مقدمه

INTRODUCTION OR PLAN OF THE WORK

Late on a hazy night in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda told me he wanted to write a hip-hop concept album about the life of Alexander Hamilton. For a second I thought we were sharing a drunken joke. We were probably drunk, but he wasn’t joking. We had bonded a year earlier over a shared love of hip-hop and theater, though that evening was the first time we were meeting. When Lin’s first show, In the Heights, had its Off-Broadway premiere in 2007, I was the drama critic at New York magazine, where I had repeatedly argued for the enormous but neglected possibilities of hip-hop in the theater. (“Hip-hop can save the theater”; began one of those essays, “I am not kidding.”) Rap, it seemed to me, wasn’t like rock or jazz or any other kind of pop music: The lyrical density and storytelling ingenuity I heard on my headphones seemed closer to the verbal energy of the great plays of the past than almost anything I saw onstage. This enthusiasm wasn’t widely shared. “Don’t hang back among the brutes,” one of my senior colleagues advised me after reading one such essay, offering an erudite but demoralizing quotation from A Streetcar Named Desire.

After many disappointments and false alarms, Heights had made me sit up in my aisle seat: Here’s the guy. Lin’s show about immigrants in Upper Manhattan fused salsa, hip-hop, and traditional Broadway ballads to make something old and new, familiar and surprising. Best of all, he made the leap that virtually nobody else had made, using hip-hop to tell a story that had nothing to do with hip-hop–using it as form, not content. Lin thought my review grasped what he had been trying to do. The show’s publicist fixed us up. Hence the late-night drinks and the long talk about which of our favorite MCs should play Thomas Jefferson.

In the summer of 2011, after I’d left the magazine business and joined the artistic staff of the Public Theater, my boss, Oskar Eustis, asked me to propose some artists and projects. The first artist who came to mind was Lin, and the first project was his Hamilton idea. Lin and Oskar agreed to meet; Lin sent us demos; we went to Lin’s concerts. Two years later, Oskar and Jeffrey Seller–the lead producer of what had by now ceased to be an album and had turned into a stage musical–agreed to develop the show at the Public.

The opening night party there– another late, hazy conversation–is when Lin proposed that I write this book. It tells the stories of two revolutions. There’s the American Revolution of the 18th century, which flares to life in Lin’s libretto, the complete text of which is published here, with his annotations. There’s also the revolution of the show itself: a musical that changes the way that Broadway sounds, that alters who gets to tell the story of our founding, that lets us glimpse the new, more diverse America rushing our way. The fact that Lin wrote the show largely in sequence means that this book can trace the two revolutions in tandem. The story of the show’s creation begins at the White House on May 12, 2009, when he performed the first song for the first time. It ends with opening night on Broadway, August 6, 2015, just after he completed the final scenes of the show.

The account of what happened in the intervening six years is based on what I saw in script meetings, set meetings, presentations, workshops, dressing-room hangouts, and at some excellent parties. It also draws on interviews with more than 40 people close to the show and on timely glimpses into their notebooks, inboxes, and Twitter feeds–Lin’s in particular. All of the listening and watching and talking yielded three large surprises.

The first is that while Hamilton looks seamless and effortless and inevitable, it was none of those things. It could have been–and, at several points, almost was–a very different show. Thousands of choices and a fair bit luck shaped the result. The same can be said of the 18th century revolution: inevitable in retrospect, but unprecedented and all but impossible to imagine ahead of time.

Second, the narrative of the show’s creation amplifies the show’s themes, like the one about how stories harden into history. A few hours before the opening night performance on Broad-way, sitting in his dressing room, Lin and I realized that the tale we’d been telling about the show’s origins–the already mythic account of how the idea came to him poolside in Mexico–wasn’t entirely right.

Lin got the idea from reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, and he read the book in Mexico–that much is true. But our late-night conversation about a hip-hop version of Hamilton’s life happened a week before he started that trip. After much baffled poring over emails, we realized he must have read a few chapters as soon as he bought the book, and that that was enough for him to come up with the idea, and even with a title, which was already in place by the first night we met: The Hamilton Mixtape. If we can’t keep our own histories straight, then the process of legacy formation that obsessed Hamilton and his contemporaries is even more fraught than we think, and the results more suspect.

Lastly, the secret history of Hamilton, if anything about the most heralded show in a generation can be regarded as secret, is that Lin’s uniquely singlehanded achievement (as composer, lyricist, librettist, and star) required the artistry of dozens of very gifted people to be realized. A bunch of people from a bunch of back grounds had to come together to make it work, and they did this so well that an even bigger bunch of people from yet more backgrounds flocked to see it. Alexander Hamilton would have admired the unifying power of the show based on his life, and would have felt vindication. Henry Cabot Lodge, who edited a collection of Hamilton’s papers, wrote, “The dominant purpose of Hamilton’s life was the creation of a national sentiment, and thereby the making of a great and powerful nation from the discordant elements furnished by thirteen jarring States.”

The widely acclaimed musical that draws from the breadth of America’s culture and shows its audience what we share doesn’t just dramatize Hamilton’s revolution: It continues it.

The comparison might strike you as farfetched. What (you might be asking) can a Broadway musical possibly add to the legacy of a Founding Father–a giant of our national life, a war hero, a scholar, a statesman? What’s one little play, or even one very big play, next to all that?

But there is more than one way to change the world. To secure their freedom, the polyglot American colonists had to come together, and stick together, in the face of enormous adversity.To live in a new way, they first had to think and feel in a new way. It took guns and ships to win the American Revolution, but it also required pamphlets and speeches–and at least one play.

In the desolate winter of 1777-‘78, General George Washington led the freezing, starving remnants of his army to Valley Forge. During that bleak encampment, when the prospects for American independence were as feeble as they would ever be, what did he do to strengthen his troops’ resolve to defeat tyranny and secure their freedom? He arranged a production of his favorite play, Joseph Addison’s Cato, which is about a man who gave his life to do just that. ­jm