We are going to rise up. Time to take a shot Charlie Leslie odom junior is here, who played aaron burr on this program. What brought you to hamilton . Leslie i was invited into hamilton. Sometimes you find that the best jobs that you get in this career and business, you did not audition for. I just asked tommy last week, because i have a superstition, sometimes if i get a straight offer, i do not want to ask how it came about. Im afraid they might realize why did we ask this guy . I got invited about two years ago to do a reading for this show. And then i saw it at vassar. I saw them do about half an hour of it. I saw them do maybe 45 minutes at music stand. I was blown away. When i was invited to do the reading, i prepared like i have never prepared before. I knew all of my music. I knew what they were working on. Charlie you knew it had powerful potential. Leslie i knew how it affected me. Lin is only a year older than i am, so this is our music. I recognized the rhythms and the syncopation and the pulse of the piece. I recognized that. It has been in my ears since i was born. Charlie people wondered when hiphop would come to broadway , because rock had come to broadway. Leslie lin was so influential with that. The height was such a watershed moment for hiphop music and latin american actors. I remember listening to it before i saw it. There was something about it i have chills thinking about it, i told him at one of my first one of my first rehearsals, there was something about, from the first moments of that album, the need to communicate has always moved me greatly. Showedwas a teenager i i saw a show called def poetry jam. The way that those people came out, they needed you to get it. There is blood in the pen. There was an urgency and a fire in their bellies for you to get it. It came full circle when i was listening to a rehearsal of us in hamilton, learning my part, and i said that we sound like that. I can hear that need. Charlie i read almost all the energy, the preparation , to do justice to the text that you were given. How much of it was important to know and aaron burr . Because you not only play a character, you play the narrator. You were there at a moment. Hampton has a larger role, but burr is also a continuity. Leslie what might favor gifts that people give, fans will bring us looks. Bring us books. They come by with these articles and books that they order. Those have helped me a lot. I would not call me a historian by any means. Lin has read enough about all the different people and events surrounding it that he has been able to come up with his own opinion on the events. That is the only opinion you have. Burr to comeugh on up with my own theories. Charlie there are different opinions of aaron burr, some good, some bad. Leslie at the end of the day, the text and the show is my life. I have the plate what to play what lin wrote. Charlie you have to pour in what he has written what you know, what you have experienced, and what you feel. Aslie and what i believe far as what my job is as a performer. Thats another one of those things. This is intersected, coming at the right point. Theres a certain amount of vulnerability that this show requires that i was not ready to embrace at any other moment in my life. There is a certain amount of honesty. That comes with time. Charlie tell me who aaron burr was. He was he was a soldier, a father, a husband, a lover, a friend, a murderer. A politician. I think he was all of those things. Like all of us when people say, who is the person you want to have dinner with, living were dead . Living or dead . Charlie id like to be there. Leslie aaron burr, just to ask him. Our show is him looking back. Our show is after all that stuff has happened. Charlie he had an interesting life after killing hamilton. Leslie it ruined his life. Charlie ruined his political life, first of all. He had been vice president. Then he fled the east coast. He was indicted for treason. Eslie he had a daughter, his only child, who died. After the death of his only grandchild, his grandson died. He died completely alone. He did have friends, though. He didnt have much money. There were people that supported him because what he had shown himself, the men he had shown himself to be. He had friends in of the war. People who saw acts of heroics that into your them to him all the days of his life. Charlie moments of heroism. Leslie yeah. Charlie hes intertwined with hamilton. We see that in the play. What was the relationship . Leslie they came up together. They ran in the same circles together. They tried cases as lawyers together. They fought in the war together. So i think of them as friends. I think of them, as if you were to tell them when they were 19 years old, if you show them a picture, this is going to be you in your early 40s. Youre going to do this to this guy, they never would have believed it. Charlie this musical, people are talking about it as changing the american musical theater. Significant evolution in the american musical theater. This is seen more than simply a successful musical. It is been given the heavyweight of cultural moment. Leslie i am a spiritual guy, too. This work is emotional, physical, and there is a spiritual component. Inside. From the there is a great deal of it that , andy, lin have planned within an inch of his life. Those guys are meticulous. We were so happy we opened as it forced them to put their pencils down. There is the part that they had nothing to do with. There is Something Else charlie what is that . Leslie it is the space between you and i. It is whatever happens between me saying it on stage and how it affects you and what it does to you. That is the part that none of us have any control over. None. You could not pay jimmy fallon to go see our show and talk about our show the way he did the next night. You cannot pay for that. I hope that the audience comes and feels like their presence isnt idle. Charlie we spoke to the composer of hamilton. They join me in april. Here is a look at that conversation. You sit in a room for six years making something, and you have the dream of version of how the show will be received. We are experiencing that. We are hanging on while we can. I was on my vacation, my first vacation from the show. I picked up the book at random at the borders. It had great reviews on the back, and i know that he died in a duel, so it was going to have a bang ending. Hamiltkensian nature of ons life charlie explained that. At some point you say dickens, dickens, and dickens. What was the dickensian nature of his life . Hamilton was born possibly out of wedlock. His father split by the time he was 10 years old. His bother his mother died in bed with him a few short years later. His brother was invited to a blacksmith as an apprentice, so he was by himself. His cousin killed himself. Then he got put in charge of a trading charter as a clerk for a trading company. They treated sugarcane and rum, the key point of the triangle trade. He rode his way off the island. There was a hurricane that had ravaged saint floyd, and he had wrote a poem about it ascribing the carnage. Describing the carnage. This poem was used for relief efforts for the island. People set up a fund to get an education in a new york. Charlie here we have a great character, who dies at the end of a dual which she may have not in fact, fired his gun. The end of the duel. Here we have that story. You have translated it into so much more. Tell me about the ideas that you want to pour into this to make it a new look at the founding fathers, the american experience, and a different way of presenting it that would appeal to young people, because your people are young actors. You speak to what we were conscious of, eliminating any distance between their story and now. We knew it was going to be set then, but it would sound liken now. Fundamentally this was a country that was founded and created by immigrants. Somebody in all of our lines stepped off about in some form of transportation, put their foot down on this soil and went to work. Once we started thinking about taking the inspiration from rons book, we thought of events, but we had to tell a story. We had all the events laid out. We read the book and made our own timelines. We would compare, hey, this moment feels like it spoke to me, this one is essential. It became so apparent early on as we were designing how the show could function that this idea of doubling characters felt really right on. The character who played lafayette, one of his great friends charlie jefferson. Also jefferson. The of this connection to france. One antagonistic, one supportive. How can we make the audience feel like who they are is actually not so different than what people are struggling with . Charlie hiphop seems like a genius stroke, but that is what you knew. That was what i checked. I read two chapters of this book, and i thought, someone has done a hiphop version of this. It felt the quintessential hiphop narrative. This is someone who grew up in hard times and wrote his way out of the circumstances to a better life. That is the hiphop narrative from the south bronx in the 1970s to today. Hiphop andamilton it was not there. As soon as you google it, you will now see my show. But that was the first thing that jumped out at me. This is a fundamental hiphop story. Charlie im just like my country, im young, scrappy, and hungry, and im not throwing away my shot. [laughter] charlie you performed that at the white house. Ivory from the opening number. Charlie before we see that. Is that with the president responded to, when he said geithner or should see this . This is my first time performing the song in public. They asked me to forms of thing from indicate perform thed me to show with that. In his response was, ive got to get greater in here. I have to get geithner in here. The economic crisis everything had blown up. R has theeithne hardest job in treasury since Alexander Hamilton. This was very early in obamas administration, may 2009. How were just figuring out to do this thing, how to get us out of the hole we were in. I think he was tickled by the secretary ofsed a treasury. Burrs performed it from point of view. It got a laugh halfway through. Charlie where does that come, from ehrenbergs perspective . From aaron burrs perspective . Lin thanks to Erin Lloyd Webber , we have that narrator. That was immediately where i went. That set up was a very difficult task to figure out who ehrenberg who aaron burr is. A villain in our history. Charlie do you think more of him . Lin i do, after reading about his life. There are several biographies of him. Gore wrote a historical novel, much craftier than mine. Burr was a early feminist. His daughter received an education greater than any man of that era. He was close with his wife and his daughter. He was on a few main mission with Alexander Hamilton for the abolition of slaves in new york state. There are redeeming characteristics to this guy. I had to find my way into that. Every biography is either defensive of him, or vilified him. Charlie but you know better than anybody explained to me. On the one hand, aaron burr was amazingly cautious, careful, laidback, and Alexander Hamilton wanted to charge forward at every move. Lin hamilton left behind seven volumes of written work. Burr left behind less than 2. That tells you how much everything you need to know. Burr reserved his right to change his mind on any particular point. The tragedy of the show is, at the moment when burr is finally reckless and lets go and hamilton is cautious, one kills the other. And that is how they are remembered forever. Charlie have you thought about playing burr . Lin every time i wrote a burr song, i thought, man, i should do this guy. Charlie because he was the narrator . Lin because he got the best songs in the show. [laughter] but now with leslie, you can imagine anyone else. He gets these wonderful moments. One being the room where it happened. He is talking about not being in power and seeing hamilton trade away the capital for a financial plan. How am i not in the room . Charlie take a look at this. This is you at the white house in 2009 performing the first rap song you wrote for hamilton. Grow up to be a hero and a scholar being aot farther by lot smarter by being a self starter being slaughtered and carted away came andrricane devastation rained \ future dripping down the drain connected to his brain he wrote about his pain workout around, this kid is insane get your education, dont forget from where you came and the world will know your name whats your name . Alexander hamilton theres a million things he hasnt done but just you wait it, hisof it, debt spl mom and bedridden alex got better but his mother went quick his cousin committed suicide left and with nothing but ruined pride retreating and reading and dreaming he wouldve been destitute without a sense of restitution book he could get his hands on on the bow of a ship heading for a new land in new york you can be a new man headed for the harbor now, see if you can spot him coming up from the bottom go. Lie there you its unbelievable. Could this ever have been done . Its a most like if they didnt have hiphop, it had to be invented for this. Lin wow, thank you. That means a lot. I think the score is both a love letter to hiphop and musical theater. But it is this heightened language. We learned early on that when we turned a speech into prose, the energy went out. We had this ball that we throw in the air so high at a top of this opening number that we had to keep it at that level. There are a lot of times when we take musical breaks and slow it down and speed it back up again, but this heightened language to be the only way to convey hamiltons worldview. Charlie to the million fans around the world, they are better known as diplo and s krillex. A string of electronic dance music. Heres a look at their single take you there from their new album. Charlie im pleased to have diplo and skrillex at the table. For the very first time, welcome. Here is why im really happy about this, i didnt know that much about either of you. The more i read and learned i was excited to have you here. Let me begin with this, do you think of yourself as musicians or Something Else . Skrillex i think it is a combination of being musicians. I came from singing in bands and playing guitar. P l and other instruments. Iano and other instruments. It is the culmination of being a musician and artist. Diplo you have to have one foot in music and the creation of the media and the way the shows put together. I am not a musician per se, but i create music now and i have learned how to play music on my own. I think it is bigger than just getting a guitar. You have to create an atmosphere more complexe a than just laying down some courts. Charlie what has made it so popular . 6. 9 billion per year. Skrillex i think it was the timing. The fact of the internet, being able to share media. Computers and music programs were so accessible. Younger people were coming into music. Coming from a band, i found it easier to express myself through a computer. It is your onestop shop. Music videos are all made by us. Diplo the distribution chain is broken. It used to be when you had a from,where sunny came you get your band together, find some friends that like to make music, you find a garage and rehearse, find someone to borrow some money or use a studio to bel,rd, maybe find a la create a record that they want to promote. That is a twoyear process. Now it is diy. I can go on my laptop, make a song, put it on youtube or sound cloud, and reach people in a couple hours. An act catalog could be reached on the radio. That chain has been lost. We are very grassroots and we distributing ourselves. Skrillex the renaissance of all art has become digitized with computers, people that added on instagram. Edit on instagram. That is an outlet for them to be creative and that can go deeper , into music and editing and making art in general. Charlie it also has huge energy. Skrillex i think it comes from being such a youthful movement. The producers are becoming popular and making a living are getting younger and younger. Diplo our job is inside the computer, inside the speakers to make the loudest, the craziest, the next, the biggest. Something you have never heard before. It is our goal to make something progressive and make something brandnew. Rillex also sk about bringing people together, too. It is all about taking things that shouldnt make sense. Getting 2 chainz and Justin Bieber on a record, where you wouldnt normally have some thing like that. Charlie lets talk about forming jack u. Whos idea . Diplo we became really good friends and i think we have always been outsiders in this dance world and the producer world that we try to create , stuff together. It was really special because we have a strong quality control. It is good enough for both of us. That takes a lot of work. Charlie is it a long time . Diplo that record you played a video of, we recorded that in three hours in a hotel room with a girl in a room. It took another month after the two hours of recording the vocals to make the song sound the way it did. For me it may take a year to mix a record and produce it properly, even if it takes a night to write it. Charlie it is extraordinary for two people at the top coming together. Often, when two people become really good, they split. You can together, as competitors almost. Skrillex whether we are good or bad, we respect each other so much. We have that quality control. Charlie do you guys complement each other . Skrillex in what way . Like hey, youre good . Or their sound . Projects,sten to our they are so forward thinking. We try to push the sound. Jack u takes it to the next level. Also we have no rules other than we make good music. Diplo electronic music is collaborative. Im always mixing my music with things you wouldnt expect, like a rapper, a rock singer. With me and him, we are always working with different people and different voices. We are always looking to collaborate and make things you havent heard before, things that are unexpected. Charlie when did that collaboration take place . With i had become friends bieber in a club in l. A. I said we have a project, we will make it crazy, i promise you. Im on headphones on a table like this, playing around with it until we have some ideas. We had a spark and we took it to the finish line. Charlie roll tape, take a look at this. Here it is. Skrillex it was a cool concept because we just shot Justin Bieber dancing and performing in a very simple background, but then took all of the stills from video and opened an art gallery gallery in l. A. And invited fans, haters, and artists to draw whatever they wanted to on Justin Bieber. You can go on youtube and hit the still, you can see a lot of stuff. Everything from couple months, to false god, illuminati, anything someone wanted to say. Diplo our album is so collaborative. We wanted a video in a way that uses Justin Biebers voice in a way that personified what it is to be like Justin Bieber. As a piece of art himself. Doin