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Hamilton's Cabinet: meet the team behind the hit musical
Hamilton has singlehandedly made Lin-Manuel Miranda. The unlikely hip-hop musical about America’s founding fathers has catapulted its Puerto Rican composer to international fame. This time last year, Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet.
But Lin-Manuel Miranda did not make Hamilton singlehandedly. The myth of lone genius is a potent and pervasive one, but theatre has always been a collaborative art-form. Hamilton, much like American independence, is a colossal collective act. It might have been motored by Miranda’s own particular talent, but without a close-knit creative team, Hamilton might never have come to fruition.
After Miranda had found inspiration in Ron Chernow’s exhaustive biography of Alexander Hamilton, it was director Thomas Kail who convinced Miranda that the story belonged on stage, not in a concept album. Cuban-American orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, the man who would arrange Miranda’s composition into a final score, accompanied him on the piano for its very first, very public performance at the White House in 2009. Choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler came on board shortly afterwards, long before anyone had danced a step.
Between them, these three defined the way Hamilton looked, sounded and moved – but they all had a hand in the writing process too, shaping the story and fine-tuning Miranda’s lines. In a nod to George Washington’s right-hand men, fans christened them the Cabinet and, once Hamilton was up and away on Broadway, all three would win Tony awards for their individual contributions. They’re also the individuals responsible for getting the show on its feet and up to scratch in London.
Not that they ever expected to be. “None of us ever thought the show was going to be the phenomenon that it is,” says Lacamoire backstage at the newly refurbished Victoria Palace theatre. Slim and spritely, with a floret of black curls and a goatee, he seems younger than his 42 years. “I thought it would be critically well-received, but I didn’t know if people were actually going to pay to see this show about American history told through rap and hip-hop.”
Even so, both he and Kail, who, at 39, remains as fresh-faced as a grad student, always knew they were dealing with something remarkable. “The first time I heard Hamilton, I knew the writing was special, but I didn’t quite get it,” Lacamoire continues. “I didn’t know if it was a joke. It was only a year later, when he’d written My Shot, when I heard the way it spoke about revolution, that I remember thinking, 'Oh, Lin is dead serious about this.'”
“We’re here because Lin wrote a song,” Kail admits. “But musicals, to my mind, require the most collaboration of any art-form.” There’s a Broadway saying: musicals aren’t written but re-written. “Lin would bring things in fully-baked, but he’d also come in and say here’s a verse and a chorus, here’s an idea, here’s a motif. He’d push ideas out on the table and we’d talk about it. He’s not at all precious about that.”
Even so, Kail’s content to cede credit entirely. “Lin wrote something with such depth that it required all of us to reach right into ourselves.” Each artist upped their game to match Miranda’s. "That’s what material at its best can do."
Blankenbeuhler elaborates on that. “The strength of dance in this show is down to the specificity of the score and the lyrics.” Usually, he says, supporting artists set out to solve a script’s problems or “shine up” imperfect materials. “When I started looking at Hamilton, I had ten great ideas for every number. This weird snowball effect happens and, as soon as I realised that, I knew this was going to be the best work any of us had done.”
Partly, he says, that’s due to the variety of a score that switches styles every other song, allowing plenty of room for others to play, but the richness of the writing provided inspiration of its own.
Miranda’s lyrics have been raked over for their references to the giants of hip-hop and musical theatre alike: Gilbert and Sullivan or Stephen Sondheim one second; Busta Rhymes or The Notorious BIG the next. Less obvious are the allusions his creative team laced through the production. Lacamoire dropped a banjo into The Room Where It Happens in homage to Chicago’s composer John Kander. Blankenbeuhler’s choreography quotes Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson, Bob Fosse and Justin Timberlake – “everybody I’ve really admired.” The show’s duels are staged in slow-mo, as Kail’s personal tribute to The Matrix.
That’s born of a shared sensibility. Coming to theatre late, in his final year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Kail was never in thrall to its traditional vernacular. "I just thought, 'Oh, theatre can be anything,'" he says. “The music that I listened to in my car or my dorm room, the references of my childhood and adolescence all have a place in theatre.”
It’s what led him back to Wesleyan in 2002 to meet a student who had written a hip-hop score. Kail took a group of friends to see the show Miranda submitted as his senior thesis, a time-travel romance called On Borrowed Time.
Was it any good? Kail leaves a diplomatic pause. “It showed promise.” (Miranda’s more up-front: “If I have my way, you’ll never hear [it],” he told students last year.) The two met up in New York. “We had a five-hour dinner and we just never stopped talking about the show. The way Lin describes it, we started a conversation that’s lasted 15 years.”
The Cabinet had worked together for a decade before Hamilton’s first public performance and count each other as close friends. “The work we do is directly connected to the depth of that,” Kail stresses. He was Lacamoire’s best man back in 2011 and the pair have a natural quickfire patter, almost finishing one another’s sentences. When the orchestrator arrives a little late, Kail delivers a mock chat show intro: “Please put your hands together for a very dear friend of mine…” Lacamoire, rather sweetly, replies with a soft, “Hi Sheriff.”
Hamilton is grounded in their history as much as America’s. In 2005, the four staged In The Heights together in Connecticut, and that hip-hop musical – set in Washington Heights, a mostly Hispanic neigbourhood of New York City – gradually worked its way to Broadway, winning four Tonys in the process. By the time Hamilton began, they’d built a shorthand. “We could be honest with each other,” Lacamoire explains. “Everyone was after the same thing – the best possible show. There’s just no BS with that.”
Kail was also directing Miranda’s hip-hop improv troupe, Freestyle Love Supreme, with whom Lacamoire would occasionally perform. Hamilton’s roots grew out of that. “It’s about bouncing off the other person,” says Lacamoire. “When someone comes up with an idea, instead of smashing it, you have to run with it.” Kail reckons it changed their understanding of audiences too. “Freestyle empowers its audience, because it lets them listen that much more acutely. The audience are smart. They’re right there with you and that’s something Lin really trusts. He has a lot of faith in audiences.”
Though not involved with the improv group, Blankenbeuhler recognises Freestyle’s impact. “Lin’s ability to improvise is so fresh. If you say, Can you look at this 30 seconds of song?, he’ll give you another in 15 minutes. He can look out a window and write a song about what he sees. It never ends.” Collaboration means keeping up.
It also means taking care. Hamilton had a very public process. Eyes were on it from its first outing at the White House in 2009 to a semi-staged workshop production at New York's Public Theater five years later. “You could feel the vibrations starting around the city,” Kail remembers. That buzz piled on the pressure.
It was then Kail decided, unusually for New York where new shows need all the publicity they can muster, to retreat from the spotlight. “So much of my job is about building space for people to do that work. Sometimes that means making sure they don’t hear the noise being generated outside.” It meant “battening down the hatches for nine months and putting our heads down.”
Miranda, though, has never been shy about sharing the work that goes on behind the scenes – his own or his collaborators. “Look at his Twitter account,” says Lacamoire. “He’s taking photos and praising [costume designer] Paul Tazewell’s work on the garter that goes around King George’s calf.” It’s the sort of detail that so often goes unnoticed, but Miranda’s regular shout-outs have boosted the profiles of cast and creatives alike.
For Kail, however, the effect of that goes beyond credit. It lets audiences into the process itself. “Lin’s never been one to come down from the mountaintop. He’s the person on Twitter saying, ‘Hey, this is hard. There were a lot of times I tried to write and it wasn’t happening.’ It’s important young people see that and understand this wasn’t a lightning bolt – all of a sudden it’s there.”
The London run, meanwhile, brings a new level of expectation. Hamilton now has to contend with the scale of its own success, but the Cabinet aren’t concerned. They’re effusive about a “phenomenal” British cast, led by Jamael Westman as Alexander Hamilton. The chance to start over, from scratch, with everyone on an even footing has been revitalising. “We can’t rush anything,” says Kail. “It takes as long as it takes.”
Hamilton’s success has, of course, changed each of their lives. Royalties from its $275 million gross on Broadway have led to levels of financial security few artists attain and fewer anticipate. For his part, Blankenbeuhler says he’s now more selective about the work he takes on. “This is a blessing and a curse, but it’s set a new bar. It’s set new bars for everybody, but especially for us as a bunch of makers. My wife reminds me all the time that the next show is not going to be Hamilton.”
Nothing’s public yet, but Miranda’s let slip he’s started toying with new ideas. Have the Cabinet been consulted? For the moment, Kail and Lacamoire are keeping coy. They exchange a quick look, mutter something about a movie, mumbling a title that’s not been made public, before the director cuts in: “My feeling is that if Lin’s in a hole digging, I don’t stand up here and say, ‘What are you digging for?’ I grab a shovel, jump in and start digging.”