Interested in he was interested in the soul. I never read slylight and i started reading it. And i read about ten pages and i thought i hope the rest of it is this good. I hope it doesnt get bad. And it just kept Getting Better and better and better and by the end i was in heaven. Rose a look back at the year in theater when we continue. Funding for charlie rose is provided by american rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by rose additional funding provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Im past patiently waiting passing and smashing ef reexpectation every creation. Laughing in the face of casualties im thinking past tomorrow im not going to waste my shot im not going to waste my shot im not go throwing away my shot because we going to rise up we going to rise up, rise up time to take a shot rise up, rise up time to take a shot time to take a shot take a shot time to take a shot time to take a shot im not throwing away my shot not throwing away my shot off. Rose lesley odom, jr. Is here. What brought you to hamilton. E best jobs you get inat this career, in this business you didnt audition for. You have no idea how you got there. So i just asked tommy last week, cuz i have this superstition, sometimes if i get a straight offer i dont want to kind of ask how it came about. Rose tommy being the director. The director, yeah. I dont want to ask how it came about because im afraid they might realize, you know, why did we ask this guy. So i got invited about two years to do a reading of the show. And i had seen it at vasser. I had seen them do about a half an hour of the show at music stands. Maybe 45 minutes. And was blown away, so when i was invited to do the reading, i prepared like ive never prepared before. I mean i came in. I knew all my music. Because i knew what they were working on. Rose you knew it had powerful potential. I mean yeah, i knew how it affected me, you know. And you know, lin is only ayearolder than i am. So this is our music. You know, i recognized the rhythms and the sink passion and the the iofsyncopati, o n and the pulse of the piece t has been in my ears since i was born. Rose people wondered when hip hip hiphop what come to broadway because rock had come to broadway. Yeah. An lin was so influential with that too. In the heights happening and being such a watershed moment for hiphop music and for also latin american actors. I remember listening to in the heights on i listened to it before i saw it. And there was something about, i have chills thinking about it i told him and lac as one of the first rehearsals, there was something about from the first moments of that album. I mean the need to communicate is something that has always moved me greatly. I remember i saw a show when i was a teenager called deaf poetry jam. And the way those people came out and just they needed you to get it. You know, they put something, there is blood in the pen. They put something down on paper and they have there was an urgenessee and a fire in their belly for you to get it. It came full circle when i was listening to a rehearsal of us and hamilton listening back, just learning my part. I said we sound like that. We sound i can hear that need in what were doing. Rose i hear all that you all the need, all the desire, all the energy, all the preparation to do justice to the text that you were given. How much of it was important to know aaron burr . Very. Rose because you not only play a character, you play the narrator. You were there at every moment hamilton has a larger role but burr is also the continuity. One of my favorite gifts that people give sometimes, fans will bring us books that they will find on articles, theyll find on ebay. I will say the name steve and ronda hawthorne have given me more than anybody, right. They come by with these articles that they order and books that they order. And those have helped me a lot because i would not call myself a historian by any means. I mean lin at this point is. Lin has read enough about all of the different people and the events surrounding it that hes been able to come up with his own opinion on the events. Cuz i think thats what makes it historian. You read ron chernows become and that is the only opinion you have if you havent read anything else. I have read enough on burr now to come up with my own theories and may own. Rose because there are different opinions on aaron burr. Yeah. Rose some good, some bad. And then i also, at the end of the day, the text in the show was my bible. Right. I have to play what lin wrote and lin has. Rose but you have to pour into what hes written what you know and what youve experienced and what you feel. And what i and what i believe, you know, as far as what my job is as a performer. You know, thats another one of those things that this is intersected. Its come at the right point that im ready to theres a certain amount of vulnerability that this show requires of me that i was not ready to embrace at any other moment in my life. Theres a certain amount of honesty that if im doing my job right, i bring to the stage every night. And that is you know, that comes with time. Rose this play hamilton, this musical, people are talking about it as changing the american musical theater. You know, im a spiritual guy too, you know, this work is, you know, its emotional, physical, theres a spiritual component for me too. And i just i, cuz i seen it from the inside, charlie. And i will tell you, theres a great deal of it that those guys, andy, lac, tommy, lin have planned within an inch of its life. I mean those guys are meticulous and you know, we were so happy it opened because it forced them to put their pencils down. They will keep perfecting it until somebody forces them. But theres also theres the part that they had nothing to do with. There is something else. Rose and what is that . Its whatever happens, its the space in between you and i. Its whatever happens between me saying it on stage and how it affects you. And what it does to you. Thats the part that none of us have any control over. None. You couldnt pay jimmy fallon to go see to go see our show and talk about our show the way he did the next night. You cant pay for that. I hope that the audience comes and feels lake their presence is vital. Rose earlier we had talk toed writer, composer and star of hamilton Lin Manuel Miranda and its director thomas kail. They joined me in april and heres a look at that conversation. You sit in a room for six years making somethingment and you have the wildest dreams version of how you think a show will be received. And were experiencing that. So we are just trying to hang on while we can. I started writing this in 2008 while i was still in my show, in the heights. I was on vacation, my first vacation from the show and i picked up ron chernows book at random at borders just knowing that. Rose you went up and said i will take this one. It had great reviews in the back. I knew he died in a dual and so i knew it would have a bang ending. And fell in love with the story, really, that, the dic ensian nature almost from the second chapper. Rose at the point you say dickens, dickens and dickens, what was the dickensian aspect of his life. Alexander hamilton was born in neves, possibly out of wed lock. He was his father split by the time he was ten years old. His mother died in bed with him a few short years later. His brother was apprenticed so to a black smith so he was by himself. He got sent to live with a cousin after his mothers death, the cousin killed himself and he bot put in charge of a trading charger, he was a clerk for a company that traded sugar cane, the key point of the triangle trade in st. Croiss. And he wrote his way off the island. There was a hurricane that had ravaged stcroix and he wrote a poem about it describing the carnage saying that he saw sights that would strike astonishment into angels. This poem was used for relief efforts for the island and people took up a fund to get him an education rose so here we have a character, a great american. We know theres drama that he died at the end of a duel. In which he may not have, in fact, fired his gun. Lots of differing opinions on that. Rose speculation, all right. So here we have that story. But you translated it into so much more. Tell me about the ideas that you wanted to pour into this to make it a new look at the founding fathers, the american experience, and a different way of presenting presenting it that would appeal to young people because youre peopled by young actors. Well, you know i mean you speak to what we were really conscious of which is how do we eliminate any distance between our story and now. We know that the story was going to be set thenment but we knew it would sound like now. And we knew that fundamentally this was a country that was founded and created by immigrants. Somebody, somebody in all of our lines stepped off a boat or some former transportation put their foot down on this soil and went to work. And so as we started thinking about taking the inspiration from rons book, we thought okay, here are a lot of events but we have to tell a story. So we had all of the events laid out. We sort of both read the book and made our own time lines. Then we would compare. This really spoke to me. This moment feels like its essential. So then he you have those things to build around it just became so apparent early on as we were really designing how the show could function that this idea of doubling characters, for instance, felt really right on. That the character who played la fayette, one of his great friends. Also plays jefferson. They both have this connection to france. They both have this relationship, one antagonistic, one supportive. So how can we make the audience feel like who they are and what they understand is actually not so different from what these people were struggling with. Rose hiphop seems like a genius stroke now but thats what you knew. Thats the first thing i checked, by the way. So i read two chapters of this book and i go someones already done a hiphop version of this. Because it felt to me the quintessential hiphop narrative. This is someone who grew up in hard times and wrote his way out of his circumstances. Wrote his way towards a better life. And that is the hiphop narrative from the south bronx in the 70s to today. And so i googled hamilton hiphop musical. Rose and it was not there. It was not there am and so thank god, now you google it you will see my show. But that was the first thing that jumped out at me was this is a fundamental hiphop story. Rose the lyrics go i am just like my country, im young, scrappy and hungry, and im not throwing away my shot. Charlie rose is rapping. I hope were rolling. Rose were rolling on everything. But you perform that at the white house. Yeah. I performed the opening number at the white house, actually, the Alexander Hamilton, the opening number of the show, yeah. Rose before we see that, is that what the president responded to when he said quitener should see this. Yeah. Yeah. I told i told the a essentialed audience this was my first time performing the song in public. I, they had asked me to perform something from in the heights and i said i have 16 bars about the first treasury secretary and they allowed me to close out the show with that. And his response was somebody got to get geithner in here because you know. Rose he thought of geithner as hamilton or what . He had a quote at that time because the economic crisis had just, everything had just blown up. And he said geithners got the hardest job as treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton. I think that was his quote on the record about what geithner had ahead of him. And this is very early in obamas administration. We performed in may of 2009. So you know, they were just figuring out how to do this thing. How to get us out of the hole we were in. So i think he was tickled by the fact that i had made a treasury secretary sing. And he wanted to show the treasury secretary. And that song was from burrs perspective point. So he also performed it from burrs point of view. So it got a laugh about halfway through. Rose where did that idea come, burr, aaron burrs perspective . Well, honestly, i look to musical theater history. We have a great tradition thanks to Andrew Lloydwebber of the antagonist narrating the story. Judas far rates jesus christ superstar. That was immediately where i went. And that set up a very difficult task for me of figuring out who aaron burr is, who is as we say in the show, a villain in our history. He is known as the guy who shot. Rose you think more of him. I do after learning a lot about his life. And i have to find my way in because there are a lot of biographies of burr, there are several. Rose gore wrote a historical fiction novel. His burr is a lot craftier than mine. But one of the things i learned about burr was he is an early feminist. His daughter received an education greater than any man of that era. He was very close with his wife and with his daughter. He was as he was on the Mission Society with Alexander Hamilton for the abolition of slaves in new york city, in new york state. And so there are redeeming characteristics to this guy. I had to find my way into that because every biography either is insanely defensive of him orville i fews them. Rose they were different in the voluming way which you know better than anybody. Because on the one hand, aaron burr was amazing. He was cautious, careful, laid back, alexander ashow is at the moment when burr is finally reckless and lets go and hamilton is cautious and throws away his shot, one kills the other. And that is how they are remembered forever. One of the things we were and i think and hamilton knew they would be bound forever, and whether that would whether that would insurance his legacy of someone who then had to be spoken about. He had become slightly obsolete at this point. This is someone who had thought about death so often in his life and here he was towards the end, not empowered, not able to affect change in that way. And we talked very early on and i think again to the credit of the writing and leslie odom who plays burr, we said we have seen a lot of stories about two enemies who shoot at each other. Lets make a story about two people who were very dear and complex friends and one of them kills his friend. Soldiers, lawyers, statesmen together. They. Rose admiring of each other. Yeah. Rose you thought about playing burr. Yeah, every time i wrote a burr song i said man, i should be this guy. I mean you know. Rose because he was the narrator or because because he gets all the best songs in the show. And as you will see, leslie is now you watch the show, you cant imagine me playing the role because it really fits leslie like a glove. But he gets these wonderful moments, you know. One of my favorite being the room where it happens, where he is talking about not being in power. And seeing hamilton trade away the capital in exchange for his Financial Plan and being like how am i not in this room. How am i not in the room where it happens. Rose take a look at this, this is you at the white house in 2009 performing the first rap song you wrote for hamilton. Here it is. Fourth son of a whore and a scotsman drops in the middle of the forgotten spot if the caribbean impoverished, in squalor, grow up to a hero and a scholar the 10 founding father without a father got a lot farther by working a lot harder by being a lot smarter by being a selfstarter by 14 they placed him in charge of the trade and charter and then being slaughtered and carted away across the waves, hamilton kept his guard up he was longing for something to be a part of the brothers then a hurricane came and it rained a man saw his future dripping down the drain he connected to his brain he wrote his first refrain of his pain word got around they said this kid is took up a collection to send him to the mainland get your education dont forget from where you came and the world is going to know your name whats your name. Alexander ham toil hamilton his name is Alexander Hamilton. There are a million things he hasnt done but just you wait just you wait he was ten his father split, full of it, debt ridden, two years later alex and his mother bedridden half dead sitting alex got better but his mother went quick moved with a cousin. The cousin committed suicide ined pride ith nothing but omething new inside alex you got to fend for yourself he started retreating and reading there was nothing left to do for someone we have been dead and destitute without a sense of restitution started working, clerking for his late mothers landlord trading sugar cane all the things he cant afford every book he can get his hands on planning for the future see him now as he stands on the bow of the ship headed for a new land to new york, you can be a new man the ship is in the harbor now see if you can spot him another immigrant coming up from the bottom his enemies destroyed im the damn fool that shot him. Rose there you go. Thats unbelievable. Right. Rose could this ever have been done, i mean its almost like if they didnt have their it had to be invented and created for this. Oh, wow, thank you, that means a lot. There is a lot of i think the score is both a lev letter to both hiphop and musical theater there are a lot of references to both embedded throughout but youre right t is this heightened language and we learned really early on in the process of making it that any time we dip mood ode speech, into proceeds, energy just kind of went out. Like we kind of had this ball we throw in the air so high at the top with this opening number that we kind of have to keep it at that level, a lot of the show. And 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 seemed to be the only way to sort of convey hamiltons worldview. Rose did you once say that hamilton reminded you of tupac. Yeah, yeah. I think he in that he embodies so many contradictions. He is both thoughtful and boys trusion. He is both brilliant and selfdestructive. In certain ways. You know, he would get into fights that in retrospect why are you fighting with that guy. And that is what i think when i think about tupacs life who was so brilliant and embodied so many Different Things to so many different people. I think hamilton carries that many contradictions with him. Rose Eugene Oneill is one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. He is the only american dram test to have won the nobel prize for literature, called the father of American Theater paving the way for arthur miller, Tennessee Williams and tony kushner, the iceman cometh is one of his most powerful plays. Oneill described it as a big kin