinking: “We can have a band, so we can orchestrate some of the songs. So let’s get seven or eight of our friends, and let’s just throw a party, and everybody else here is invited to that party.” The surprise was who showed up: On January 11, 2012, all 450 seats in Lincoln Center’s Allen Room were filled. Plenty of friends and collaborators were in the crowd, but so were members of the press and some heavyweights of New York theater. It was not the last time that the public’s interest in Hamilton would catch its creators off-guard.

Lin opened the program with a set of songs that he called “the DNA of my brain.” These were formative hits by some of his favorite rappers: The Notorious B.I.G., Talib Kweli, Eminem. Then he and his friends performed all the Hamilton songs he had produced so far, a catalog that had swelled rapidly in the half-year since the Ars Nova benefit, when he and Tommy had started working on them in earnest.

But what were those songs, exactly? Stephen Holden’s review for The New York Times captured the audience’s puzzlement–and its delight. “Is The Hamilton Mixtape, from which 12 numbers were performed, a future Broadway musical? A concept album? A multimedia extravaganza in search of a platform? Does it even matter? What it is, is hot.”

To Jeffrey Seller, the answer was obvious. “It became crystal clear to everyone in the room that it was a Broadway show,” he says. Lin had played a few of the songs for him before that night. The chance to hear them in order, with a rapt live audience, was a revelation. “I thought, Here’s the show. The musical has emerged. This makes dramatic sense, and is scintillating,” he recalls. “Even in a concert format, the story was taking shape.”

A few weeks later, he took Lin to lunch. “If you want me to produce your show, I’d love to produce your show,” he said. A few weeks after that, he sent an email to Lin and Tommy, offering to be a “passionate advocate, cheerleader, sounding board, constructive critic, and barker.”

Some Broadway producers spend years mastering one of those tasks before stretching to do the others; Jeffrey had been doing them all since before he learned to shave. He grew up in Oak Park, a working-class suburb of Detroit.

People called his neighborhood “Cardboard Village,” because the houses had asphalt shingles instead of bricks.

When he was in fourth grade, his synagogue strained bounds of holy writ and copyright law to stage a Purim play up that set Queen Esther’s story to the score of South Pacific. (“Bali Ha’i may call you” became “Mordechai they called me.”) Theater grabbed him and never let go. He went home and wrote a play of his own, Adventureland. Then he joined his community theater, thinking of being an actor. Pretty quickly after that, he discovered it would be more fun to choose the plays than to perform them–and to stage them, promote them, and raise money for them. He still wasn’t old enough to drive.

He dreamed of New York, a city he lacked the money to visit, let alone call home. But after college he made the leap. In the mid-‘90s, he teamed up with Kevin McCollum to produce a rock opera almost as daring as that Purim play: Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Their follow-ups included the audacious puppet musical Avenue Q and the salsa/hip-hop breakthrough In the Heights. All three shows won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

When Lin and Tommy had their lunches and phone calls with Jeffrey after the Lincoln Center concert, they liked the way that he talked about the Hamilton project.

“The things that he was saying about the show really lined up with what we had in mind,” says Lin. They agreed that Jeffrey should produce the show. In summer 2012, he optioned Hamilton for the company that he had formed earlier that year to strike out on his own, as a solo lead producer: He called it Adventureland.

The American Songbook concert put Hamilton on the path to Broadway. It also offered the first glimpse of the show’s ambitions, the way it would challenge audiences to think differently about Broadway. “Just as we continue to forget that immigrants are the backbone of the country, we forget that musical theater is a mongrel art form,” Lin says. Broadway absorbed jazz, then it absorbed rock, but it hadn’t absorbed hip-hop, even though he saw the enormous potential of fusing those sounds. To make the connection explicit, he opened the Songbook program by combining two iconic songs about New York City: “Another Hundred People,” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s: “Empire State of Mind.”

That fusion of styles and traditions permeates all of bricks. Hamilton, but it appears in super-concentrated form early in Act One. Lin knew he would need a song to set up King George III’s big number, “You’ll Be Back.” He also needed to depict the fiery brilliance of the young Alexander Hamilton. We’re going to demonstrate that he fights in the war, but how do we demonstrate that he’s quick-witted and fighting in a war of ideas? he wondered. He wrote the jauntiest tune he could imagine for a British loyalist to sing: drums, fifes, harpsichord–“getting my Bach on, essentially,” in Lin’s words. This was pretty much what an audience expected a musical about the nation’s founding to sound like. But Lin added a hip-hop twist.

In the 1770s, the real-life Alexander Hamilton used a pair of pamphlets to eviscerate the real-life Samuel Seabury, a leading loyalist. The stage Hamilton would do it with a rap. Lin had been listening to an ingenious tribute that Joell Ortiz had recorded for the greatest Puerto Rican MC, Big Pun. Ortiz had kept all the rhyming syllables from a classic Pun song, but he incorporated them into new lyrics that paid homage to the late rapper. “It was a weirdly casually brilliant a way of doing a tribute,” Lin says.

In “Farmer Refuted,” Lin weaponized the idea, as he illustrates in the annotations. And, in an added display of virtuosity, Hamilton did it in Seabury’s waltz tempo. Only rarely does a rapper depart from the usual 4/4 for another time signature. ( Jay Z’s “My 1st Song” is the rare track in 6/8.) If they dropped mics in 1776, Hamilton would drop one here.