Failing Up

by Leslie Odom, Jr.

  * * *

  THE OFF-BROADWAY RUN WASN’T EASY for ANY of US, but it SURE DID SERVE to BRING US CLOSER TOGETHER.

  * * *

  Over the development process, I’d had the unique pleasure of watching a cast of supernovas assemble one by one. The small ensemble at the Vassar reading was made up of almost entirely different players than our cast at the Public Theater. Lin, Daveed Diggs (Lafayette/Jefferson), and Chris Jackson (Washington) were the only cast members who’d remained from The Hamilton Mixtape reading that I saw in the small theater in Poughkeepsie. I was added next in the “Octoburrfest.” The developmental reading after that saw the arrival of Phillipa Soo in an expertly sung, brilliantly restrained, and miraculous performance as Eliza Hamilton. The workshop after that brought us Oak (Okieriete Onaodowan in the roles of Hercules Mulligan/James Madison), Anthony Ramos (John Laurens/Philip Hamilton), and Renée Elise Goldsberry in her star turn as Angelica Schuyler. They were each so distinct and skillful. It was clear when a new member was added to the crew permanently. The keepers were always easy to spot. It wasn’t just talent that would get your foot in the door and keep it there. Your humanity played a part. It was generosity and kindness; it was intelligence and fearlessness. Lin and Tommy were recruiting a championship team.

  Jasmine Cephas Jones (Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds) was added before we started rehearsals at the Public. Another winner. Stunning, with a confidence that belied her youth.

  Together, along with an ensemble of fourteen other triple threats, we did close to one hundred and fifty performances of Hamilton off-Broadway.

  What they were unable to give us in money at the Public Theater, they gave us in artistic resources, warmth, and kindness. It was a glorious space for creating new work, and they supported us as a company and as individuals in every way they could think of.

  Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, leads with unmatched passion and ferocity. I’ve never met an enemy of his. Eustis is one of the beloved.

  I’m not sure if anyone, outside of the creative team, has seen Hamilton more times than Oskar and his brilliant wife, Laurie. Through development and our off-Broadway run, they were in the audience many, many times, and I always found their presence comforting and focusing.

  Oskar would find me backstage afterward at some point with tears still in his soulful eyes. The refrain was always the same. “You know it’s never like this, Leslie. You have to know that. It’s never like this.”

  “I know it, Oskar.”

  “This is special, comrade.”

  “I know, Oskar.”

  And I really did.

  When we finally closed the show at the Public, five months after we opened, it was a joyful time. Spring had returned to New York City. There was expectation in the air. We had six weeks off and a Broadway theater waiting for us.

  * * *

  Don’t ever stop getting better. Make it your mantra. Make it habitual.

  Coming into rehearsals for the Broadway run, I think we all felt the strong desire to level up. There was no reason to deny that we’d made something special downtown and that it had found an audience. It was connecting with people viscerally and gaining influential new fans in almost every theater-loving group. But no one in that room had any desire to stop growing and learning in the interim between productions.

  * * *

  DON’T EVER STOP GETTING BETTER. MAKE it YOUR MANTRA. MAKE it HABITUAL.

  * * *

  The scheduled Broadway opening night fell on my birthday, August 6, which, after the road I’d been on to make it to that very night, somehow felt like a cosmic wink. A sign that everything was going to be all right. Maybe more than all right.

  There were absolutely no guarantees at any point during the development process. There was no promise of a Broadway run when I answered Lin’s “Octoburr” invitation. There was no guarantee that I’d be kept in the role even after I’d walked away from the television series for the production at the Public Theater. We had indications that the show was impactful and that it could find its audience if given the opportunity, but the worldwide embrace of the material after the Broadway bow was not something any of us could’ve predicted. We kept our heads down and in the work.

  For my part, before rehearsals began for Broadway, I took on the dreaded but necessary task of watching and critiquing my work. There was a digital copy of the off-Broadway show that was floating around. It was a tool used solely for the purposes of bringing understudies up to the task of stepping in for performers at a moment’s notice in the case of illness or emergency. It was also a great visual reference to improve on Andy Blankenbuehler’s intricate spacing and stage pictures.

  You have to be both a harsh critic and strong advocate for yourself.

  There are tremendous advantages to being able to get some perspective on your own work. It’s tough. But you have to find the objectivity to look at your work and become the teacher, the coach, the mentor for yourself when the moment arises.

  I didn’t make it past ten minutes of the tape. I shut the thing off the moment it became clear to me what my work needed to be in the two-week rehearsal process before our Broadway opening. In the off-Broadway run, I’d been so focused on the emotional journey and the more technical demands of Lin’s score that I hadn’t made strong enough physical choices for Burr. I had barely landed on any. I didn’t have much time to add the crucial element, but I couldn’t move forward without drilling down on this piece of the performance I’d all but ignored.

  * * *

  YOU HAVE to BE BOTH a HARSH CRITIC and STRONG ADVOCATE for YOURSELF.

  * * *

  I approached Jon Rua, one of the extraordinary movement specialists in our ensemble, and asked if he could find time during the few off hours we had to help me make stronger choices and take the performance to the next level. Jon and I worked with a camera in our sessions. He helped me create the beginnings of a movement vocabulary for Burr. We talked about how to better use, fill, and inhabit the space. I’ll always be grateful that Jon was willing to take the time.

  The result was a more fully realized and three-dimensional performance uptown. When I was at my best, it was a full-bodied investment in the evening’s proceedings, pinky toes to hair follicles.

  The work isn’t over until it’s over. You either fine-tune and keep making it better until they rip the pencil from your hand, or, once you intuit that you’ve finished and that you’ve conveyed what you intended to convey in your work, you put your own pencil down, step back … and triple-check.

  * * *

  THE WORK ISN’T OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER.

  * * *

  We kept the things that worked and jettisoned the things that didn’t. The off-Broadway to Broadway transfer was all about the edit. We had the time to make it better. We had the time to release the grip on something that really worked and grab ahold of something that could really, really work.

  This was the group of people crazy enough to try.

  * * *

  Everything about the external world changed for us after Hamilton opened on Broadway. History was cool. Broadway was mainstream. People cared about who we were and what we had to say. It was all new. Where it gets tricky is how you allow those external changes to affect you on the inside. Success can change who you are so easily. Especially if you don’t already know who you are. I am grateful that I’d lived some life, and spent a little time in the wilderness before Burr found me.

  Tommy Kail, our director, went to great lengths to preserve the sanctity of the work space. Early on, he gathered us together.

  “I can’t control what happens outside of here. I know how noisy it is for you all.”

  We were only just getting started, and the distractions were many and extreme.

  “Inside this theater,” Tommy went on, “let this be our sanctuary. In here, we just get to do our show.”

  Tommy helped us preserve and protect the magic of Hamilton, making sure the theater remained a holy spa
ce—assuring that in the eye of that hurricane we could always find quiet.

  * * *

  FOR ME, HAMILTON WAS MY FIRST REAL BRUSH with the AMERICAN DREAM.

  * * *

  For me, Hamilton was my first real brush with the American Dream. I’d gone to Hollywood a decade earlier in search of it. All these years later, I could see that every triumph and every failure, every lesson learned along the way, was available for me to access and use to ensure that I made the most out of this moment. A Broadway musical about the Founding Fathers—a piece of art in part about slave owners and their American Revolution—bought me freedom. The American Dream had a new spirit and a new context for me now. Lin-Manuel, Daveed Diggs, Chris Jackson, and all my brothers and sisters at the Rodgers had given the dream a new face.

  Hamilton tapped into what theater can do on its highest level. Lin-Manuel understands how to musicalize the highs and lows of the human experience. Hamilton is human rites of passage set to music. In the span of the musical, we essentially cover childhood, abandonment, adolescence, loneliness, bravery and valor, war, falling in love, getting married, having children, jealousy and envy, betrayal, death, loss, and redemption. When you get to the end of the show, there is so much life the audience has gotten to live together. Together with the storytellers onstage, there is so much ground you’ve covered, you can’t help but feel connected. It opens you up for catharsis, for that spontaneous rush of emotion.

  And isn’t that what our love affair with the theater is about? It is about catharsis. We go into a darkened theater to sit next to strangers and feel something. On Broadway, actors have their days off so that at night they can come to the theater and do onstage what we are afraid to do, what we are not emotionally equipped to do, or what we aren’t allowed to do in our everyday lives.

  Actors are our avatars. They are our stand-ins. When a performer stands onstage and bares her soul, she bares her soul for all of us. When a man stands on a stage and lets his heart break, he lets it break for all of us. There is an invitation to participate, but we are also free to observe and learn. We elect them to do us this service—our theater stars and our movie stars. The same is true of the great singers. We elect them. I’m thinking of Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson, and Barbra Streisand, and Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Jay-Z, Kanye, and Nina Simone. They don’t just sing for us, they sing for us. Bruce is the voice of a generation. Jay-Z is the voice of a generation. Marvin is the voice of a generation. They are the chosen representatives of a group of people.

  If you’re ever curious to know who an artist is, get to know their fan base—get to know the people they sing for.

  Art has to occupy a space of significance in civilized society. We translate the vitality of the human experience through the art our society produces. We translate the pain and discord, the joy and sadness, and majesty—all of it—through our art.

  I think Hamilton did this. It is, at once, one of the easiest and hardest things you can set out to do. Lin set out to do it with his pen. He recruited a room full of people willing to carry that vision from the page to the stage. We gave Hamilton back to New York City on August 6, 2015. They gave us their open hearts and the whole world in return.

  * * *

  In the spring of 2016, after over four hundred performances of Hamilton the musical in New York City, the Tony Award nominations were announced. The awards season in general can be a heady time. We’d been through it in part once before with the off-Broadway run.

  There are “Best Performance of the Season” lists that you’re included on and some you are not. Once the awards season begins, you can’t help but have it in your periphery, but you’d do well not to make it your main focus.

  I was hopeful for the Tony nomination for sure. But in all honesty, I had come so far with Hamilton that I didn’t want the nomination or lack thereof to blight this blessing for me in any way. I knew nothing was owed to me in that moment. I remained hopeful but not expectant and tried not to lose sight of the fact that the whole thing was fleeting.

  The morning of the nominations announcement, Nicolette and I cut our phones off and went to our favorite New York diner for breakfast. We ordered pancakes and waffles and locked in a memory of how good life was in that moment, sitting at a diner, with zero Tony nominations between us, and the best pancakes and waffles in New York. If life was to remain this way for a little while longer, or forever, we were going to be okay.

  On the walk home from breakfast, we turned our phones on and … full voice-mail in-boxes and text message after text message let us know there was cause for celebration. Not just for me, but for so many of my castmates. Hamilton had received a record-breaking number of Tony nominations, with individual nods for me, Lin, Phillipa, Daveed, Renée, Chris, and Jonathan Groff, our King George III.

  The awards were to be given out on June 11, 2016, at the Beacon Theatre. The weeks leading up were about savoring and letting go. They were about celebrating what all the preparation and sacrifice had brought to us. And they were about letting go of any expectations for the night of the eleventh. They were about savoring the fact that we got to have this victory lap as a little family, which is what the cast had become by then. And they were about preparing to say good-bye to Hamilton and Burr and make space in my life for whatever adventure would be next.

  I couldn’t hold on to Burr forever. My yearlong commitment would end at the top of July and I knew there would be many, many more talented, underused, and creatively starved men after me who would come for their own revolution on the stage at the Rodgers.

  * * *

  I COULDN’T HOLD ON TO BURR FOREVER.

  * * *

  I remember when I arrived at the Nederlander Theatre to begin my Rent adventure. Most of the original cast members were long gone, but their powerful intention, their love—the spell that they’d cast—was everywhere you looked. They were still there. Jonathan was still there. Those of us who came behind them ate and drank at the table they set.

  As I prepared to exit stage right in a few weeks for the last time, it felt like we’d cast the spell as a company. It felt like we’d done our part to make this an equitable, welcoming, and wonderful place to work for what would hopefully be years and years to come.

  At the time, the night of the Tony Awards was rivaled in excitement only by our wedding day. Nicolette and I arrived at the Beacon Theatre, dizzy and electrified. We were so happy to be there.

  Lots of people will tell you that they’ve been practicing their acceptance speech since they were a kid. In the mirror, with the hairbrush. I get it. People asked me if I was that kid, and truthfully, I wasn’t. I have never practiced my acceptance speech.

  What I have practiced since I was a kid and my mother made me write notes of gratitude whenever someone did something kind for me—when Mrs. Turner asked me to write what was most important to me and assured me that people would care, when they gave my grandfather a year to live—is the love and care you put into saying thank you whenever you are given the chance.

  Time is not promised. Say thank you in exactly the way you intend to when the moment arrives.

  That was the thing I was most grateful for that night—there were so many people who’d encouraged and inspired and carried me all the miles to the podium on the night of the Tony Awards. When my name was called, my only job was to mention as many of them as I could and to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Simple.

  Gratitude has a drawing power all its own. And nothing can keep you from making it a daily practice.

  * * *

  I left the Richard Rodgers Theatre weeks later with a tired body, a full heart, friends for life, the prefix “Tony and Grammy Award winner” to my name, the richness of these memories, and a tremendous sense of pride.

  As a body of strangers, over the course of some time together, we’d touched greatness. And in our finest hour as practitioners, we’d been present, we’d been vulnerable, we’d been kind, we’d made something that matt
ered.

  The willingness to fail led us here. The willingness to risk led us here. Love and trust led us here. I was a witness. I’ll carry the experience and the gratitude with me always.

  CHAPTER 9

  PERMISSION TO PROSPER

  Don’t count the days. Make the days count.

  —MUHAMMAD ALI

  It’s nine p.m. on a Thursday night in October 2017, and I’ve just made my way into the boxing gym where I train as many days in the week as my schedule allows. For whatever reason, the gym’s unusually quiet for this time of night.

  As I wrap my hands and tug on my gloves to get ready to hit the big bag, I have to laugh at how few people who know me well could have predicted that I’d take so wholeheartedly to boxing. Sure, I’m somewhat competitive when it comes to working out but I’ve never been intensely involved with any particular sport.

  So, why boxing?

  For starters, keeping off the pounds is a lot harder with the absence of the three-hour cardio bomb I used to get eight times a week. I’ve had to intensify my workouts just to maintain.

  Experienced fighters will tell you about the mind/body/soul integration of a great session in the gym. I am discovering all of this for the first time.

  Boxing is this stripped-down, primal experience that can be almost meditative. Gabe, my coach, is part Jedi, part yogi. My favorite repeated refrain from Gabe comes whenever I’m in bad form or when some fundamental he’s repeatedly shown me isn’t clicking once again. Gabe reminds me, “Les, relax your shoulders.” Nine times out of ten, it is all I need to hear to get me back on track.

  I go through my days now hearing the simple reminder from my middleweight urban sensei. I am often surprised at how the simple self-correction can help root me in the present. Tension evaporates from my jaw and my chest. I am free to do my best. I am out of my own way. The relaxation brings old and new lessons into focus.