In the summer of 2013, Odom saw a workshop of what was then called the Hamilton Mixtape as part of a festival of new work at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater.
“I saw that it worked in six seconds,” he told BuzzFeed News at the Hester Street Café in the New Museum on New York City’s Lower East Side. “Six seconds into that opening: ‘How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore, and a Scotsman…’ You’re like, Something’s about to happen. Something. Those first lyrics — what the fuck is happening here? And by the end of the opening number, you’re in even deeper.”
What moved Odom most was the way the show’s cast was populated largely by actors of color, including Indian-American actor Utkarsh Ambudkar as Alexander Hamilton’s adversary, Aaron Burr, a role Odom would eventually take over. While the historical figures portrayed in the musical were white, writer-creator Lin-Manuel Miranda deliberately conceived the roles for actors of diverse ethnic backgrounds.
By the end of “The Story of Tonight” — the song in which Hamilton, played by Miranda, forges a bond with contemporaries Burr, the Marquis de Lafayette, Hercules Mulligan, and John Laurens — Odom was in tears.
“I was watching great performances and hearing great music, but it was so—” he stopped to collect his thoughts. “Actors of color rarely get to do material that is that well-crafted. That’s exciting. I was seeing something really special. So I was in a puddle, seven minutes into the reading.”
At the time, Odom didn’t imagine that eight shows a week on Broadway, he’d be playing Burr, the former vice president who shot and killed Hamilton in a duel. It’s a responsibility that he’s taken very seriously ever since he first assumed the role in a workshop in the fall of 2013.
Not only is Burr pivotal to the plot, but he also introduces the audience to the story and carries them throughout the show as its narrator. It’s Odom as Burr who steps onstage first every night and begins the performance with the opening lines of “Alexander Hamilton” that moved him to tears the first time he heard them.
“I’m the tour guide for the night, and so it’s my job to make sure they’re OK, to make sure they’re getting it,” he explained. “It’s my job to make sure they stay with me because we have a lot of ground to cover, and we’re going quickly.”
In that opening number, Burr lays out the plot and announces his culpability in Hamilton’s death. So, it may be impossible to make Hamilton’s ending a surprise, but that doesn’t mean Odom isn’t trying.
“I want them to forget, somewhere in the middle of the show, how it’s gonna end,” he said. “You go see a great production of Romeo and Juliet, where those kids are full of life and love, you hope and forget. You hope that it’s gonna end differently, and you take the ride, when you see it done well.”
But even if the audience is primed for Hamilton and Burr’s inevitable confrontation, the emotional potency of the moment can still catch them off-guard. Odom, for example, has said the line “I had only one thought before the slaughter / This man will not make an orphan of my daughter” onstage nearly 500 times. But with each performance of the musical’s penultimate song “The World Was Wide Enough” — from the workshop, to the show’s off-Broadway run at the Public Theater, to its Broadway opening in August 2015 — he tries to play it differently.
On the cast recording, Odom’s voice cracks with emotion on the word “orphan,” but he doesn’t always break down in tears at the same time. Sometimes he doesn’t cry at all. And sometimes, he’s sobbing long before he reaches that point.
For Odom, choosing how to play Burr for the night hinges on the performers around him and the tiny variations that make each show unique.
“What I try to do is just to honor the truth of whatever we are collectively, whatever we have created in the room at that time,” he said. “If we’ve created a simpler thing tonight, if we’ve created a quieter thing tonight, then that’s right, then that’s what we want.”
That speaks to what Odom has learned after playing Burr for nearly three years: The audience isn’t always going to respond to the same moments the same way. And even in a musical with near-universal acclaim like Hamilton, he’s not resting easy.
“I want to know that I’m gonna knock ‘em dead every night,” Odom said. “But what I believe is knocking ‘em dead, what this show has taught me, what this time in my life is teaching me, is that knocking them dead each night can look different.”
He paused, grinning. “I just don’t want to fuck this thing up.”
