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Tony Awards

Hip-hop 'Hamilton' comes to Broadway

Elysa Gardner
@elysagardner, USA TODAY
The creative team behind the Broadway musical 'Hamilton' in New York:  musical director Alex Lacamoire ( left) , choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler (back left), director Thomas Kail, (back right) and chief creator and star Lin- Manuel Miranda.

NEW YORK — Back in the spring of 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda, fresh off winning a Tony Award for his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, was invited to perform at the White House. Rather than trot out a number from Heights, the performer/composer/lyricist/librettist decided to introduce a song he'd written for a new project — one that, conveniently enough, focused on the USA's founding fathers.

"I hadn't written anything else for the show yet," Miranda, 35, recalls. "So it was a little like showing a sonogram at a week — to the president of the United States."

That embryo would develop into the most celebrated new musical in years, and Broadway's hottest ticket of the moment: Hamilton, which opens Aug. 6. President Obama saw the show in full on July 18 at a preview, accompanied by his daughters. The first lady had already caught it during a critically and commercially triumphant run off-Broadway earlier this year, which also drew Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and other bold-faced names, from Tom Hanks to Madonna.

Inspired by Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow's 2005 biography of our first treasury secretary and primary author of the Federalist Papers, the show reclaims history for a contemporary audience. Miranda stresses the central role of immigrants in shaping our nation — among them Hamilton, born (out of wedlock) in the British West Indies. The score seamlessly fuses different traditions of musical storytelling; the lyrics are alternately rapped and sung, and there are nods to American icons from Rodgers and Hammerstein to the Notorious B.I.G.

"It's a love letter to musical theater," says Miranda, who also plays the title role in Hamilton. "The new thread in the loom is that I'm trying to be as dense and intricate in the lyrics as my favorite hip-hop songs are."

Chatting before a recent performance at, fittingly, the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Miranda is joined by two of the other three members of Hamilton's "Cabinet": director Thomas Kail, 38, and music director/orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, 40. Both are longtime friends and collaborators who worked with Miranda on Heights, as did choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, 45.

Lin-Manuel Miranda stars as Alexander Hamilton, in a scene from the Broadway musical 'Hamilton.'

Hamilton moves uptown to Broadway with the same racially and ethnically diverse cast from the Public Theater, where it premiered. Miranda's parents are from Puerto Rico, and African Americans play George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Aaron Burr. The fundamental details of their stories, Kail stresses, remain intact; Chernow has been a consultant on the musical, "and if we deviated from historical accuracy it was only after a conversation that extended for weeks."

When Miranda started reading Chernow's book, he says, "I thought, this is so hip-hop, the way Hamilton writes his way off this island. I wasn't thinking about color; I was thinking about what the voices would sound like. Tommy extended that in his casting, with the idea of eliminating the distance between the audience and its history."

Kail says, "The idea was that everybody who made this country came from somewhere else. They put their feet down here and started over. So why not acknowledge that, and do so with an America that looks like it does now?"

Members of the Secret Service counter sniper team watch over the Richard Rodgers Theatre while President  Obama attended "Hamilton" with daughters Sasha  and Malia on July 18 in New York.

Blankenbuehler, speaking the next day, insists that "ethnicity was secondary" in casting. "The most important thing was finding authenticity — that sense of, 'I have something to say and I'll fight to say it.' People of color are able to express that better than anyone else right now."

None of these men are taking Hamilton's success for granted. Miranda, who's famously active on social media, reacted to news that Hamilton's image on the $10 bill would eventually be replaced by that of a woman with a string of witty tweets. "They still have five years to change their mind," he quips.

And the show remains a work in progress. Kail reports that during a recent performance, Miranda added brand-new lyrics in Act Two after getting the director's approval during intermission. "That's how current this is," Kail says.

"What I love is we all feel like we can do better than we've done," says Lacamoire. "We're trying to get the show as perfect as it can be."

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