There’s a big, rusty-colored rock in Weehawken. It’s protected by a locked fence, behind a pillar holding up a bust of Alexander Hamilton. Time has washed away any blood stains left where Hamilton supposedly leaned against the rock, waiting for his rowboat back across the Hudson to Manhattan, after he was shot with his brother-in-law’s gun by his famous frenemy, Aaron Burr—in the place where Hamilton’s son was also fatally shot in a duel (I know, right?!?). There’s a little plaque confirming that, yeah, this was the spot, the scene of the crime—plus many others (not affecting the street’s multi-million-dollar market value, thanks to a killer view of Manhattan)—because as the line in the musical Hamilton goes, “everything’s legal in New Jersey!”
So there we were with Aaron Burr himself, played by Leslie Odom Jr., who was visiting the site for the first time on a particularly balmy July morning, the same month the duel went down 211 years ago. There’s not a lot to take in—there’s the rock, I pointed out—but there’s a sense of history, and the weight of that was not lost on him, as he gripped the fence and looked out over the view of the skyline, a long way to paddle on your way to your death. “This is where I kill my best friend every night!”
“I grew up in Philadelphia,” he said, when we sat down to talk on a bench in Hamilton Park, a few paces away from the site. “I want to go back to all of those sites, too, with my newfound interest in these dead white guys.” There’s so much in Hamilton, which officially opens on Broadway this week, that makes you realize that those hundreds of hours in school were close to pointless. Who were these men, really, who we love so much that we name parks, tunnels, and libraries after them? “They don’t teach us that they were human beings,” said Odom. “If you would teach kids that these were regular guys who were petty, who made huge mistakes, who had affairs, who did all the horrible things that we’ve been guilty of—and they also did these wonderful things, too, that we still benefit from. Oh, Alexander Hamilton fell short of his best self every now and again, and he still managed to do these wonderful things—well, so do I. So what am I capable of?”
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sharply written hip-hop musical transforms Burr from this steaming Disney villain we’ve imagined him as, to a relatable, envious, but sympathetic, antihero. After the duel, Burr was basically in exile, ruined from what was in a brief moment, a win, but one that came with consequences that sustained centuries. Burr “is judged forever from quite possibly his worst act on his worst day,” said Odom. “Our show is about ‘who lives, who dies, who tells your story?,’ and his enemies told his story.” Odom’s Burr narrates the show, and easily has some of the best numbers. He performs with slow-burning, rage-fueled energy, as if a volcano is about to erupt from within, and when it does, his voice is something to behold.
“You can’t judge the people that you play anyway, you leave that for somebody else to do,” said Odom. “All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night. I also don’t want to clean it up, either; he made horrible mistakes just like Alexander did. I want all of his beauty and ugliness up there every night. I want him to be a mirror of the people who are sitting in the Richard Rodgers Theatre.”
There has been so much hype for the show, and "hype" is the right word here, when it rarely is. The opening number caffeinates you, and you can’t believe, three hours later, that you still feel it jolting you awake.
When so many musicals are revivals of past musicals, banking on audiences that want to be able to sing along, Hamilton, which cast African American, Hispanic, and Asian actors as our founding fathers, is a different kind of revival. “This is the story of America then, told by America now,” is the show’s tagline, announced patriotically on July Fourth. It revives history, both hundreds of years old and recent: “So much of the show was created with [President Obama] in mind, subconsciously and unconsciously,” Odom said of the night the president came to the show. “This show would not exist in this way if that man wasn’t in the position that he’s in. To get to have him in the house like that, the gravity was not lost on any of us. So we focused up, we prayed up, we got on one accord, and we had a great show. It was one of the best shows we’ve ever done.”
The president’s feedback? “He told us we had done a good job, a good job fleshing it out, since he had seen the first number [at a performance at the White House during the show’s first run at the Public Theater],” said Odom.
There’s a line in Hamilton that the whole cast belts out, “How lucky we are to be alive right now?,” that gets stuck in your head. Odom said it’s the line that he feels embodies the spirit of the whole show. “It’s connecting to audiences—that we are drawing a line directly from us to them. Our ambitions to their ambitions, our guts to their guts. We’re tying to find every single connective tissue, everything we have in common with these people. It’s about empathy. We’re learning about who we are, by looking at who they were.”
Hamilton *opens today at the Richard Rodgers Theater; you can buy tickets here. Listen to Leslie Odom Jr.’s self-titled debut album on iTunes here. *
