Much has changed in the decade since Leslie Odom Jr. took his first Broadway bow as Aaron Burr in “Hamilton.” He won a Tony Award for the role, received an Oscar nomination for portraying Sam Cooke in “One Night in Miami …,” and became a father of two children, now 8 and 4. When he returned to “Hamilton” this fall, he noticed another change: He is now the elder statesman onstage, who, at 44, needs more time for self-care.
“I didn’t think about recovery 10 years ago; I didn’t really even think about warming up 10 years ago,” Odom said. “So now, I’m doing everything that my teachers used to teach.”
He sees a physical trainer twice a week, a vocal coach once a week and is using a deep-tissue massage gun before, after and even during the show. By week’s end, he said, his body “is pretty in need of some TLC.”
He knew the physical demands of the show, but decided to return because he saw it as an opportunity to understand the cautious Burr and himself better. (The demand has been high: Premium seats have been selling for $1,500.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda recalled Odom’s proposal, which he raised during discussions to reunite the original “Hamilton” cast for a Tony Awards performance to celebrate the show’s 10th anniversary on Broadway. “The thing he said to me was, ‘I didn’t have kids when I did this. I sang “Dear Theodosia” before I had kids, and I want to show my kids I can do it, and I also want to know what it feels like to do it,’” Miranda said.
When I spoke to Odom in early November about his return — in a video call and then briefly in his dressing room — he kept referring to it as a “healing” experience. “It’s been a two-year journey of reconnecting to things that I had disconnected based on a traumatic childhood,” Odom said. “I left my real vulnerability behind me a long time ago, and I had to go back and get it.”
While he did not get into specifics, Odom acknowledged he was referring to Leslie Odom Sr. and the lawsuit his father had filed against him in January in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The suit accuses the actor of a breach of contract and elder financial abuse for failing to buy Odom Sr. a house. Odom denies the allegations. “It has been the hardest thing that I’ve ever gone through,” he said.
Still, after being in therapy for two years, he is also feeling “lighter and freer.”
Others agree. “He sounds and feels freer,” said Alex Lacamoire, the show’s musical director and co-composer. “There is a weight lifted off of Leslie and therefore lifted off of Burr.”
Perhaps no moment captures Odom’s emotional expansiveness, artistic breadth and vocal depth better than “The Room Where It Happens,” in which Burr realizes that to pursue his political ambitions, he must be less hesitant and more like Alexander Hamilton, impulsive and assertive. To better understand why that song is so thrilling to watch, I spoke to Odom, Miranda and Lacamoire about their vision for the number. These are edited excerpts from the conversations, seen through the earlier performance.
‘The Ultimate Spectator’
The scene opens with Hamilton telling Burr about his strategy to get his debt plan through Congress. Then, as he excuses himself, Hamilton sings, “decisions are happening over dinner.” Upstage, Hamilton huddles with James Madison and Thomas Jefferson; Burr is left alone to contemplate how far outside the center of action he has found himself.
“Two Virginians and an immigrant walk into a room, diametrically opposed,” Burr jokingly sings, before theorizing how the compromise resulted in the U.S. Capitol moving to the Potomac (as Madison and Thomas desired) and Hamilton pushing through the nationalization of state debt.
Sonically, he is up against the more dominant drum drop, keyboards, horn blare, the running banjo, and asides by Hamilton and Jefferson. With dancers swirling around him, Burr is bewildered, appearing in service of the song’s melody.
“This is both when Burr, as a narrator, is explaining the course of events, but discovering what’s happening with us at the same time,” Lacamoire said. “We spend much of the show with him noticing that Hamilton’s advancing, and now he realizes that he is being shut out.”
The scene moves quickly, with Burr intensifying his voice to match the uptick in the song’s momentum. He is both enthralled by the re-enactment of the meeting happening behind him and, in a sudden reversal, blocks our view of the action in the dining room with his body.
“Burr is kind of the ultimate spectator,” Odom said. “He is envious that he wasn’t there, but he’s also just a fan of the inner workings and machinations of power.”
A Turning Point
The next section — the confrontation between Hamilton and Burr — was added for Broadway.
“I’ll say selfishly, the most fun I had playing Hamilton every night was not playing Hamilton; it was playing Burr’s version of Hamilton,” Miranda said, referring to how in the song Hamilton mockingly repeats Burr’s earlier advice (“talk less, smile more”).
In Burr’s heightened version playing out onstage, Hamilton emerges from the room victorious — somber, yet full of swagger. As the two men stand next to each other, Hamilton confesses his strategy directly to the audience, seemingly shutting Burr out.
Then, Hamilton turns to him and demands, “What do you want, Burr?/If you stand for nothing, then what’ll you fall for?” It is this vision of Hamilton that taunts and haunts Burr for the remainder of the show.
“It is a nightmare for him, and he doesn’t even know he’s asleep,” Odom said. “Then Hamilton takes over the lead and turns the tables, and something happens to me.”
Burr, crouching and cowering after the psychological blow, suddenly jumps back up, having an epiphany that spurs him into action.
“I … I wanna be in the room where it happens, the room where it happens…,” he confesses slowly, conspiratorially.
‘Unstoppable Force’
Now that Burr’s outed his ambitions, the tempo revs up as Odom circles the stage, driving the crescendo.
Initially, the song was supposed to end with the foreboding “Dark as a tomb where it happens.” But the choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and Lacamoire persuaded Miranda to add eight extra bars, giving the song a more jubilant tone to mark Burr’s triumphant insight.
“We added that ending because we knew what Leslie could do, and we knew that he could just go from being the narrator to like, ‘I want to be in this [expletive] thing,’” Miranda noted. “It’s just thrilling when the turn happens because you don’t necessarily see it coming. When he sees this country being made around him without him, that’s the moment when he admits he wants to be a part of it. And from then on, he’s this unstoppable force.”
To help that moment stand out, “the vocal phrases get higher, longer and louder,” Lacamoire said, adding that Odom’s voice simultaneously sails over and bounces off the ensemble. “It is in rhythmic unison, but this way Burr is both in and outside of the moment.”
Odom also ad-libs, contributing a frenetic, improvisational energy that represents his character’s final takeover. “The team was very generous and let me sing what I felt,” Odom said. “I did my best to make sure it was rooted in character and not some moment to show off.”
As the ensemble recedes, framing the set like the walls of a room, Burr runs over and takes a seat at the empty table. Then conquers it by crossing his legs atop it, as he sings. By the time he climbs onto the table, his conversion is complete.
Until this point, Burr’s solo numbers primarily have been ballads, suggestive of Burr’s patient and interior style. With a wail, though, Odom exultantly concludes “The Room Where It Happens” with a full-throated high note.
Each night, Burr still goes on to kill Hamilton in a duel and lose his daughter. He never achieved the sense of peace and purpose that Odom seems to have found as a father and as someone finally reckoning with his family trauma.
“I’ve always felt that there’s been an effortlessness to Leslie’s voice and I still feel that,” Lacamoire said. “But now there is a peace to him and his approach to the work.”
Odom agreed: “Ten years ago, the performance was powered by rage. And the show gave me a wonderful place to channel that. I’m powered by love now.”
Video camera operator: Elijah Mogoli; 2016 audio and video of “The Room Where It Happens” via Disney+.
Produced by Josephine Sedgwick.
Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The Times and a professor at Rutgers University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2022, for columns examining race and Black perspectives as the arts and entertainment world responded to the Black Lives Matter moment with new works.
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