“What’s your favorite song to conduct in Hamilton?” my friend asks as we eat dinner near the Hollywood Pantages Theatre before she comes to see the show.
“One Last Time,” I reply immediately – not the first time I’ve been asked this question, and not the first time I’ve made that answer without hesitation.
Why? The inevitable follow-up question (there is, after all, stiff competition from about 49 other songs).
There are the musical reasons: the keyboard parts in the song are fun to play, from the funky R&B groove at the beginning to the gospel-ish ending. In between them lies the beautiful section of chamber music that accompanies Lin-Manuel Miranda’s setting of George Washington’s Farewell Address.
The music underscoring the speech is a delicate dance between George Washington and Hamilton onstage, and the string quartet, bass, and piano. The piano is played by the conductor, and our task is to follow GW and Hamilton while leading from the instrument, allowing for the nuances of timing that allow the text to breathe and the import of the moment to land on the audience. The conductor is the nexus between the vocal/text and instrumental subtext.
At the climactic end of the song, we listen to the spin of GW’s voice to know how much to draw out the timing of the band’s powerful hits in the last phrase. Every GW, and indeed every performance, is a little different in the phrasing of the ending, and each one brings the house down – unique performances, same result. I recently told Carvens Lissaint, the brilliant artist who has played GW spectacularly throughout our run here in LA, that conducting “One Last Time” with him is the highlight of my show and one of the great musical pleasures of my life.
And there’s another reason this is my favorite song to conduct – a lyrical reason, a single syllable that highlights the stakes of the song and makes it so relevant to this moment in our nation’s history.
“No!”
That’s the syllable. It falls in measure 46 (at about 1:43 in this video with Lin & Chris Jackson), in response to Hamilton’s assertion that GW “could continue to serve”. Tommy Kail, the director of Hamilton, pontificated on this brief one-measure exchange at a rehearsal in February 2020: be sure, he instructed Carvens, to imbue that “No!” with intention that encapsulates the revolutionary idea of the peaceful, voluntary, regularly-scheduled transfer of power to a democratically-elected successor.
When we rehearsed for this Los Angeles run in February of 2020, we couldn’t have known about the outcome of the 2020 election or the dangerous lies sowing doubt about Biden’s victory. The deadly insurrection of January 6, fomented by our former president in one of his efforts to overturn the election he lost and stop the peaceful transfer of power, was nearly a year in the future. We couldn’t even see a month into the future, when we would have a dress rehearsal on the evening of March 11, 2020, and shut down along with the rest of the state of California and our entire industry on March 12.
This LA run and company of Hamilton map precisely to the covid-19 pandemic for me. We shut down literally on the cusp of our first performance, came back nearly 18 months later to rehearse (again) during the crest of the Delta variant in LA, got shuttered (again) by the Omicron variant over the holidays, and are approaching our closing weekend as the virus and the world’s varying responses to it continue to evolve. Most of us in the LA company had only known each other about 3 weeks when the shutdown happened, but after we variously scrambled to figure out our lives in March 2020, connected periodically during the shutdown, and finally returned for our all-too-brief, interrupted run, the bonds feel much stronger.
During the shutdown, there were the aforementioned events undermining our democracy – and there were many events reminding us how imperfect that democracy is: the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, disproportionately people of color, disproportionately Black, as seen in the class/racial/geographical differences in access to healthcare, as seen in the lack of political will for paying a living wage to service workers we lauded as “essential” in the early days of the pandemic shutdown. The flaws are in the foundation, right there with the great ideas – written by men with great ideas and flaws (one flaw being that it was written by one very narrow type of person).
Any prospective home buyer knows to be on the lookout for foundation issues. They are difficult and expensive to fix, and catastrophic if left unaddressed. Structures of humans are similar, and inequities are frustratingly slow to change.
But there is one notable difference, most visible on the individual level and often misconstrued by media that runs on advertising: the events of the last couple years have perhaps gotten us all a little more in touch with our “no.”
I work with a coach who often encourages me to find the “yes” underneath the “no.” In GW’s “no” to staying in power indefinitely, he was committing to a different, experimental, and more equitable way for humans to structure their society – a “more perfect union.” (Notice it’s more perfect, not perfect; we’re not there yet.) For me, getting in touch with my “no” has meant saying yes to prioritizing rest, key relationships, and my own creative output, which has meant thinking long and hard about what will work for me and drawing boundaries to make it so. This individual agency feels inextricably linked to the health of democracy (though that link is contingent on voting rights…).
As I head to the theater today to conduct the LA company of Hamilton ‘one last time’, I’m wondering: What are you saying no to, and what’s the yes within your no?
Quick post-show selfie with Carvens Lissaint, who plays George Washington in Hamilton in LA :)