San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover story
Biography turned musical racks up decade of milestones
As “Hamilton” returns to San Francisco, Mariah Rankine-Landers leads a workshop titled “Rise Up! Disrupting the Master Narrative” at a conference for grade school educators.
The musical that made the history of America’s founding fathers come alive for a new generation of audiences now has a history of its own.
It’s been just over 10 years since Lin-Manuel Miranda first conceived of “Hamilton,” the Tony-raking, multimillion-dollar blockbuster of a musical about the United States’ first secretary of the Treasury. As the show returns to SHN’s Orpheum Theatre, now with its sixth company of actors and beginning performances Tuesday, Feb. 12, students of both the American Revolution and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Twitter feed would do well to study up.
2004: Ron Chernow publishes an 800-page biography of Alexander Hamilton. In a review for The Chronicle that now looks eerily prophetic, Justin Martin writes, “Hamilton’s life screams out for reinterpretation, far more than that of any of his colleagues. No other founding father more richly deserves a modern-eyeon-the-colonial-guy treatment.”
2008: On impulse, Lin-Manuel Miranda picks up a copy of Chernow’s work in an airport bookstore. It’s Miranda’s first break after the offBroadway run of “In the Heights,” before that show’s Broadway run. By the end of the second chapter, Miranda is envisioning Hamilton’s youth told in hip-hop lyrics.
2008: Miranda meets with Chernow to sing him a number from his workin-progress. “It was the most extraordinary thing,” Chernow told The Chronicle’s Steven Winn. “Lin had compressed the first 40 pages of my book into four minutes. I was completely bowled over, but it was also a little embarrassing. Either I write really long, I thought, or he writes really tight.” May 12, 2009: President and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama host an Evening of Poetry, Music and Spoken Word at the White House with guests including James Earl Jones, Esperanza Spalding and Miranda, who’s been invited to perform excerpts from “In the Heights.” Miranda brings something else. “I’m actually working on a hip-hop album,” he says by way of preamble. “It’s a concept album about someone I think embodies hip-hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.” He holds for laughter. “You laugh, but it’s true!” Nov. 2, 2009: The White House posts a video of Miranda’s performance on YouTube. Shortly thereafter, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York’s Public Theater, sees it. “For me, it was just like it’s turned out to be for the world since,” Eustis recalls over the phone. “Within 15 seconds I was completely enamored of it and certain that I had to bring it to the Public Theater.”
Nov. 16, 2009: Always disarmingly open on social media about his artistic process, Miranda gives a glimpse into the rigor that went into “Hamilton” with characteristic humor and grace. “Spent the entire day working on one couplet about George Washington,” he posts. The show “is slow-going, my friends, but I promise you it will be worth it. It’s hard converting whole swaths of history into a hot 16 bars.” Jan. 11, 2012: Miranda performs “The Hamilton Mixtape” as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series; fellow cast members include Christopher Jackson and James Monroe Iglehart. For years now, Eustis remembers, he’s been doing “the nagging thing for which I am sometimes known: I just say, ‘You gotta do it. Come to the Public. Do it.' “But Miranda “kept saying to me, ‘It’s not a show; it’s an album.' … I didn’t know him that well, so I couldn’t argue with him that ferociously.” After Lincoln Center, though, “it was unavoidable that this was a show.”
June 21-July 28, 2013: Miranda and director Thomas Kail bring the nascent show to Vassar and New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Season, which incubates new work. Speaking by phone, NYSAF Artistic Director Johanna Pfaelzer (who will take over as Berkeley Rep’s artistic director in September) remembers the team were “so well thought about what their needs are and how best to meet them: They break down the task into very specific slices and then figure out what structures are going to best help them address those. … They knew they wanted to work on Act I. They knew they wanted to present it publicly but in a very protected way — and then maybe do some exploration of Act II, but they didn’t want to be under any pressure to share it.” After a presentation of the work-in-progress in a 135seat black box theater, Pfaelzer remembers calling a colleague to say, “This is why you fight to sustain the theater and to keep the lights on and to keep the doors open. Because some day, somebody like that is going to need this. And it’s kind of all you hope for.”
March 6, 2014: The Public announces “Hamilton” will premiere in its 2014-15 season. Miranda, says Eustis, “figured out that hip-hop is the most effective delivery of expositional information that exists in any theatrical form. There is more information in ‘Hamilton’ than in any musical that’s ever been done.” The character of Alexander Hamilton, he adds, has more lines than Hamlet does. The comparison to Shakespeare doesn’t stop there. “He’s taking the voice of ordinary people. He’s elevating into verse. And by elevating it into verse, he’s both making it infinitely more memorable and ennobling the people who are speaking it. He’s revering them. And that’s exactly what Shakespeare did.” For Eustis, the show came together when the team figures out the purpose of Act II and what the election of 1800 meant in Hamilton’s life. Up to this point, “Hamilton’s ambition personally and his desire for the good of the country have been the same thing. We’ve watched them both rise together. Now, we’re at a moment where Hamilton has to make a choice, and he chooses what’s good for the country, not what’s good for him. … That was the moment for me where Hamilton reached true heroic status.” Feb. 17, 2015: The Public Theater’s production of “Hamilton” opens offBroadway. Reviewing the show for the New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote, “This confluence of what’s heard on the American musical stage and what’s heard on the airwaves and in the clubs hasn’t existed for at least six decades.”
Aug. 6, 2015: “Hamilton” opens on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it remains today.