“Hamilton” comes to San Francisco. Pictured: Actor Michael Luwoye (holding microphone) at a rehearsal in Manhattan.
S.F. audiences finally get their shot to see the runaway hit
“Hamilton” begins with a question from Aaron Burr — “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
The musical answers that question in two hours and 45 minutes.
But there’s another question that “Hamilton’s” producer, Jeffrey Seller, still can’t answer. Why has the show that opens in the Orpheum Theatre on Friday, March 10, been such a success?
He shook his head. “I was going to ask you, or the mother of the girl from Columbia, S.C., who wants the music for her bat mitzvah theme, even though she’s never seen ‘Hamilton,’ or the 80-yearold guy who likes history,” he said.
“For me, it’s another one of my children whom I love and whom I nurtured, and whom I brought up, and I brought them all up the same way,” he said, speaking of hits that he’s produced, like “Rent” and “In the Heights,” “except this show became the biggest show in Broadway history.”
The answer, said Seller, is that he has no answer: “My hypothesis is no better or worse than yours.”
The day we spoke, the “Hamilton” cast of the national tour was rehearsing on 42nd Street, down the block from “The Lion King.”
“I’ll be damned if you’re gonna get senior citizens into ‘The Lion King,’ ” said Seller. “We are the first show that genuinely hits everyone. “‘Hamilton’ is for all of us.” In rehearsal, the “Hamilton” ensemble was finetuning Thomas Jefferson’s return from Paris to the U.S. after the revolution. Singing “What’d I Miss?,”
a clueless Jefferson is feted by a dancing chorus.
The scene was one of the few that didn’t require Michael Luwoye, who plays Hamilton. He was down the hall, eating lunch.
Luwoye, all of 26, is African American, with a fearsome beard that lends itself to a scowl or swagger. He also has a huge smile. His parents are African immigrants from Nigeria, engineers who raised him in Huntsville, Ala.
The San Francisco production won’t be his first time onstage as Hamilton. Lowoye has alternated on Broadway in the part since last fall. He’s the fifth person to be cast in the role written and created by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
“We all play it so differently, the four others before me. All their performances are sort of in mine,” he said.
The closest Luwoye has been to the Bay Area is San Diego, where he once auditioned at the La Jolla Playhouse. He doesn’t know the San Francisco audience, but he does know the expectations that the crowd he can see from the stage brings to every performance.
“I wait until ‘My Shot,’ ” the show’s rousing song about getting an opportunity and seizing it, “that’s usually when everybody is engaged and waiting to see what happens there, especially when I’m on, because nobody really knows who I am,” he said, laughing.
“It’s the moment where the listening heightens,” said Luwoye, who has also played Burr in the production, “and it’s, ‘Can we trust you with this part, with this thing that we’ve listened to over and over and over again, and obsessed with friends, and learned all the lyrics?’ ”
He’s watched that audience mouth the show’s lyrics — “all the time, everybody’s doing it. They’re performing for us as well.”
The bar is set high, and Luwoye hadn’t
thought of acting as a career until he was a junior in college. “I was going to be a composer for Nintendo. I had to be coerced by my professors at school into moving to New York. Broadway was not on my radar at all,” he said.
Nor was Alexander Hamilton before he heard about the play, which taught Luwoye to balance the interests of history and drama.
“As an actor, when it comes to doing a show that is a representation of history, that is combining many different things that are true to tell the story, I prefer to avoid the concrete facts, because that’s not the story we’re telling,” he said. “There’s a lot that I’ve learned now, but I still try to keep that in a pocket, away from the show, away from the relationships in the show that didn’t happen in reality.
“All the Sons of Liberty didn’t meet in a New York tavern, and they weren’t rapping.”
Stepping into the most prominent role in American theater right now, Luwoye had never played a white man onstage before. His only experience playing Shakespeare was Othello.
He shrugged. “I never really think about it on a skin-color basis. I don’t know what it is to be a white man. I could never portray that. But I know how to express shame, I know how to express love, I know how to express insecurities when other people aren’t thinking that you can do it.”
And he knows the immigrant story that’s central to “Hamilton.”
“There’s a lot of parallels with how I’ve defined my journey,” he said. “I put a lot of myself into my performances every time I’ve had the opportunity to go onstage with the Broadway company. There is something about having to assert yourself all the time, when no one knows who you are, when someone can take your culture and say that’s all you are.”
Luwoye thought of the November night Vice President-elect Mike Pence saw the show, after Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant message won the election. “It was freaking electrifying. When Pence came to the show, you could see how it galvanized everybody to react. I loved that. Not only did you have people who are against Pence, but you had people who were in full support, standing up, clapping. That’s what this is. Everybody in this audience can be here,” he said.
And that, said Jeffrey Seller, is the “Hamilton” phenomenon. “What ‘Rent’ caused was ‘Hamilton’ to be able to happen. It opened up Broadway to stories and characters and risks that heretofore were not acceptable on Broadway.”
And “Hamilton”? “I don’t believe that there is a Broadway musical that has enlivened our sense of country in such a positive way.”
That said, Seller wasn’t ready to let his show’s positive portrait of America stand outside politics. “It’s a story for all of what makes America so great right now, a story of why we have so much to protect and so many reasons to resist the totalitarian impulses of the people that are running Washington today,” he said.