[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