Daveed Diggs:
‘Hamilton’ idol in S.F. to inspire fans, Youth Speaks slam stars
The Tony-winning “Hamilton” star joins best friend and award-winning Oakland poet Chinaka Hodge, left, for a talk and poetry slam at the S.F. Jewish Community Center.
“I was bored, so I was like, I’m going to act this poem out.” Daveed Diggs
Robert Graves rightly observed that there’s no money in poetry. But poetry paid off for 70 teen bards on Saturday, Sept. 10, when they enjoyed a cuddle session with actor, rapper and “Hamilton” superstar Daveed Diggs. The occasion was the kickoff of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco’s Arts & Ideas season, featuring Diggs in conversation with his best friend and fellow Oaklander Chinaka Hodge, herself an award-winning poet, educator and playwright.
Adults and kids alike went giddy as Diggs, 34, entered the sold-out Kanbar Hall in jeans and a sweatshirt, his signature curls drifting over bookish eyeglasses. And when he flashed his megawatt smile, it was obvious why audiences fell for his dashing Marquis de Lafayette and dour Thomas Jefferson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-driven musical, which has redefined Broadway and could top $1 billion in ticket sales in New York alone.
The dual roles won Diggs a 2016 supportingactor Tony and a Grammy for best cast album. (“They’re having a great time together,” he quipped of his statuettes. “The Grammy is an alcoholic.”)
It was a homecoming for Diggs, linking his worldwide fame with his local start in poetry slams at Berkeley High. “Right away, he was dynamic and smart,” said Youth Speaks founder James Kass by phone before the event. “He always found great joy in language, and he worked really hard.”
So it was only fitting that the event included a slam. The competitors got to hang out on beanbags with Diggs and Hodge, and winners Megan Bartschat and Maxine Flasher-Duzgunes of Mill Valley and Tova Ricardo of Oakland performed their poems for the sold-out audience in Kanbar Hall.
“‘Hamilton’ represents the most unorthodox way of expressing oneself,” said Ricardo, 17, the 2015 Oakland poet laureate. “That makes me really excited because I like to break away from stereotypical norms.”
What Harry Potter did for novels, Alexander Hamilton has done for poetry. And for unity between generations — the day started with an all-ages “Hamiltunes” three-hour sing-along, where enthusiasts from wee to 93 belted out the best-selling soundtrack.
At the start of his conversation with Hodge, Diggs described himself as an introvert who started performing as a social icebreaker. In their easy conversation, he readily expressed vulnerability and self-deprecating humor.
“My fourth-grade teacher is the reason I do anything,” he said. “She used to have us memorize these poems. I was bored, so I was like, I’m going to act this poem out. Everybody laughed when I wanted them to laugh. I’ll never forget that.” That first experience with spoken word happened to tap an exceptional verbal acuity.
Former Berkeley High teacher Rick Ayers recalled that Diggs and Hodge already possessed inventive creativity. “These kids were doing rhyming couplets,” he said by phone. “It’s Shakespearean and it’s also hip-hop. The big deal for me was to shut up and listen, to realize something really cool was going on here.”
Diggs is arguably the coolest person on Earth right now, but he describes those days as nerdy. The family struggled financially (“I exclusively wore flannel pajama pants . ... They were only $6”) but excelled in encouragement (younger brother Malcolm “bailed me out of situations my whole life, and never seemed frustrated by it . ... I call him my big little brother”).
Early on he found an outlet, and a metaphor for life, in running track. “You train and train, and you put everything you’ve worked on into this one moment,” he said. “Then you take what you learn and go back to the drawing board. Performing is the same thing.”
He became a star hurdler at Berkeley High and Brown University, where he majored in theater (and broke the university’s 110-meter hurdles record with a time of 14.21 seconds). A 2004 article in the Brown Daily Herald presciently noted that after graduation, “he might work in New York hip-hop theater.”
A stint with Miranda’s hip-hop improv group Freestyle Love Supreme led to Diggs’ casting in the early workshops for “Hamilton.” When Miranda invited Diggs to get involved, “I said, ‘What is it about?’ He said, ‘Alexander Hamilton.’ I said, ‘That’s a terrible idea.’ It was obviously a great idea.”
So great that Diggs attended every reading in New York, sometimes covering his own travel costs from the Bay Area, where he worked as a substitute teacher while rapping in various crews and acting with such groups as Marin Theatre Company, the Magic, TheatreWorks and San Francisco Shakes.
“It’s the most focused I’ve ever been on anything,” he said. “Not because I knew (‘Hamilton’) was going to be a big deal; I just wanted to get to perform this thing. Because it was stretching me in so many ways, and it was so good.”
Nonetheless, he said, “the Bay Area theater scene is the best in the country. A lot of the things that people thought were really groundbreaking about ‘Hamilton,’ I had been doing for a long time here.”
“Hamilton” has brought Diggs respect and remuneration, but also exposure that few people experience. “This level of fame was not anything he ever considered,” Kass says. “What’s great is that it allows him to do the stuff that he really wants to do.”
Stuff like Clipping, Diggs’ experimental noise hip-hop trio with gradeschool friend William Hutson and sound designer Jonathan Snipes. The group released its new album, the Afro-futurist-dystopian “Splendor and Misery,” on Friday, Sept. 9.
Before his final curtain call for “Hamilton,” on July 15, Diggs had been cast in the 2017 Julia Roberts film “Wonder,” Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix musical drama “The Get Down” and the ABC sitcom “Black-ish.” On the Sept. 28 episode, Diggs debuts as Johan, the bohemian Ivy Leaguer brother of Rainbow Johnson, played by Tracee Ellis Ross.
“The thing that we’re about to find out, post ‘Hamilton,’ is that Daveed’s a really good actor,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts chief of programming and pedagogy (Hodge is his associate director) mentored Diggs in Youth Speaks and has directed him in multiple plays, including Hodge’s “Mirrors in Every Corner” and Joseph’s hip-hop drama “Word Becomes Flesh.”
“He’s not a rapper that’s found a dramatic role,” Joseph says. “He could play Othello next and kill it. He’s the dude that you want on your squad.”