[inaudible conversations] all right. Good afternoon and welcome to the 32nd annual Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest. Id like to thank all of our sponsors. The lit fest is big on social media. The theme of this years festival is whats your story, so we encourage everyone to share the stories you hear this weekend on twitter, instagram and facebook. Using the hashtag prlf16. Downloading the printers row app where you roll find all the Chicago Tribunes premium book content, and the complete litfest schedule. Todays program is being broadcast live on cspan2s booktv. There will be a q a session at the end of the presentation so anyone with questions, please line up at the microphone to your right, so that the home viewing audience can hear the questions. Lastly, before we begin, ask that you silence all of your cell phones and turn off any camera flashes. With that, id like you all to welcome the coauthor of holiday hamilton the revolution. Jeremy mccarter. [applause] hi, everybody. Thank you for being here on this very hot day. My name is jeremy mccarter. I am very happy to be the coauthor of hamilton the revolution. I see a couple copies in the audience. Im happy to be here, here, meaning because chicago has been home. Since i moved to chicago with my family i have had to go back to new york to do anything about hamilton, thats where the show has been so able im the advanced as im sure you know, in a couple months, hamilton is coming here, which is very exciting. So to help me get a sense of you use guys are who you guys are id love to know who has spine lins Youtube Video when he would at the white house. A lot. Who has been to new york to see the show . Some. Be careful. This an envious looking crowd. Who has listened to the cast album . W. H. O. Has who has heard is more than once . Who listens to it once a week. Who listens to it every day . Has listened to it once today . Okay. Thats a lot of people. Some of whom raised their hand. You are my people, im happy your here, thank you for coming. So the organizers asked to us frame the talks reasons the theme of the festival, which this year is whats your story . Which sounded fun for about five seconds. And then when i started thinking about that and filling half an hour with that it got be unnerving. What is your store by sounds like question about your life, and how do you talk about your life for half hour, and then if you keep thinking, which is actually even more terrify, what if you can actually get your whole story into half an hour. What kind of life are you leading . You should quit your therapist because youre repeating yourself. So what i hope liz taylor, who is going to come out to ask questions, wont mind me doing is tweaking the team. It stenof talk about your story, id like to talk about our story, which field more in keeping with the theme of the show, which is hamilton. So, what is our story . Obviously the story that brings us all together here today is am ton. And its not just us today that the show is bringing together. Hamilton is in my experience of being around the city this last fewerees, a rare work bringing an extraordinary number and range of people together. Now, that is not always the case. There are plenty of great works that get made that people admire, and in a kind of austere way you. Think its great but dont want to give it a hug. People are giving hamilton a hug. Sometimes more than that. Ive walked out of the stage door plenty of times on broadway, and right into the arms of the enormous crowd that waits to see the person who play aaron burr, and from she sound of he shrieks that is love. We even did lin and i did a signing at the drama book shop in new york a few blocks from the teeter, and that was an incredible afternoon. A threehour procession of young people, old people, every race, every color, every background, different accents, coming up to him and trying to put into words what this show had meant to them,; and i wont share them. They were really, real where private and powerful but i will never again doubt that stories can change the world. Now, we should stipulate that not everybody feels this way there are people who, for one can principle or another, for that simple matter of taste, hamilton is not for them and thats okay. Doesnt have to be universal for us to say theres something going on here. This show ha an appeal to Political Parties and races and ages. Asked about this when i was doing the book. Quest love, an executive producer of the cast album, said this nearly universal embrace reminds him of thriller. Thriller the most popular album ever made. He told me he loved that album and said his teachers loved the album, the kids that have been calling hip racial slurs on the playground before the album was released asked them him to tetch them to do the moon walk, and. Crazies things about ham to be were not just talking bat pop album that has drawn all this attention. Even a pop album that makes everybody put extra zippers on their court. Is this agency his examination of the founding of the United States, about the country, and i wouldnt say our country because i dont want to speak for you. The founders in their time worked a couple of secular miracles. The defeated the british and founded a government unlike any government that had ever existed. These were not perfect men or perfect women. They didnt end slavery. They allowed it to thrive. You dont need me to tell you that the racial and economic fourses in the last 240 years that makes plenty of people file alienitiled. The most important thing of this, that i talked about in the book, is that hamilton is making people feel sometimes for their first time they have a stake in the origins of this country. The story ofs her could by their story. Hugh Broadway Musical did that and what that means for america, thats the story we tried to tell in this book, and thats what ill try to talk about today. But to do that we have to ask the question what is our story in a slightly different sense, which is what is the story with me and my coauthor and my friend, lin manual miranda. Let me take a within with that. One night in early 2007 i was the theater critic for the new York Magazine and i went to a place way over on the west side of manhattan called 37 arts to see a musical by people i never heard of that it did not expect to be very good. I had before writing for years repeat lid, on onoxiously about the power of hiphop as a way of telling stories. Had seen people try to use it but never the with a i thought it had the potential, way of telling stories, a drama, a kind of writing that shakespeare did and the greeks did that most playwrights did until 200 years ago. What statue were a lot of musicals how bad the record industry was, which is true. And after all these years of wait can for somebody to act on this, do the thing is saw my favorite emcees doing, imagine my surprise and my delight and my relief when, within five minutes of the start of in the heights i felt like heres someone who gets it, actually thinked about these things the same way i do. Use hiphop and salsa to del the story of life in upper manhattan and has a facility for writing ballads. Who loved the craft of broadway as much as he like biggy small. I wrote stuff in my review and a few weeks later i found out that the experience i had of watching the show, hough i felt, is about how lin felt when he read my review, this sense of, theres someone wholes gets this thing. The publicist for the show is a friend of ours. He fixed us up because he thought we would hit it off and he was right in 2008 we met up for drinks. This was before lin was donned the macarthur genius, the people magazine, one of the sexiest men alive, but you could tell that something was coming, something was going on. Id like to give awe momentbymoment account of that conversation because i guess it is directly responsible for my standing on this stage right now. The fact is we killed too many brain cells that night for me to reconstruct it. And the most important is one that it only realized much later, on the opening need of hamilton o. Broadway, found an email i had written a few days after lin and i melt for those drinks and made clear in that very clear conversation in the summer of 2008 he told me about this crazy idea he had. He only started to tell a few people. To do a mixed tape, concept album, about the life of Alexander Hamilton to told through hiphop. A crazy idea. Objectively a crazy idea. This was few days before his famous mexico location when he took he had the title that night that we met. And ben franklin was a key in and a kite and applies to his life at that point. Fast forward three years, im on the staff of the Public Theater in new york. Part of my job is to bring there artists, develop projects; the first person i propose told my boss is lin, my friend, i say, prompt missing talent. He told me this great idea he had. So as soon as i say lin, what oscar hears is, lin, that guy that competed against me for the tony award three years ago and won. In the heights hat won best musical at the expose of a musical that oscar had developed. So i convinced oscar to take the meeting, and i emailed lin to tell him how thrilled oscar was to get to meet him. And they hit it off quickly and completely, and i think for life. During one of those early meetings lin hand me a cd. You have to ask your parents. A cd is this plastic disk that in the old days we used to hand each other music on. I understand before that it was vinyl but i dont believe it. And on that cd was were the demos of the first eight or ten songs he had written for hamilton. I wish i could remember that night when we met for drinks. Remember precisely what happened when i heard those songs. I was sitting in the apartment in brooklyn, popped it in. The third or fourth song on the album was helpless which, if you heard owl you people who raised your hands to whose heard it this morning, you know that helpless is a song that eliza skylar, hamiltons soon to be wife sings in act one the version you heard is close to the one i heard back then. The difference is you hear i got lin singing it himself in facet to falsetto which i tour for different reasons, and i knew at the end of the song, i knew at the end of the song, if he anyone who could do that, write a pop song that was as catchy and potents as crazy in love which the beyonce, j seasoning which is it and still have that kind of precise story telling power to land it on a dime, listen to its again. See how much territory it covers. Anybody who is capable of doing that. If he can put this project on stage instead of a record, its going to be the best musical of our generation. That does not mean to say that i expected all of this that has happened round the show. Lin didnt expect it. His director didnt expect. No one expected it because, again, its insane. No one can even dream you land the cover of Rolling Stone and the cover of time and your heroes wants to meet you when you go to the white house the first liedy said the show you made, quotes, is the best piece of art in any form i have ever seen in my life. That cd is important to me for other reasons the context of my marriage because three years after it was handed to me, i brought my wife to Opening Night at the public, and at intermission she turned to me and said, oh, this is why you have been talking about this show all these years. The party that night is when lin promotioned the idea that we write the book, and after everything i said you probably think my reaction would have been this immediate exuberant yes mitchell actual response was closer to, eh, because it was one thing for me to see how this incredible show was developing the work that lin and his director were doing, but writing a book was something altogether different and what it forced know do is ask the question again, with a different perspective. How do you get this down on the page . Its funny to see the descriptions people say about the book. A back stage look at the show, companion to the show, and those things are absolutely true up to a point. Thats why people buy the book but those are also explicitly almost verbatim the thing wes knew it couldnt only be. Those are the places we were starting and we knew we had to get past. This is also related to when i see that people say its a show a book for people who love hamilton. Yeah, sure, we intended it be for people who have curiosity about American Culture and excite hiphop. Just that at the moment, that subset of people is essentially the same subset of the people who love hamilton. I went off and did some thinking and found myself asking, as i usually do in those appropriate what would steve sound home do. He is want influence on lin as he is an influence on all composers working in broadway today. He is an influence on me because of how gutsy he is and how brilliant, the chances he takes, how regular rouges he is. I was thinking about one thing that is crucial for tall story tellers, books, songs, doesnt meeter. The Sandra Day Oconnor you figure out the story you want to tell and then figure out the forum. If we are going to do this book we cant tell the story how the show was made. You want to tell about what the story is doing, the change it is effect neglect world, hough is it changing the lives of the people who made it and the people coming to see it . Finally at some point it clicked. And this this short version from which this entire book sprang. Hamilton doesnt dramatize the revolution, it us the revolution, it changes the abroadway sounds and changes who get thursday tell the story of the founding and changing the lives of the people making it, and since content dictated form, then it cant have the same structure as all the other books about broadway shows because those are trying to do something else. Cant have the oral history 0 at the top and have the side bars with the little features about people. Cant tuck the libretto away at the back of the book and seems the creation of the show was the end result. We came up with a new structure, new kind of book to tell a new kind of story. We had to tell two storiesed in tandem. Theres the show tracing Alexander Hamiltons incredible life, and then the book, following the same arc, telling the story howl he show got made. How to do that. Turned to someone i dont consultas often as son heim, j hsieh. Jay jayz. He complains where you understand better because of the chapter that preceded it. Thought that could be a useful structure make itonnologial. We could begin with a night in 2009 when lin performed the opening number at the white house, the youtube clip. We could end with Opening Night on broadway six years later. Lin i could already tell would probably have just finished the last numbers in the show. So in between those two thats the trick, then, how to space out the story of how the shot got made, the impact its having, while hamilton and the other characters on stage are going through their adventures and having are their trials and crises. The final influence on how the book came together and the thing that goss us royalweight the federalist papers, that figure in the show, that were largely hamiltons doing. They gave us the idea for the old timey title. My edition. And they show you how you can vary a theme and keep driving a point home. They were making the argument for the constitution. Wanted to make an argument not exactly on behalf of the somehow because the show didnt need me to argue argue on its behalf. Anyone any show that didnt need a lot of nices a jecktives, hamilton. Wanted to make an argument about stores. I wanted to make an argument how stories can change the world. And the thing that gave me permission to do it was a quote i found when i was doing some research. Henry cabot lodge edited the first collection of hamilton papers and made a point that the dominant person of hamiltons life was not creating the national bank, not being a hero at the revolutionary war. Wasnt diving in a dual with aaron bur. I was creating a national consensus, to get americans to think about themselves in a new way, think about the country in a new way. Think of themselves as a union and then keep driving that point home as much as he could while he had time on this earth. Thinking and feeling, that to me might bev what Alexander Hamilton did but thinking and feeling is the theaters wheelhouse. Thats our specialty youch get people to feel differently about themselves elm thats why were in business. When i thought about hmm ton roz lifestyle if thought was was happening around show show. The way people react ode song tri. What was trying to tell the store of not two revolutions they were two aspects of the same revolution. A grandiose claim to make on behalf of a show. To about it next to the legacy of a founding father. You can make arrangements on behalf of this moment or that show. Heres one for me. Bust arhymes, a rapper, scheme see it one night. He told his team when he went on stage the next night for a concert he wanted to have a costume like the one the king wears in holiday pam ton. When you hamilton. Wedge you can second him on stage as king george iii you have trend the limit of the possible. Two aspects of one American Revolution, thats the israel we were going to tell and we would call hamilton. Hough how did we do it . We had to work really fast. Not Alexander Hamilton fast but at least as fast as the people that lin collaboratessed with to make the show. Theyre coming to town and might get to spend time with them so i should warn you that the director, the music director and the choreographer, the core four artists who made the showing. If youre going to talk to them, caffeinate heavily in advance because they think fast, talk fast, they even move fast. The creative metabolism of the people who methods this show is light speed and thats one of the things that is essential why it works. There are 32 chapters in the book. Had seven weeks to draft them. I do not recommend this as a way of making books, for the record. There was head start of me having been around a lot to see things that were happening in rooms where no writer belonged but then i wasnt there as a writer. I was there as sun someone on the staff of the Public Theater. Lin couldnt have had much longer than if to write the annotations in the book. He was doing this while he was performing seven times a week and unbee meant to to everybody was writing the music for the cantina scene in the new star wars. I would send him with apdf file, asking questions and opinion ought places where i remembered there once having been a variation on something, trying to figure out while he made the choice he made. And he surprised me. Again and again. As well is a i newell the guy he surprised me by digging into his past, his life, showing me things in the show that were more autobiographical than i expected. He was my first reader and i his. Thats hough it had to be on our crazy timetable to make these pieces snap together to tell one story, which was at the end we had to ten up the space. We wanted to add scans from the notebook. You can see the actual pages where the tough is coming out of hit brains and he is trying to get to the page. The only way to find the right page was for him before he went on stage to leave me with a big stack of those note books, which is then unvarnished look into the guys brain, and i had the same peopling. Had to get the same feeling, i had to do things to quickly, and then i shared where i was writing my chapters which i dont let anybody see that stuff. But it was the only way we would get it done. If we werent on the same wave length we wouldnt have started the book and if we didnt trust each other, we want to of wouldnt finish. There was no help from other writers and we didnt want help. We didnt want outside experts weighing in. Content dictated form. If the store of hamilton is the story of different peoples from different backgrounds coming together to make something together, then the challenge was to get the most different kinds of content, the most different episodes, essays, profiles, things like that, and fit them into the smallest number of pieces. So, no side bars. No things awful the side unless theyre primary sources. Email exchange, cut lyrics from the show. Historical documents. Now, content dictates form is the principle but theres also something that we took from the spirit show itself. Tommy kale, the shows brilliant director, realmized early on the only way the work is is not to apologize for the fact he has broken with all convention and made the actorsors who are were playing the roles actors of color, and what he says is either the audience is 0 going to come up to you or theyre not but nicer not go to be a wink at the audience. Its going to be immediate, going to be unfiltered. The book, like the show, is something that we wanted to have you be only a mill meeter airplane millimeter away from the action in the we cans of writing, that perspective of being an eye witness to something incredible, was not a stretch. Tommy was brilliant at finetuning the show and at least as brilliant in creating the conditions that ail loved his collaborators to thrive. Thats a very delicate thing to do. Youre talking about the psychology of 40 or 50 people. And youre trying to give. The what they need thatso they can do their best. Even if its not always the same from one to the next. He kept everybody cool, made the cast some the designers think the stakes were low so they could play and take chances and believed this and would walk outside into total pandemonium, because as the show got closer to Opening Night the fever in new york kept building. It was a hurricane around the show and tommy hat contractedded an eye. Created an eye. The audience reaction at the first performance was so crazed. Some of the actors werent sure they were going to get through it. Afterwards on stage they all rallied together and some of them were crying. This is going to sound a little exploitative but if you want to know why it was important to tell the story the way we told it, that crying that the actors were doing was as important to us as the fact that the show happened on a certain date, certain theater, and it was received in a certain way. The reason why hamilton is a historical drama that feels as if its happening to people that we know is because when lin and tommy talked about stories, the capital t, cap cap cal s, they minute that they wanted to create evoke the emotional reality of these men and women who lived in the 1770s and 1890s. The room where it happened is the great second act show stopperrer is not about the dinner at which hamilton and madison and jefferson trailedded the location of the u. S. Capital for a bank. Its a song about how he feels from the fact he is excludessed. His envy and angst. It dramatizes the pressure of needing to put the new nation on its feet. Its about fatherhood. Its not just in the book that lin add read song or tommy found an actor. We wanted show how it felt. I got to write about beautiful things and write about painful things. Their personal achievements here and dreams coming true, also sickness and death. A lot of pain happened in a couple of years we were trying to retell in the course of this book. So, sure, on one hand were writing for fans now. We want people who love the show to have a better sense what it is youre hearing and listening to but we were aware of writing for people who look back on this weapon want them to know how lin and tommy their brilliant collaborators did it but also went them to how it felt to be doing and it also want them to know what it cost. This idea of look can back from someplace in the future is important to understand this moment, i think. The story that were telling is one that started before us and going to continue after us there are a couple of moments in the eight years that i was very privileged to watch this show happen when i had this feeling that it can only liken to vertigo but in time, instead of space. This historical vertigo of seeing past and present crash together. Its hard to write about this without sounding like your high. Trust me. Ive tried to do it. When we learned that president obama was coming to the show it was technically after we were supposerred to be done writing it but when president obama is coming you we add an epilogue. To see president obama walk on stage at Richard Rogers after a performance of the show, to see him stand about six feet from where clays jackson who plays George Washington, just sung the word washingtons farewell address, then to hear president obama look back on the incidence of his own administration with the past and present starting to shimmer next to each other, and the distance between them to collapse. Biggest moment of this kind happened after the when i was very lucky to go with the Hamilton Company to the white house and perform for president and mrs. Obama, Vice President and mrs. Biden and an incredible array of dignitaries in the east room and i thanks the theater god is didnt have to write that on a timeline. I tried to write about it in an essay for buzzfeed about this but if you want to understand what is special about the show, its in here. The last song was wound last time a song in which Chris Jackson sings the words washingtons farewell address. Imagine this. Youre seeing Chris Jackson, an africanamerican man from illinois, singing the song, directly in front of him is president obama, who is africanamerican, his wife behind him is the Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington. The first president , a character that Chris Jackson is playing who owned black men and it felt like all of American History was condensed into this one little tab blow. Didnt have tab low. I didnt have to turn my head to see it. What is most exciting about the show is knowing people who were just behind president obama when this performance was happening. There were 100 students from local schools. Theres a chapter where i talk about what some of these students, some of the reactions they were feeling. In earlier performances when students had come. But the place where the two revolutions intersect, where is that those kids sitting there were seeing two George Washingtons and theyre both valid. The Gilbert Stewart washington minute something in the 1790s when it was painted. The lin manualmer rain when i spoke to actors when i was making the book most powerful interview l withwith actors who plays bur and the one who plays jefferson and they were very candid with me about how their lives might be different if, when they were the age of those kids, they had seen a black man playing George Washington. Or if they had had the opportunity to step into the shoes of these men who had felt remote from their experience, felt lyme like they were living a story they had nothing to do with. This is the last generation of kids who wont have a chance to have that experience because of this show. Lin has reimagined the past in writing historical drama that worked the way this one does but also seeing the future inch 20 years this will be a much different country than today. We know the racial makeup of the countries is changing the expectations what it means to ben an american are going to change. Whats exciting is i think about how this is a chapter in one long american story that hamilton, like the obama presidency, are both in a a prefiguration of what is to come. The best reactions i have gotten from the book is, i had no idea it was that hard. People didnt know quite how much effort and toil went into making this thing that looks, i think you agree, pretty effortless. It seems though it was natural, bound to be what was. Of course thats not true. And once you step back a little bit and look at it you realize theres a lesson. Think how many fluky Little Things had to happen just right at the just the right time for me and lin to meet or become friends, let alone write this book together. Think of the show. Seems perfect and inevitable but wasnt anymore than the book wasment to. Tommy told me something, a great insight into the process, i wish id been able to use in the book but you get the benefit today. He said he was looking back over the whole process and said, if lynn had shanked that performance at the white house back in 2009, what would have happened . It is flawless. He rips it could have again sideways so many different ways and didnt. The amount of things that had to couldnt spire for this to happen to make it more a miracle than anything else. If the book wasnt inevitable, the showsshow, then what does that imply about the subject of both of those which is the American Revolution of the 18th century, hamiltons revolution. It seems like that must not be inevitable either. The americans had to win the war, something that no colonial colonials haye evidence didnt half. S to found a government without real precedent and to make them stick, knowing that we take the Shows Success for granted and shouldnt, makes me want to stop taking the american experiment for grantedded, too. It could have failed at any moment. We need to do what the show says, to look around and feel how lucky we are to be alive right now. If as the show is helping to us see maybe were all part of the american stories, then all of us have a role to play in making sure it continues. One of the last things that that lin and i add was my favorite page of the 288 between those covers. Its the dedication page. Its the most perfect collaboration because its two lines long and i had the first line, which was why dont we dedicate this back to our children, and he hads the served line, which is, because its lin, perfect. And it was, who will come of age with our young nation. Now, that line, on one hand, is two fathers expressing hopes for their young son and daughter and also two americans expression the same kind of hope for the country. What id like to do now, before we start taking questions is read a chapter of the book. This is one that touches on some of these things. It is chapter 14, for those who have i dont think anyone should read along. That would be creepy. If you insist, keep me honest if i drop a wore please dont do that. This is chapter 14. This is about the american experiment and when it really began. This is the chapter that sets up the songs that are the final battles of the revolutionary war, guns and ships, history has its eyes on youy york town. This is the day of firsts, says tommy, may 9, 2014, and he would looking at the 150 people who packed the theater of the 52nd 52nd street. A program that specializes created for and by kids and sometimes offers spaces to shows like hamilton. Hey came for what the called, quote, the first time we will have ever done the first pack and the second act back to back. He site youre the first audience in the history of the world to have seen that. The shows title was another first that day. Jeffrey sellers the lee lead producer, persuaded lynn to drop mixed tape as the title. He joked it might by the most important contribution he made to the show. Quote, hamilton sounds like blockbuster, jeffrey says, at least it does now. Tommy warned the audience that lin had been adding and changing things nell night before. Quote, youll hear things even he has not heards out loud. Lin could not help himself. Finish, a tune at 10 30 for actors learning it at 11 00 he tweets during a workshop, horrible, horrible, when will i stop can do my homework on the bus. Im 33. The company has spent five weeks experimenting with different ways to move people and furniture around the stage. Five weeks was an unusually long time but not long enough to figure out how to stage this show. Tommy had been feeling stressed out about how to speed up the process when the music director reminded him that nobody was forcing them to do anything. They decided to stage act one and fall fact to music for act 2. The biggest first of the workshop and its real revelation is what the cast wore, looking back now the costume choice were obvious. Nobody thought son may 14inch. No even the man who made enemy. Paul tazewell designed costumes for shows like the colonel purple and dr. Zhivago, when he heard the dem notes he nudes that hamilton needed to combine both sensibilitieses but as the the question was how. The challenge was figure ought where the two areaes me and what percentage is hiphop and what is 18th century. He look at street fashion from our time and from hamiltons time and styledded the work of two stylists who tried to mash the times. Everybody has done an 128th 128th century at one final 0 18th century at one tim or another. Despite of his experience, the tool kitt and research, paul cooperate locate the right point of intersection between the past and president. Luckily he and tommy collaborate owned five productions before, developing a mutual trust to remain untroubled by the fact they werent sure what to. Quote, we thought the only way to figure this out is to try it, says paul. Since they knew what the cast looked like in contemporary clothes, apology used the work schupp to experiment with an intense live thaw ten tim time. Period from the neck down, modern from the neck occupy. I didnt want to she christ in a powdered wig. Wanted to see him for whom he was. That choice by itself doesnt constitute a first. Joe started putting black and Latino Actors more than half a century ago. More than recently visual artists, have painted contemporary black men in the trap is of old masters. Still, the sight of this cast in pauls costumes made the show seem doubly, tripley audition in action one when the actors came on wearing blue coats with red trims unmistakably the uniforms of george wafers army. For that day, odd mence members halt the odd expose of watching black and Latino Actors,. People went at intermission. They screamed at the finale, and the lobbyafterwards you could hear euphoria, aspiration, from people would want to invest in the show. Four preparations between this and saturday which maintenance that 600 penal fanned out that weekend to the their friends what they had seen. By monday, hamilton toy had become the most talked about not quite show in new york. For tommy, the experiment of putting actors in period costumes hads been a complete sense. One choice that seemed like a confession, the spare nature of workshops. Owl the actors in pear. Ment tone clothed and adding clotheses only when they distinguished themselves as the characters carried to broadway. Paul had received five tony award nominationness this career and still wanted to get this one right. The piece is so humbling he says, tears rising in his eyes itch didnt want to f it up and get in the way of it. There are certain places where i remember, oh, yeah, im a part of this. Not this production. I know what bring to this production. Being an american. Im part of it as opposed to being re re searched for the right word afterthought. When the battle of yorktown sequence ended that the largely black and latino cast, singing a son within by a puerto rican process pourer costumes by an africanamerican designer, and celebrating doing the impossible. They would spend the next 16 months trying to recapture how exhilarating it felt. It took him until Opening Night on broadway to make him feel he succeeded. [applause] that was wonderful. Thanks so much. Ill ask a few questions and then please start getting up at the microphones and think of your own. Were talking about the this is an important cultural moment. The play, refer luigsizeed theater. The book, which is just extraordinarily beautiful, sort of revolutionized bookmaking, but, jeremy, how did it revolutionize you . Thats a big question. I guess good question. Like i said at the end, towards the end there, it does make me think with more concern and more loyalty about the United States of america. I think a chapter id eventually wanted to read about this, some of these it was just way too long is the one that makes the point that you can look at the founders and how you sort of needed all of them in exactly the right position at exactly the right time too get the United States to be formed in the way it was and its exactly the same way as when the guys who made the show had to be in exactly the right place at the right time to do it. Once you start looking at things that way, look at how contingent all these things are, it makes you treasure what you got because you know how tenuous a lot of it can be. So, thats been on my mind a lot and also, you know, the one experience of this that i didnt have, the whole time i was watching my friends go through this insanity, oak, who plays madison, and all these guys, who had very different lives and very different careers before this show, well, when you get that famous, it changes your life a lot. Id been watching the big spotlight swing around to them, one after another but only been watching. When this book came out thed are adoration around the show, assaultedly the spotlight is on the show and i had no idea what that felt like. Watching them i never could have guessed that love, that intensity of affection that people have for the show. You just cant really understand it until its chasing you down 46th street. Actually, i have a question that was texted to me a few minutes ago by a seventh grader. I dont know if she is in the audience o. Not. But alana if youre hearing. Seventh grader. She writes could your words be as eloquently put about Politics Today for another time in history or is it something that stand. Out about the story of hamilton that made the book so beautiful . The stakes were higher in the 1770s and 80s. Wait question of life or death for the characters if the revolution was going to work. And if they would be able to make it last. The stakes are still high today so it would be a little trickier, i suppose, to find that kind of subject. But i think the fundamentals of the storytelling in hamilton, how rigorous lin and tommy war and got all their collaborators to be about telling the story, thick just for me as a person who writes and puts projects together, just watching this is a whole other question about artistic form i will not bother you with today but hit me up at the table and ill tell you. This idea that the content rick tates form principle and how that really works in practice, if you get that right, then you can find subjects anybody and you can make them. I was talking to a third grade teacher in the audience and she said theres some explicit lyricses and she is trying to think about how to bring into it her classroom. Do you have any thoughts. This will teach a whole generation of kids how to swear. There are already moments when my wife and i are listening with our daughter and question start going la la la at various point show doesnt hear what is being said. Well get there. I dont know. I dont know exactly what level of foul mouthed eloquence is right for what ages but i will say that jeffrey seller, the producer of the show, has made a really admirable commitment to making sure that students get to see it. In new york, funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation in a program with a syllabus that was assembled by the gilder institute or American History to make sure that 20,000 students a year, high school students, will get to come see the show from the kind of schools they probably wouldnt have been going to see broadway shows otherwise. That to me when we put revolution on the cover of this book, people can if anyone is skeptical of that claim, as i would have been skeptical of the claim i hadnt gone through this that is this last line of defense know the experience the kid have been healing. Im talked to their teachers the world is good together be a different place because of what comes out of the kits brains as a consequence of having seen the show. We have a question. Hi. I just want to say, aim a huge pam ton fan listened to the cast recording before it came out on nbr. Turned my dad into pa broadway fan. So good things in this direction. What i find most amaze about the book you wrote, the characters of the musical. The right people at the right place at the right time. Can you imagine the American Revolution is if George Washington wasnt at that miss in his career. And amazing this diverse cast is telling the story of the Founding Fathers when every day on the word we hear about diversity problems we still have in the 201st century. My question do is you think that hamilton could have been this successful on broadway if it came out ten, 15 years ago, with the cal it has now . I dont know. I dont know. To imagine a world its a great question. Dont want to answer it too quickly. Ten years ago it was 2006. Those are great songs ump think great songs the fact he channeled all of the power, all of the stuff we love about really great pop music into telling a story with this kind of precision and rigor, thats going to work anytime. Would it have ban hugephone . Phenomenon. How important it was Michelle Obama came to see it and freaked out about how much she loved it. Or that barack obama was our president. Right. Exactly. The fact that it is so coincidence with the Obama Administration seems important to me and hard national it otherwise. And in terms of how it intersects with the news theres at least one moment when that intersection was close together. As its happens the company went back into rehearsal after the run downand before they reopened on broadway. Well, right the night before they reassembled was the shooting in charleston, when the white supremacist opened fire and killed nine worshipers at the church and it was in the room the next day. Chris Jackson Place washington and if talked about it. Very difficult f fog their him to stand there singing this new song that lin jut wrote about washingtons hopes for our country where everybody would be saf ay and nine people were killed. Tony talked about this because tony keeps writing plays that seem prophetic. He writes a show that begins the line, theres no underground in louisiana, only underwater. And then hurricane Hurricane Katrina happens. How does that happen . His answer is, if you write about the world we live in if you write about politics, write about government, write about society, and a really disciplined way, then youre much likelier to have thing that intersect with the new and i think thats the case herement lynn could have pulled a lot of punches and he didnt. Thank you very much. Since no one else is asking a question, i want to know what youre doing for at the tony. I will be at the hamilton tony party. [applause] ill be watching the screen and crossing my fingers and drinking champagne. Were having this program on saturday. A saturday program, not a sunday. Anybody else out there . Here comes one. So, what about historians . Have you had any historians who sort of quibbled with the take on, say, aaron bur, or any of the others . Theres burr is an interesting case. One of the great villains of history now. Lin seems more kindly of burr than almost anybody im aware of. Certain my more kindly about the guy than, say, ron cher now, who wrote the book that inspired lin to write to the show lynn said to ron turnow when he first asked turnow to help him, he didnt sale i want historians to like it. He said i want historians to take it seriously. That means if youre a historian and you want things to be taken seriously, then you pull on it, push on it, challenge it, look for the ways the argue. Is weak or strong, fit into it the context of the conversation thats already going on. There are historians who wish that lin had written things differently or fault him for this or that. To me its the fact that there is a genuine historical dialogue happening about a Broadway Musical is one of the most Science Fictiony things about the whole Science Fiction experience. Does absolutely transcend time. You dont what peered youre in when youre watching it or listen. What do you think maye made hamilton such a popular musical as opposed to in the heights even though it shares the same musical styles. Another really great question. Its the same team. Jeffrey seller produced both shows. Lin wrote both show with a coauthor, and the same choreographer and same actors. What happened . One thing for sure is he matured as an artist. They all did. They had one under their belts and were able to defend e deachen what they could each of them could do and what collectively they did. And this is my sort of theory that neither of the two gentlemen involved quite see it as crucial also i do, but another thing that happened between height and hamilton is that lin did two shows with steven sonheim. He appeared in a production. He was doing lyrics on stage and he did the Spanish Language translations of the sharks lyricses for a revival on broadway. Not that he is studying these things. He has to put them in his brain and do something with them. There is to me a sense that son home is the proto hiphop figure of broadway because if you listen to the precision and the density of what he is doing with his lyricses, some would kill to write a song like kris san them mum tea which is wonderful, player, cleverly string of rhymes. That is happening offstage, everthing else, lightning strikes sometimes. I think it just had to be everything lining up exactly right, and it did. It just happens almost never but this time it did. Thank you for talking. I have a comment and a question. My comment is that im old enough to remember when hair opened on broadway and i remember thinking is theirs my music, these are me people singing and thats the very same way i felt about hamilton. So important to these kids because its their show. Its their music. My question, however, is how much time did you spend with the show itself before you started writing the book in the theater, with the actors and the characters. Right. Lets see. Some of the episodes that are in the book are things that are written from my direct observation, like renees callback. Her audition when everyone in the room was freaking out how great she was. I watched that happen. About some of the i cant remember what i wrote now its hard to say. Wayns script meetings, in design meetings, i was the chapter 16, the one about tech week, how difficult that was because its so complicated. Was in the room watching them try to deal with the fact they didnt have enough time to do what they needed to do. And then once i knew i was going to write this book about it, then i just started showing up much as is could get back to new york because i knew that in any moment something important might happen that id want to preserve, and sure enough, gravity moments like when lin heard the roomy it happens, the showstopper for first anytime first time it happened in a broadway theater and his reaction to that. He was sitting right there. So, its always like a if id known in 2011 that i was going to be writing a book i would have taken better notes. Instead of just trying to pick this up on the fly. Thank you. Hi, thank you for your talk your wonderful book and this incredible musical. One of the thing is love about holiday hamilton is the Strong Female characters and i wonder if you considered in the future projects where the Strong Female characters are not only the wives, of the really prominent men who were involved in history but people who are making history themselves . Well, lins very next project in fact its milan na. A disney film, female protagonist that will be out later this year. So absolutely. In terms of collaboration, his next project, i dont know if ill work with the guy again. Hope with get to but he has that and my next im working on a book now im trying finish. A book about Young American radicals during world war i, one of my protagnies eggs alice paul, the absolutely fearless incredibly inspiring suffragist leader who gets the sues ban b. Susan b. Anthony amendment across the finish line. One more question. Everything ive read about lin or seen on his twitter, just seems like his pace is so frantic and almost like nonstop, like, in hamilton and says in the book someone asked him are you ever going to slow down yourself, write like youre return ought of time. He said, well, i. A do you share that sort of same work ethic as him o. Wars it kind of hard to keep up with his pace when you were work with someone who never stops. We do kind of share the same work ethic. We both sort of we had to hit a deadline they set for us wimple had tone could churning out words. But lin is a very rare specimen. I have got top work with a lot of very talented people, and theres something unique about that guy. About how closely he listens, thing you dont think he is picking up, the speed his brain is moving all the time, even when you think its not. It comes out when he does improve improv. He is part of a hiphop team and is funny and comes up with things that are moving. So, yeah, you sort of have to be on your toes when youre with the guy, but he is also a friend. So thats part of the one of the thing is love about the guy, it just never stops. Thank god because if it stops we wouldnt have holiday hamilton. Thank you. I have to say that everything that jeremy just said about lin, i would say about jeremy. Really. He is remarkable, and im so honored to know him and that he is here to tell our story. So, thank you very much. [applause] and jeremy will be signing books. These beautiful books. Right outside. Thanks. You can find out more