So I heard Peter Sellars, great stage director, opera director, tell a group of Harvard students
once "you will never see the world more clearly than you see it right now."
What would you say to young artists looking at the current political moment and searching
for ways to create the next generation of Pulitzer-worthy work?
That is the question, right?
"May you live in interesting times," boy do we live in interesting times.
For me it always gets back to story.
I think if you set out to say "I'm going to write a poem about the injustice of voter
fraud, I'm going to write a musical about voter fraud and rigged elections," I'm telling
you, it's going to be boring.
It's going to be boring because you're starting with theme instead of with story.
I fell in love with Hamilton's story and in chasing his story, it allowed me to write
about all these other themes because they are inherent in his life.
The notion of power, the notion of the immigrant narrative, and how "immigrant" has positive
connotations in our society just as often as it has negative connotations in our society.
There are the notions of who gets to make the decisions in our country and the limits
of representational democracy.
If I set out to write a show about that, it would be so boring.
But if I'm writing about Hamilton and his friend Burr, and Burr gets locked out of a
dinner, suddenly we can talk about all that stuff and it's exciting because the personal
is political.
So, I would tell the storytellers living in these incredibly interesting times: find the
story that moves you and changes you and allows you to see different perspectives because
if the story's compelling, we'll go with you regardless of what the politics inherent are.
That's kind of, I believe, your responsibility as a storyteller, especially in the theater:
is to give people the time of their lives and tell a great story well.
Everything else is gravy.
What do you tell others who want to do what you do?
Start writing now.
I tell them to start writing now.
It takes a long time to find your own voice.
It takes a lot of reading things you love and seeing things you love, and reading things
you hate and seeing things you hate.
I think the beginning of your work as an artist, I think it begins when you imbibe art and
are able to critically say why you love something or why you don't love something, why something
doesn't work for you.
In doing so, you figure out your own tastes and you figure out what kind of work you want
to make.
So, I think in the early stages of everyone's work you're chasing your heroes, you're chasing
literary styles of your heroes, the themes that your heroes explore because they're the
ones that resonate with you, and in falling short of those and chasing them, you eventually
stumble into what you sound like and the kind of art that you create.
You know, I can point fingers and Jonathan Larson and I can point fingers at Sondheim
and so many artists in the theater realm, but also hip-hop artists like Big Pun and
Biggie whose focus on storytelling and rhyme schemes within their storytelling made me
want to be a better lyricist.
And so you chase those, and you fall short until you become yourself.
So, Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow talks about, recalls a scene where he goes to your
rehearsal studio for the first time and what he remembers is that he was shocked, is the
word he uses, to see black and Latino actors cast in the roles of the founding fathers.
When I picked up Ron's book and I got to the part where Hamilton writes this essay and
the essay is so good that people take up a collection to get him off the island, that's
when I had the moment, where that's the most hip-hop thing I've ever heard.
Because that's what my favorite hip-hop artists do.
They write about their struggle, they write about their circumstances and if you're good
enough you ascend to this other level, you make it out of those circumstances.
That notion of writing your way out was sort of an early epiphany for me as I was reading
Ron's book.
And then for the rest of Ron's book I wasn't picturing the literal founders, I was picturing
what is the R&B artist that has the moral authority of George Washington?
What does Jefferson sound like when he singing?
That impulse of, let's make Hamilton's voice the voice, and hip-hop, the voice of the revolution,
and then cast all the other roles accordingly, I was never picturing the literal founders.
We don't need help in knowing what the original founders look like.
If you have this notion in your head of George Washington and he's this unstoppable man standing
up in a boat crossing a river and he's the man of steel, what does it mean to you when
the first time you meet him in our show, he is a strapping man of color and he's about
to lose New York?
Suddenly we're not picturing the guy crossing the river anymore, we're engaged in him as
one of us.
And by casting our founders the same way our country looks now, I think it helps eliminate
differences between those perspectives and gets you to hear them in a new way because
you're not hearing them through the guys who look like the guys on our money.
So, if ever there was an anthem to power, it's "The Room Where It Happens".
Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison negotiating the location of the nation's capitol, and
oh, by the way, the future of our financial system, and Aaron Burr standing on the outside.
There's some sympathy for Burr in this moment, though...
Absolutely.
...as this outsider without access to power which is the way a lot of Americans feel.
The last three couplets of that song are really all of us aren't they?
It's, you know, the art of the compromise.
Hold your nose and close your eyes, if you're doing it right, you're not really happy with
the way it turns out.
You have to give something.
That's really forgotten in modern politics.
I think we live in a time when you can curate your reality so well.
You unfollow your friend with a differing opinion on Facebook, you block differing opinions
on Twitter.
I know I do.
So what you see in our politics is that if it's not what I agreed with then it's rigged.
It's my way or the highway.
And the art of compromise is becoming a lost art.
And so, what's the next lyric?
"We want our leaders to save the day, but we don't get a say in what they trade away."
Also very true.
And "we dream of a brand new start but we dream in the dark for the most part."
We elect leaders who do things we don't agree with, but we hope we elect leaders that have
our interest at heart.
They don't have to.
More often than not, we find they don't.
And that's an ongoing fight.
I think Burr along those lines vents our frustrations at that.
Ron Chernow says that you used every fact that you found in the book, that you left
nothing out.
I'm wondering, for you, what was the process of choosing, of winnowing, and maybe not even
so much what to include but what to leave out?
We leave out lots of stuff because we are working on momentum and we are working on
how do you go on a ride, how do you go on a ride with this guy and particularly Hamilton
and Burr?
Who are these twin characters.
Twin souls who sort of circle each other their whole lives until they tragically meet at
the end.
There's a lot of compression that needs to happen.
Hamilton was friends with John Laurens, he was friends with Hercules Mulligan, he was
friends with Lafayette.
They weren't all hanging out in a bar and just waiting for him to walk in a room but:
I gotta go!
We've got to meet our friends and we've got to get on a journey.
It's enormous fun to get the match for the compression that still gets the match for
the essence of it.
There are these two songs that are speaking to each other across time and it's about,
on the one hand, giving up power, on the other hand losing power.
One being "One Last Time," which is George Washington telling Hamilton "I'm not running
again."
Then there's the song "What Comes Next?"
And this is King George who desperately clung to power and control is now commiserating
with the new young nation about the terrible burden, really, of being powerful.
There's seriously a Harvard Business Review case study being done between those two songs.
What is the lesson about giving up versus having power taken from you?
That's a fantastic question.
What was fascinating to me about "One Last Time" was, so what are we going to focus on
with this?
We're going to focus on the revolutionaries becoming empowered or are we going to focus
on Washington's, what I think is Washington's more audacious act, which is stepping down.
And I remember Samantha Power, whose our U.S. ambassador came to see the show and she said
"I have so many heads of state that I would love to bring to see this show just to have
them watch 'One Last Time'" because one of the trappings of power is that you become
convinced that the problems of your country are uniquely yours to solve.
That's the rationalization.
Heads of state go "well, we've got a lot of stuff in motion and we've really got to see
it through to the end."
And that's how you get to dictatorship, that's how you get to despotism, that's how you get
to tyranny, and that's how you get to a mayor's third term when you've got two-term limits.
So, you convince yourself that I alone can solve this problem when the faith needs to
be in the institution.
The institution itself and the process by which we get our next leader.
The political is personal, that's how we get away with it in our show and that's why we
can get away with having a King George character in our show with this benevolent condescension
of my "colonies are my children."
That if you grow up born to power and you grow up from nothing but privilege, you think
"well how on earth are they going to make any decisions for themselves.
They always had me in charge and good luck, you are going to be unloved like I am unloved
by you right now."
And that feels very much like breaking up with an ex, being like "good luck finding
someone who likes you the way I do."
It is again, if the personal is political, and it always is, we can get away with that
about it.
A strong theme in your play is that power in the face of mortality is an illusion sometimes.
Do you feel that?
That it's not something in your control?
Absolutely.
I've spent the last seven years grappling with characters that have risen and fallen
in the opinion of history and the opinion of our country over and over and over again.
Jefferson's a hero, then he's the worst, then he's a hero again, then he's the worst.
Hamilton, same deal.
Hamilton's having a bit of a moment now, he'll fall into disfavor again.
Our values change and the things we care about, we always use our past to prove.
And so we can use Jefferson's words and eloquence in our founding documents as ideals to uphold,
but then we also have to contend with his personal life and his slaveholding history,
and then he falls into disrepair again.
I felt very grateful when Washington showed up to say those things in my play.
You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story, because I firmly believe
that's true.
Also, in grappling with those themes for so long, I am very Zen about what will happen
to "Hamilton."
It's having a moment right now, there will be a time when people hate it.
There will be a time when it will come back.
It's just what happens with work.
We build it up and we knock it down, and we build it back up again.
And hopefully you've built something that people will talk about.
All I can control is the work itself and the rest is time's job.
Ok!
Goodbye Harvard.
Thank you.
Thanks guys.