Hamilton: The Revolution

[BURR] I am the one thing in life I can control.

You have no control. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.

How on Earth did you do that with the same 24 hours a day that everyone else gets?

I know my sister like I know my own mind, you will never find anyone as trusting or as kind.

Raise a glass to freedom Something they can never take away No matter what they tell you

I may not live to see our glory But I will gladly join the fight And when our children tell our story They'll tell the story of tonight

Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder

History is entirely created by the person who tells the story.

BURR: Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays defending the new United States Constitution, entitled The Federalist Papers. The plan was to write a total of 25 essays, the work divided evenly among the three men. In the end, they wrote 85 essays, in the span of six months. John Jay got sick after writing 5. James Madison wrote 29. Hamilton wrote the other 51.

Comma sexting. It's a thing. Get into it.

I wish writing were really like the way Andy staged it here: Me in a mania at a desk while a group of people stand around cheering in awe. More realistically, it's me pooping around on Twitter until I get an idea.

Lin beamed, and threw a couple of triumphant middle fingers in the air.

When Lin optioned his book, Ron was relieved that the Founding Father who had the most dramatic and least appreciated life story would finally get his due—even though a rap musical was the last way that Ron had anticipated Hamilton getting it.

You didn't expect these notes to turn into my therapy session, did you?

Sometimes the right person tells the right story at the right moment, and through a combination of luck and design, a creative expression gains new force.

(Questlove) Is this the most revolutionary thing to happen to Broadway, or the most revolutionary thing to happen to hip-hop?

This was the way into Burr. I knew he and Hamilton circled each other all their lives, I knew they went from friends to frenemies to foes, but it wasn’t til I read this detail online—that Theodosia was married to a British officer when Aaron Burr met her, and he waited until she was available—that the character of Burr came free in my imagination. Imagine Hamilton waiting—for anything. That’s when I realized our task was to dramatize not two ideological opposites, but a fundamental difference in temperament.

(On Angelica in 'Satisfied') Oof. Tryin’ to out-Eponine Eponine up in this piece.

Legacy. What is a Legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see

I was having a drink with Hugh Laurie, with whom I’d worked on his series House, and I told him I wanted to write a breakup letter from King George to the colonies. Without blinking, he improv’d at me, “Awwww, you’ll be back,” wagging his finger. I laughed and filed it away. Thanks, Hugh Laurie.

This is familiar in contemporary politics.

Lin says the sensation of standing in the middle of these unsettling effects is a distilled version of how he feels throughout the show: "I am staying in my lane and doing what I'm supposed to do while everyone is doing what they do at the height of their abilities, and if I move to the left or right, I'll get hit with a desk.

On opening night, standing under the Rogers's marquee, [Lin] realized that if Eliza's struggle was the element of Hamilton's story that had inspired him the most, then the show itself was a part of her legacy.

(On 'The Story Of Tonight (Reprise)') Tommy Kail and I always described this scene as “When your hometown friends are at the party with your college friends.

Ron told Pippa that during the six years he had spent on the book, Valerie Chernow had developed a powerful identification with Hamilton’s wife. “She used to say, ‘Eliza is like me: She’s good, she’s true, she’s loyal, she’s not ambitious.’ There was a purity and a goodness about the character, and that was like Valerie,” he says. In 2006, after 27 years of marriage, Valerie passed away. For her gravestone, Ron chose a line from the letter that Hamilton wrote to Eliza on the night before the duel: “Best of wives and best of women.

I’m erasing myself from the narrative. Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart.

Unless Lin made the whole thing up - and nobody has said that he did - it suggest that however innovative Obama's speeches and Lin's show might seem, they are, in fact, traditional. They don't reinvent the American character, they renew it. They remind us of something we forgot, something that fell as far out of sight as the posthumously neglected Alexander Hamilton, who spent his life defending one idea above all: "the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country." Obama's speeches and Lin's show resonate so powerfully with their audiences because they find eloquent ways to revive Hamilton's revolution, the one that spurred Americans to see themselves and each other as fellow citizens in a sprawling, polyglot, young republic. It's the change in thought and feeling that makes all the other changes possible.

You have married an Icarus; He has flown too close to the sun

The myth of 'You have to be a tortured artist' is a myth," says Lin. "You can have a happy, healthy life and still go to all these crazy dark places in your writing, and then go play with your child and hug your wife.