As I publish this, Lin-Manuel Miranda (LMM) is finishing up his final performance on Broadway as Alexander Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
I have been listening to the cast album at the same time (starting at 8:00 and even taking an intermission!) to share in the experience in a small way at a distance of hundreds of miles.
LMM deserves all the accolades Hamilton has received. First Broadway cast album to reach #1 on the Billboard Rap Album chart. Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album. A record 16 Tony nominations, and winner of eleven (one short of tying the record) including Best Musical. A MacArthur "genius" grant. The 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I mean, who comes up with the idea of telling the story of the founding of the United States, in verse, with a multicultural cast that looks more like 2016 than 1776?
LMM likes to say he spent six years writing Hamilton, and on one level that is true.
But I would also count all the years he spent listening to a wide variety of cast albums, watching movie musicals, and seeing live performances on and off Broadway, absorbing the structure of what makes great musical theatre memorable.
I would also count all the years he spent listening to a wide variety of musical styles, and developing a sense of what makes great songwriting effective across any genre.
I would also count all the years he spent developing his vocabulary reading a wide variety of literature—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays--internalizing what makes great storytelling emotionally powerful.
His previous Broadway musical, In the Heights, won the Tony for Best Musical in 2008, but all that success was almost just a dress rehearsal for Hamilton, where he poured everything he ever learned about theatre, songwriting and human nature into one three-hour masterpiece.
The day I came back from seeing the show i tried repeatedly to write a diary and kept failing—it was too intense of an experience on too many levels. Even six weeks later the emotional impact is pretty fresh.
Just hearing all those great voices singing through the score live is amazing. Alex Lacamoire (whom I adore almost as much as LMM for his imaginative orchestration) stuck the top of his head out of the pit for a moment, so he must have been conducting that night instead of playing the piano.
Most of the staging was nothing at all as I had imagined it from my almost daily listening to the cast album. The set is all wood and brick and ropes—my first thought was a shipyard. A journey. A destination. Or a place from which to embark. The center of the stage is a rotating turntable, with an even smaller turntable inside that can turn in the opposite direction, and this can create drama even when people on the turntable are standing still. The choreography was a wonderful combination of styles—the ballet and jazz dance moves one would expect on Broadway, mixed with the kind of strutting and posturing we associate with rap videos, and other unusual movements that look more like just interpretive gesturing rather than "formal dance" but it all fits together seamlessly. Dancers also did a lot of scenery and prop moves—dancing while moving props and furniture at the same time—something I always find elegant and beautiful when it is well done (and it is well done here).
Lighting design is something that is hard to take in consciously when you are seeing a show for the first time and trying to look at the acting and the costumes and the dancing and everything else all at once. But the lighting did its job in the same way an excellent movie score does—setting the mood without necessarily drawing specific attention to itself. One stunning exception to this was Hurricane—when that first dramatic piano chord rang out and the rich blue lights bathed the stage I actually gasped out loud. LMM stood in the middle singing while dancers encircled him on the turntables holding things over their heads as if he were standing in the eye of a hurricane. Not sure why that detail stood out to me—maybe it reminds me of my own current situation in life LOLOL!
I heard many people sniffling around me during the final duel of course, and during Eliza's evocative denouement, but the place I cried most was It's Quiet Uptown. When she finally takes his hand and the ensemble sings the word "forgiveness", the look on Lin's face was an extraordinary mixture of anguish and relief and love, and then he begins to weep. That moment all by itself was worth the sleepless nights associated with getting the time off, the long train ride, the physical discomfort of standing in a ticket holders line that went all the way down to 8th Avenue, the financial arrangements, everything. I would have felt it was worth it if I had emptied out my entire (meager) savings account for that experience. (And I almost did, before a childhood friend came through with a ticket with a much lower resale fee and another friend covered my travel expenses.) Best birthday EVER!!!
The biggest surprise was no individual curtain calls even though we gave them an enthusiastic standing ovation as the show ended—the show runs so long they were probably just trying to ring the curtain down before 11pm.
I have a feeling they will go ahead and pay the overtime for tonight...!
Well, that's the best I can do for now. There are so many wonderful details to recount and I can't do it justice in this diary. Just wanted to post some little tribute to mark the end of this era.
I am one of those Hamilfan zealots who says the musical changed my life, and it has, in more ways than I can say here. I could never express adequate gratitude to the friends who made it possible for me—we have known each other since college and this event was part of our 2016 celebration of being friends for 40 years.
And I could never even begin to put into words my depth of professional respect and artistic admiration for LMM. He has touched countless thousands of lives with this show in ways that will continue to bear fruit for generations.
I'm just glad I was alive at the same time this man was sharing his genius with the world.
And I am indescribably glad that even though after tonight the original cast of Hamilton will break up, I got to see them.
I missed Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells in Book of Mormon.
I missed Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in The Producers.
But I was one of the fortunate few who saw Hamilton.
It sounds almost ridiculous with all the horrors going on in the world, but this one special thing has gone a long way to making up for a lot of other disappointments—things completely outside the sphere of theatre and entertainment that my life was unfortunately denied.
Hamilton came along, and I was not denied this.
I saw Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, Chris Jackson as George Washington, Daveed Diggs as Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, Okieriete "Mighty Oak" Onaodowan as Hercules Mulligan/James Madison, Anthony Ramos as John Laurens/Philip Hamilton, Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton, Jasmine Cephas Jones as Maria Reynolds AND PEGGY. People will be writing whole books about this musical, and the outstanding talent of this particular cast, for years.
I've had my share of closing nights on the amateur level and they are an intense mixture of physical focus and energy, performance joy as you savor every "last time we are doing this", and bittersweet heartbreak as you realize that even if you keep in touch (which is hard) you will never again be close to these people in the same way as you are in this moment.
OK, the show isn't actually closing. But LMM’s absence will be felt, even though his replacement as Hamilton, Javier Muñoz, is a exceptionally good singer and has his own enthusiastic fan base from his previous work on Broadway and the many times he has already gone on for LMM during the Broadway run.
Two additional leading cast members are leaving tonight as well: Phillipa Soo is scheduled to star in an upcoming musical adaption of the movie Amalie (projected for Broadway in Spring 2017); and many have said that Leslie Odom Jr.’s Tony-winning performance as Burr was the linchpin that held the whole show together. Even if all three of their replacements are spectacular in their own way, a show always changes chemistry when key original cast members leave.
A lot of disappointed Hamilfans are weeping tonight at the thought they they will never see the show with LMM in it. He has spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking folks down off the ledge.
He has dangled the possibility that he may drop in on the Broadway production every now and then.
There are rumors that he will open the London production in 2018.
But he is leaving the Broadway cast for an indefinite period after tonight.
Who knows, some lucky audiences in Chicago and San Francisco and elsewhere may have the thrilling surprise of finding a slip of paper in the Playbill saying
AT THIS PERFORMANCE
Alexander Hamilton..........................LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA