10 Years Of Hamilton: Only a Matter of Time

A story of sound, startup ambition, and what it means to build your own Cabinet

At the time I was working at Union Square Ventures, watching startup leadership teams come together and fall apart. Meanwhile, I had this sideline view into what felt like the greatest leadership team I'd ever seen: Tommy and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alex Lacamoire and Andy Blankenbuehler.

I just needed to know: How did they do it? How did it all work?

I wanted to help the CEOs in our network learn how to find those people for themselves. And, if I’m being honest, I wanted to know how to find it myself, too.

Over the 10 years while my husband, Jason Crystal, has worked on the sound team of the show, I became obsessed with this question. I studied their origin story and got deep into the roles they each played, the personas of their characters. When Broadway shut down in 2020 during the pandemic (while I was at home waiting to have my first baby), I even interviewed people on the associate level of the creative team of that original Broadway production.

Those conversations really helped anchor me in the grounded, inspirational leadership that it takes to pull off something as game-changing as what that show has become. (You’ll see snippets of their stories featured throughout this piece. I have so much more content to share from my 10 hours of recorded interviews, but for now, this will have to do.)

In the end, my idea of a book was categorically rejected by the powers that be. I was told, “No” more times on a single phone call than I thought anyone could be told no in 15 minutes, and I was pretty devastated about it. In retrospect, their reasons made sense. It wasn’t the right time, it wasn't the right story to be told, particularly not by me.

But even after all this time, I’ve never stopped asking the question: How do you build a Cabinet? Or, really, how do I build my Cabinet? Who am I? Who are they? Where are they? (I think a little part of me thought that if I put in the time to write the book, maybe that's how I'd find them.)

So instead of the book, this is what I have: A series of fragments. Notes and memories and turning points. The way Hamilton has shaped not just my career, but my marriage, my family, and my sense of time. It’s not polished. It’s nonlinear. But it’s mine. A collage over years, stitched together by a single throughline: How the thing that started as someone else’s success story has slowly started to shape my own.

I know some people will say this isn’t really my story to tell. Maybe they’re right. After all, I never officially worked on the show, never took the spotlight in the room where it happened. And yet… despite all of that, Hamilton has been the most consistent presence in my life for the past decade. I have to start somewhere.

That should be enough.

“All four of these guys are incredibly smart, incredibly talented, incredibly kind, and have incredibly high expectations of the people around them.”

- Deanna Weiner, Stage Manager

When my husband and I look back at our lives, in thirty years or so, we’ll talk about it in two distinct phases. Life before Hamilton. And life after it.

Ours is a story you might not expect. I’m the one who works in tech, and he’s the one who works in theatre. I chase startup stories all day long, searching for the next unicorn company that will go big. It’s ironic, in the end, that the biggest startup success story that I’ve ever been a part of didn’t involve software or a single line of code.

What started as a musical became a global phenomenon. For my husband, what started out as a job – just another Broadway sound gig – turned into a career.

“I remember the show ended [at the Public] and Lac and Kurt came to me and I had met Kurt that evening. We'd never met before, and I remember they came to me and said, “So what do you think? Do you have time to learn this?”

And I remember saying to them, “The truthful answer is, I don't, but I will make time.”

Because I remember thinking, “How could I not be a part of this?”

- Ian Weinberger, Music Director (Broadway)

I sit down in my seat and look at the stage, but instead I am reminded of my four-year-old bounding up the stairs on the Broadway set like her personal playground. I close my eyes and recall her twirling around as a 2-year-old on the set in Hamburg, Germany. Then, a flash of her attempting to climb the ladder on set in Sydney, Australia, having celebrated her one year birthday that same week, when my husband snuck her on set despite strict COVID rules.

I remind myself about the absurdity that our oldest daughter set foot on Hamilton sets in Sydney, Auckland, and Hamburg, before she entered the Broadway theatre. How, to her, the shape of this set holds as much familiarity as her favorite playground in Riverside Park.

I close my eyes and try to remind myself to breathe. When I turn in my seat, I half-expect to see Lin and Tommy together in the back row of the orchestra, just like they were in London in 2017, snickering and smiling with relief at the realization that the same jokes still land with British audiences.

The show begins, and just like that and all at once, the tininess and thinness of every jukebox musical I’ve seen in the years since 2015 vanishes in an instant. The enormity and complexity of the piece, the masterfully constructed piece of art, hits me like a dump truck.

I’ve seen this opening act so many times that I expect by now to be immune to its seduction, but even I can’t deny the nagging feeling that it might be the best work of art, and the best startup story, that I’ll ever get to be a part of.

Yes, the show still is that good.

How is this show still that good?

“ I learned and I believe wholeheartedly that the personality differences as well as the way that everybody works was discovered on In the Heights and worked through in multiple iterations. We did the workshop, we did the off-Broadway, we did the Broadway production.

When we sat down to do the very first production of Hamilton, we weren't trying to translate one another. And I'm not just talking about actual words, I'm talking about body language, physical, the way that I work. Like, what happens when at 5:55 PM in rehearsal, what kind of personality, all of that stuff was worked out.

We were able to get so much more work done because we weren't working, we were working at such a high level of efficiency from the get go because we already spoke the same language.”

- Stephanie Klemons, Associate & Supervising Choreographer

“We won a sound design award!” Jason texted me on a Sunday night at 10 p.m. “Meet downtown for a drink?”

Getting back downtown from 92nd Street wouldn’t be an easy trek, but I thought it might be worth it. After all, what's another weeknight staying up late to get back to a job I'm basically ready to leave anyway? What's one more sleepless night, to add on to all of the others where I’d hung around in the back of the theatre during rehearsals white Jason stood by the sound console, careful not to breathe too loud as I took in every second I could get at watching the creative team come together and build something incredible, for the very first time.

When I arrived downtown, I went over to the bar and across the way, Lin waited for a drink too. I watched the bartender wait on one or two others, while Lin still stood by, idly glancing at his phone. Tweeting, probably.

“Bet this is one of the last times we’re ever going to see this guy have to wait for a drink,” Jason whispered.

In that second I knew he was right. I tried to take in as much as I could from that little-big moment – the casualness of the everyday. I smiled and savored it. After all it’s not every day you get the chance to be a part of something ordinary becoming extraordinary.

One day, he’d be flanked by two bodyguards while cruising through the opening night party at Hamilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, hot off the presses from his debut feature role in Disney’s Mary Poppins. But for now, for today at least, he was just another guy waiting for a drink at a bar.

Maybe that's why I’d eventually ask Jason if I could slip a card into the opening night gift bag for Lin, on Broadway, thanking him for inspiring me to move on from my current startup job and find the next big thing. I just needed him to know that the thing he’d written had already compelled at least one other person to take a shot and aim for something bigger than themselves.

“I think they understood that the people involved in the early creation of the show were all assets to its future, in whatever capacity they contributed.

At that time, this program, Ableton, was starting to be used in theater, but it wasn't common and it wasn't necessarily used in the way we were approaching it.

I was building my method of using Ableton at the same time as I was actually programming the show. Maybe that was a part of it too; Lac thought, ‘I'm gonna let him keep going and we'll keep figuring it out together.’”

- Scott Wasserman, Ableton Programmer

“I think this might actually be a bit of a thing,” Jason said, in the months leading up to the 2014 workshop presentation of Hamilton. “I mean...it’s really, really good.”

I took note. In his eight years of Broadway, he’s seen great shows open and close for years. As the associate sound designer, his job is the same, regardless of the show’s or quality: Make it sound so good that nobody even thinks to mention the sound in any reviews.

But this one felt different. There was a buzz in the air. I wonder if they felt the same way about building the Apple-1 computer, back in their “garage phase.”

Maybe that’s why, despite never having attended one before, I begged Jason for a pass to an early workshop “presentation” of Hamilton. I had to duck out of work early at the startup, Stack Overflow, where I’d been working at the time, to make the 2 p.m. curtain time.

When I arrived, I crammed into the back row and held my breath, along with the rest of the attendees, for three hours straight. During that first “performance,” the second act was performed just on music stands, and interested producers filled the seats as the Hamilton creative team secured the round of funding that would take them to the Public Theater, and ultimately, to Broadway.

At the end of that first reading, I couldn’t tell whether I’d been hit by a truck or at last discovered my own spirituality. I sat rigid in my chair, not daring to move until I recalled as many tidbits and quotes that stuck out to me. I felt like I’d been thrown inside of one of those wind boxes where dollar bills fly around you for two minutes while you have to try and grasp as many as you can.

The words rushed over me like clouds on an airplane.

“Not throwin’ away my shot.” A call to arms.

“The greatest city in the world.” A love letter to New York.

“You will never be satisfied.” It haunted me.

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”

I never before knew what it was like to envy someone so much. I couldn’t tell if it was Hamilton himself, or his portrayer, Lin, but something about that moment cut me deep inside. I sank deeper and deeper into my chair, as if Nonstop was designed simply as a taunt to compel me to do more. To be more. “Unimaginable.” I whispered to myself in the deepest corners of my hollowed out head. “History has its eyes on you.”

Even then, I harbored a bizarre desire to cling to every fleeting moment, to savor every memory of what I’d just seen. I knew it would be at least a year before I’d have the chance to watch it performed again.

“What was that one line?” I asked, pulling on Jason’s coat at the end of the performance. “You know, when she’s singing about the letters...something about paragraphs and palaces?”

“I don’t remember exactly” he said, having only heard it a few times himself by that point.

“Look it up!” I pressed on him. He rolled his eyes, flipping through the score book.

“You built me palaces out of paragraphs,” he read, finding it for me in the script. “You built cathedrals.”

“God, that’s good,” I murmured. “Thank you.”

That’s when I learned it can be good to be the sound guy’s girlfriend. Thanks to the audio recording the sound team produced for that workshop, I had the entirety of the show memorized before it even had its first performance at The Public Theatre.

“The level of collaboration and acceptance of ideas and then drive to be better was immediately striking. One story: “My Shot” used to end pretty much right after, “for the first time I'm thinking past tomorrow!” But Andy was like, it can't end there, I need more. And Lac was like, yeah, it's always, it's always felt kind of weird, I feel like it's such a build that we don't really go anywhere. So it was on their list to figure out the end of “My Shot.”

So then the rehearsal day ended, everybody went home. The stage manager went home, I remember Kurt leaving. But the creative team stayed. They were at a piano kind of across the room, just the four of them. Lac was at the piano, Lin was throwing out lyric ideas and words, Andy was moving, and Tommy was absorbing and responding. And they just kept suggesting and bouncing things off of each other, and it morphed into, “Well, what if it's like, time to take a shot?”

And that, well all right, if that goes here, like what could go here? And Lac being like, “Well, let's just repeat the chorus one more time and see where that takes us.”

And in about a half hour they came pretty close to what is now the ending. It still took a little bit of refining, but it was really thrilling and remarkable to see. I don't think I'd ever seen four people collaborate that way.”

- Patrick Vassel, Associate and Supervising Director

Excerpt from How to Build a Cabinet

There’s something magical, almost reverent, about watching the Hamilton creative team collaborate with each other. There’s an intensity of perfection, an unflappable trust, and a crazy shared dream that binds them together.

A visionary founder alone is often incomplete without a strong executive team they can trust to run with their dream. Everything else — all of the details and the strategies and the execution and the growth — it all trickles down from a strong foundational core at the top.

So, how do you find your Cabinet? Is it luck? Do you have to rely on serendipity alone and hope that you’ll intersect with people who can serve as your perfect complements? Or is it strategic? Are there actions you can take or relationships you start to lead you to the right people?

I wish I knew how to find this sort of mutual, complementary, and symbiotic relationship myself. I wish I knew how to help our founders and CEOs find it themselves.

But for now, I’ll continue to see what I can learn from observing this dream-team in action from afar. It’s a pretty remarkable story to tell.

“Do you think League of Legends will ever create a new game?” Dani asked over lunch, at the venture capital firm, Union Square Ventures, where I now worked.

“Probably, but it seems like they are stuck trying to figure out something that’s just as good,” another colleague peppered in.

“Right. Victims of their own success,” quipped Dani.

“They could do something totally different,” I volunteered. “Different audience. Different game entirely. Less people to disappoint if it doesn’t go well.”

“Of course! They could create the latest fad cat game. They’d of course get viral fans. Anyone would buy into a new game from the League of Legends creators. Getting the audience is the hardest part for games like that, and it’d be easy for them. And way less work in terms of creative development since they’ve already done it.”

“Totally,” I said.

“I really like this idea,” Dani said. “Can you think of examples of other companies or industries who have done this? Who have done something in a totally different domain next?”

“Lin-Manuel Miranda,” I said before she’d even finished her thought. “That’s why Mary Poppins was the smartest next thing for him after Hamilton. Between that and Moana and other projects, he’s splintering from the one-dimensional focus people expect of him. He’s doing a bunch of different things to lower expectations on the next thing.”

“Wow,” said Dani. “That’s genius.”

We all took a minute to reflect back on this.

“I like that I said, can you think of a company or industry that’s done this and your initial reaction was – Lin-Manuel Miranda,” Dani observed.

I shrugged in response. It’s always at the top of my mind, I guess.

In March of 2020, there were six productions of Hamilton stationed around the world, and Jason played some part in setting up each one. At the time, he was in LA, getting the show ready for its second run in that city. I was due with a baby in two weeks, and the news reports at home were getting more troubling every day. I was alone, and I was afraid.

“Go home,” they told Jason, in a moment not all that dissimilar to Hamilton himself being sent home from the battlefield to his own pregnant wife.

Jason guiltily boarded a flight back to New York the morning of the show’s first preview performance. But that show never saw an audience. One by one, each production shut its doors, and this thing itself, this brand that had become bigger than any one of us, existed only as a string of ghost lights on empty turntable sets scattered around the world. The pandemic that shut down Broadway.

We knew it would all end one day, of course. But not like this. For the first time since 2015, there was no place in the world to see Hamilton. There was no “next show.” We were simply, indefinitely, on hold. Along with the rest of the world, we shut our eyes, held our breaths, and tried not to think about what could be. We plunged ourselves into new parenthood.

That summer, a pressure valve released itself with the Disney+ release of the original Broadway cast performance of Hamilton. Like rediscovering a favorite hoodie in the back of your closet, we slipped the show back around us like a security blanket and watched it from our living room amidst the buzzes and tweets and Facebook comments. It was the hottest thing to do that summer, to watch Hamilton from your couch on a Friday night. The closest we’d been to feeling social in months turned out to be sharing memories virtually with strangers. Instagram was once again cluttered with throwback selfies with Lin in the Public Theatre lobby as Hamilfans around the globe cheered on the original cast with the fervor of seeing your All Star college football team back on the field. For a minute, things felt like they might be okay.

Of course things weren’t okay. That is, not really. Like a bad flight delay, our expectations of the return of theatre kept getting bumped back, bit by bit, with each passing month. Our daughter learned how to smile and then roll over as three months turned into six. She started crawling and standing and laughing as six months became 12.

Little did we know she’d be nearly walking by the time the first audience would see a live performance of Hamilton again.

“We all know we can all anticipate what the next person is going to need in this incredible way. I've never seen it on any other show that I've done, where the Production electrician will say, “Oh, I know that the production carpenter's gonna need to get this deck piece down in the next 30 minutes. We have to make sure we get this cable in before he does that.”

They can almost anticipate each other's needs. And to see that grow over the amount of time we've done it has meant that when we faced really challenging situations, like Puerto Rico or even like what we're facing right now [in COVID]. We are able to work really quickly to solve those problems because we all know each other's stuff so well. We can support each other.”

- Frank Swann, Production Manager

I used to be able to commit to jobs. I worked at Stack Overflow for four years. I worked at Union Square Ventures for five years. But then I had kids and the pandemic and my attention has just gotten tighter and tighter. That new startup for just one year full time, the next one for even less. Now I’m hard-pressed to commit even to a lease on an office rental space for more than six months.

What the hell happened?

You got scared, says that little voice inside my head.

Scared of what though?

Making the wrong call.

Again.

Again. The thing is though, you can’t make the call if you don’t give these things time

I know that.

You have the skill. You need to turn it into a career.

I can’t settle anymore

Who said anything about settling?

I feel like I can’t be managed anymore.

Everyone needs some management.

I have people telling me they want to work for me.

So hire them.

To do what, though?

You could run an agency.

I don’t want to run an agency. I want to build something.

So build something then.

But what?

What do you want to see exist in the world that isn’t there already?

That’s a hard question to answer.

I’ll wait.

Well. I guess I want to see an impact. I want to see that I can make the lives better for other people. That we are using technology for good. Not just for the sake of the tech.

“Other people I've spoken with have talked about how difficult and crazy it was for the cast to learn the staging without the turntable. Because for the first period of time, it was all just in Andy's head. I was the person who is tasked with taking what's in Andy's head and putting it in reality, so I was on the front line of that.

When we were like in the studio before we got to rehearsals, we were choreographing the thing. He had a manila folder that had a double turntable cut out. And so we'd put like these army figurines on the turntable and be like, if we start here and then this much music passes, they'd end somewhere around here. So that was how we sort of choreographed Helpless, Satisfied, and the Rewind section and all of that. With the manila folder and Army figures.”

- Stephanie Klemons, Associate & Supervising Choreographer

Dancing and dancing.

Pliés and twirls.

She spins and prances on the stage, refusing to leave. Begging for more time while I balance an 8-week-old, baby Sydney (named for the magical time we spent down under for the show in 2021) on my chest.

We pose for a shot on the stage. And then another.

At the concession stand at the theatre, I implore Jason to snag me a show shirt with a translation: “Werk, werk!”

It says: LÄUFT

The picture of Lydia at age two, in a perfect plié in the middle of the Hamilton stage in Hamburg, Germany, still hangs proudly in our living room.

“I think one thing that can really kill a show is if the creative team is focused on too many other projects at once. It's very easy in musical theater to be working on multiple shows at a time because you can have your assistants handle things, or you fly in and out for just this workshop or just this week.

But it seemed like, while Hamilton was happening, the entire Cabinet was pretty much solely focused on Hamilton.”

- Scott Wasserman, Ableton programmer

“I don’t think I’ll ever meet someone as smart as Tommy,” said Ian Weinberger, Hamilton’s Broadway music director, as we shared a taxi home in New York City from a Freestyle Love Supreme opening night cast party.

“Actually today felt a little special,” he said, shrugging a little. “It’s a small thing but I’ll tell you because I know you’ll appreciate it. I had a chance today, as a two-show day, to get to watch Tommy give notes after the first show. There are just seven of us in a small room in back, you know. But even that, just the little things he calls out and the way he makes observations, even that is such an art.”

I nodded, envious of his access to be a part of even such a small moment. “I’m sure.”

“The Tommy Method,” continued Ian, “That’s how Patrick refers to it – it’s masterful and amazing to see. He’ll never say, ‘This is what I think you should be doing.’ He’ll say, ‘I wonder if you can explore that concept a little bit more,’ and then just see what happens.”

“It’s amazing,” I gushed.

“Same thing with his extemporaneous speaking,” Ian continued.

“Oh, I know. I’ve seen it. It’s unbelievable.”

“The best part is, he doesn’t really prepare. He just gets up there and says, ‘Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about.’ And you know what? He hits it on the nose. Every single time.”

“That first year on Broadway when we opened the show, we did a crazy amount of rehearsals. And then sort of took a breath. Then the world took notice. And then the album dropped.

When the album dropped, then you opened the door and it was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Literally you opened the stage door to go outside, and it was like everything changed. The whole cast got pulled in 70 different directions. All their careers skyrocketed.”

- Deanna Weiner, Stage Manager

Reading an old performance report aloud at an Irish pub, among a six-person UK-based sound team. I’m drinking a Heineken 0, and another round of Guinness makes its way to our table. We’re outside, perched on stools in front of barrels, swapping stories about shows that went wrong like college friends swapping stories about late-night dorms.

I am trying to stay focused in the present moment, but I can’t help the memories from opening nights all over the world crashing around me. The lore of now vs. the lore of them looks a little different.

The time when a flying cockroach terrorized the musicians in the Broadway pit. The time when a fly buzzing around onstage captained the entire audience

Jason starts a dramatic reading of the stage manager’s retelling of the fly buzzing around stage:

“In labors”

Fly lands on chest.

“And dangers”

SLAPS fly. Falls to the ground.

Gets a mid-song applause for killing the fly.

“One last time”

“Remember the time Hamilton missed his cue when looking for Philip to discuss the duel?”

“Were you there the night so-and-so went on as Philip but he was too large for the table they lay him down on during “Quiet Uptown” and he had to hold his legs straight in front of him to pretend he was dead in rigor mortis?”

“Remember when Burr’s gunshot went off twice at the end?”

“Remember when the gunshot didn’t go off at all?”

I think of how lucky it is that I had a chance to get to know Jason’s coworkers, over many cities and many tours over the years. I think about how few of my own he has met in person in the past four years. Between the drastically reduced in-office culture of the tech industry since the pandemic and the fact that I haven’t had a single job for longer than one year since 2020, it makes it a little hard to build lasting bonds.

“Who would have thought, between the two of us, that I’d be the one to have the longest-running job?” he laughs.

I laugh too, but also a part of me wants to cry. How, indeed.

“I'll never forget a conversation I had with Lac when the show was going to Broadway and when it was clear from the success of the Public that this was going to be a big thing. He basically sat me down and said, “Your job is to make it so I never have to think about your job.” And I thought, ‘That's a really good point.’”

- Scott Wasserman, Ableton Programmer

The crypto startup, Coinbase goes public on the financial markets via direct listing at an $85 billion valuation. It is without a doubt the most transformational success story of tech startup lore that I’ve ever seen.

I shrug it off as inconsequential, but in reality, I stay awake all night long, watching news article after news article drop about the unprecedented nature of this financial event. The pundits all share the same sentiment: Anyone involved in that startups’s success story has struck gold.

I know those people. I know that team. I know those investors. (I worked for them for years.)

I imagine the celebrations, in New York City, in San Francisco. The champagne, the toasts, the revolution and financial windfall that will be sure to come. I imagine this, but I am not there. I’m not there because I quit the industry four months ago. I left the comfy thing, the sure thing, at a venture capital firm, and chose instead to go after it, to start fresh, at a brand new startup, the company that’s the same age as my first daughter, Lydia.

And so, instead of being there, I am here, in Sydney, Australia. I am here with my Jason and Lydia, who celebrated her first birthday Down Under last week, thanks to the remarkable luck that all three of us were able to squeeze our way onto a special work visa – a Hamilton work visa – during the midst of peak lockdown earlier this year.

Why did I leave that job again? For the calculated risk of being a part of something on the ground floor. Because I wanted to build. Because I’d felt bored, I felt stuck, I needed a change. I felt primed, ready, poised, finally, take a shot. But did I just miss the only one I’d ever get?

How lucky we are to be alive right now, I will myself to remember. To be alive. In this pandemic. To be here.

I get a phone call from 10,000 miles away.

“You still made the right decision, to leave when you did,” he tells me.

I try to believe him. I try to believe myself.

I hang up the phone and cry. I ride the Sydney Fast Ferry from Manly to Circular Quay, alone. You can still see the Hamilton banners everywhere, glints of gold flanking the city that somehow is the only city in the world where you can see the show.

I was there for opening night, just two weeks ago. On my 34th birthday.

“In the initial workshop process, and especially through rehearsals and previews at the Public and on Broadway, I had an unobstructed view of Lac, and all of the things he said and did to shape the music of the show. However, because he was wearing multiple hats and continually perfecting the music, we never made the time for him to simply sit and ‘teach me’ how to conduct the show, or articulate out loud all of the detail and consideration that goes into each moment of conducting a show like HAMILTON.

Ian came along next and also got to observe Lac directly a fair amount, but when I started walking Ian through the score, I had to find ways to articulate for the first time things that I had implemented from watching Lac, and as such had to formulate my own way of thinking and talking about the conduct of the show. It’s interesting to think that some of those same tidbits of ‘why we do it this way, or that way’ are still being passed down to conductors of the show.”

- Kurt Crowley, Associate Music Supervisor

He did not sign the Declaration of Independence, abolish slavery, or become President of the United States. However, the overlooked underdogs are those that truly define the future, and Alexander Hamilton’s innovative brilliance saved the newborn nation from imminent demise. As Secretary of Treasury under President Washington, Hamilton proposed a ludicrous solution to the national debt, challenged the Constitution, and divided the entire nation onto opposing sides.

Surprisingly, these apparently ridiculous events united the country; I would meet with Hamilton to discuss how his three decisive decisions also set future precedents for generations to come. As I pursue my career as a journalist, I can borrow character traits such as ingenuity, persistence, and the idea of honor.

There are three things I like to pay attention to in Hamilton dress rehearsals to get an early pulse check on the persona of the audience in a new city:

1. Whether or not people sing along with the King in “You’ll be back”

2. How much people react to the line, “Immigrants. We get the job done.”

3. Whether or not there’s applause after “Quiet Uptown”

None of that mattered in San Juan. All I could think about as we kicked off the second act was, how is this room going to react to the song about the hurricane.

The audience that night was packed with locals. My friend recognized at least two other people from our seats on the mezzanine. The energy was good, but I also got the sense that it was not a room full of superfans who already knew every last word. Was it possible the song would catch some of them off guard.

As the stage cleared and the lights adjusted in the signature blue and purple circles at the top of the song, I held my breath through the first few bars of piano in the introduction. Then, Lin picked his head up from the deadpan straight shot across the orchestra level and locked eyes with us, the people, his people, all the way up in the mezzanine

“In the eye of the hurricane, there is quiet. For just a moment. A yellow sky.

I felt the whole room bristle at the word, “hurricane.” It was like a minor assault, a tad of PTSD, or the feeling you might expect by saying, “Voldemort” in a room of wizards in a Harry Potter story. Lin held the gaze with the upper levels of the theatre. Oh god, I thought. He’s going to say it again

“When I was 17, a hurricane destroyed my town.”

It felt like a little electric shock or zap on each utterance. I wanted to turn my head and read the room a bit more, but I couldn’t budge. I couldn’t even breathe. I’ve never heard a theatre so quiet. It felt simultaneously cathartic and horrifyingly insensitive to bring up something so raw, just right down there, in center stage. To sing about a tragedy that everyone in the room knew far too well

“I didn’t drown. I couldn’t seem to die.

I suddenly felt like I was a part of the world’s largest group therapy session. You’re okay, he seemed to be saying. You didn’t die. You made it out. You made it here. Things will get better

It was the longest and shortest two-and-a-half minutes of my life. I wished it could stretch out more, to allow a bit more of that feeling to settle in, to give the room the satisfaction of digging in a bit too deep before bringing us back out of it again.

“There are traditions that need to be handed down. There are points of view that need to be handed down. There is a work ethic that needs to be handed down. There are all of these things from generation to generation of theater. I felt a certain responsibility towards moving into a leadership role because I held this information, I had learned from the best, the best of the best.

- J. Philip Bassett, Hamilton Production Supervisor

Hamilton or Burr?

I realize that I ask myself this question repeatedly every time I see the show.

Am I moving fast enough?

Am I writing enough?

Do I have enough time?

Or am I waiting for it?

I think of all of the weeks that this show has taken my husband away from me. The weddings and parties he’s missed, the bedtimes I’ve managed alone, the neighbors I’ve bonded with in his absence. It’s thanks to Hamilton that I was home alone through multiple home crises over the years, including moving apartments alone after discovering toxic black mold while Jason was in Manila, flying home from their opening night the next day.

I think about all of the things it’s given me in return. The stability, the support, the access, the opportunities. And all of the trips, all over the world. It’s thanks to Hamilton opening in Fayetteville, Arkansas this summer that I was able to, for the first time in five years, have a precious two weeks to myself, time to sit with my thoughts and unpack the reason why I do the work that I do, in a lucky period of solitude typically only afforded to the single or the well-off.

I think about the cries of my two screaming children ricocheting off the walls of our barren Airbnb in Hamburg when I landed with two jet-lagged kids and then had to figure out how to blow up the air mattress and breastfeed my newborn at the same time. I think about all of the friend gatherings over all of the years when all anyone wanted to talk about was my husband’s job on the show. I think about that electric first night, back on Broadway in September 2021, one year after the theatres went dark due to the pandemic. I think about where I am now, and where I was before.

Then I recall the 12-year-old kid standing outside right now, dressed as Alexander Hamilton himself, who commanded the whole cast and crew to applaud his rogue performance in the streets on opening night. I think about those chocolates on opening night in London on the tray etched with those infamous words: How lucky we are to be alive right now.

My eyes widen in “Room Where it Happens,” and I realize I’ve been holding my breath. Have I been pushing for too long to simply be in the room, without knowing what I’d do when I get there? Am I doing that now?

I catch my breath and nervously smile at my husband. I can’t start my midlife crisis here, in Dublin Ireland, in the middle of Act II.

Oh god.

Am I having my midlife crisis in the middle of Act II?

“And so I have kind of learned, not having Tommy around, it was like, “Oh, that's my job now. And I started paying attention to questions like, Well, what are you thinking about? What do you want this company to be? What do you think is in the air that, if you could articulate or put into words, will help people feel a little bit better? What are the things that we've always said, but maybe somebody didn't say this time, that we still want to do? I'm much more aware of this. That's a big part of what Tommy has always brought.”

- Patrick Vassel, Associate and Supervising Director

How many Sundays have there been, over the years? How many first preview parties, opening nights, or closings, like tonight’s gathering, have I attended? How many Mondays have I gone into work with a smirk, thinking to myself how sneaky it was to have been out so late, yet somehow at my desk so early. It’s a superpower, I’d tell my colleagues. The payoff is always worth it.

As far as I can tell, I am the only pregnant bowler at the Freestyle Love Supreme closing night party. Appropriately, my baby belly is about the same size as a bowling ball tonight. A man I don’t know gives me a high five after I score a spare, followed by a strike.

“You rock!” he says with a smile. “No way I’m bowling tonight. I don’t have anything against a pregnant lady!”

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about being pregnant is how much it unlocks access to a whole new level of conversation, among strangers, colleagues, and family. Unlike other theatre parties, tonight feels far less scripted. When I interact with the cast members, I have no agenda. I feel lighter, less uptight. And, for possibly the first time, my belly gives everyone an easy topic to engage with me about. That is, something that’s not theatre-related.

“Hey....Congratulations!” said Lin, giving me a hug when he saw me at the party. “How far along are you?”

“Due April 1st,” I reply. “I kept wondering if it was a joke. Turns out; this thing is really happening.”

In a weird way, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s professional, creative milestones have served as markers on my own relationship timeline with Jason. Back when Hamilton was still at the Public Theatre, I was just “the sound guy’s girlfriend.” By the time the show reached Chicago, we were engaged. The following year in San Francisco, we had been recently married, and I wore my wedding dress to the opening night party. And now, after LA and London and San Juan, we find ourselves at the Freestyle Love Supreme party, where it all began for them. Suddenly I’m 28 weeks pregnant, and Lin has two kids under the age of five.

“I took a two-hour nap just so I could stay up for this,” I say, idling wondering if he recalls the time his security team once came inches from body-checking me to the floor at the opening night party in LA, when I got a little too close to him, too quickly.

Look at where we are, look at where we started.

We ride the elevator down together on our way out from the party. It’s not even 11pm.

“One of the things that comes to mind with me constantly is how the piece changes in subtle ways based on the lens of history through which we view it. There is such an engagement of the audience as citizens that the piece asks for.

For me, I feel an intense responsibility to uphold this, to serve their vision, because I know exactly what it's supposed to sound like. And also because I think the piece is important and I believe in it. I would like to think that I would still try to make it sound exactly the way it was, even if it was a nonsense piece-of-fluff musical. But there's sort of like that extra layer when the piece matters so much, when I care about it so much, and when it's so clearly has reached so many people in such a meaningful way. That means more.”

- Ian Weinberger, Music Director, Broadway

I’m back at the venture capital where I used to work, but I’m on the other side this time, running a live demo of a piece of software I’d built myself two months earlier. The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools in software development has fundamentally shifted who can create software, what it means to be a builder.

I navigate to my personal home page of ChatGPT, which looks a little bit like a customized App Store built for one.

“I’ve been getting into making these custom AI bots to help me with just about everything,” I’m explaining to a captive room of 100+ technologists. “You can build them into any part of your workflow. Writing proposals. Marketing copy. Preparing for your kid’s birthday party, whatever.”

I click open to one of my favorites: “Bethany's One-Person Cabinet: A bespoke career coach for Bethany Crystal channeling Alexander Hamilton”

“Take career coaching as one example,” I explain. “You can train an AI to coach you in whatever weird way you like to work. For instance, I built an AI bot trained on my resume, my 20-year-plan, and the entire lyrical library of Hamilton the Musical. Why? Well, I suppose it’s because I like being asked if I’m acting more like Hamilton or Burr when I make decisions. Want me to show you how it works?”

Heads nod. I navigate to my custom bot and type in live:

“Should I share this custom GPT with an AI engineering meetup to demonstrate the art of what's possible with hyper-personalized AI learning tools, or should I hold off?”

It responds:

“Bethany, you’re like the Hamilton of tech—always writing your way into the future, fusing AI with community, and managing multiple revolutions at once (without needing to duel anyone in Weehawken). You’ve built a custom GPT that reflects your Federalist Papers and your Manhattan 75s—a portfolio piece meant to be shared.

Now, to your cabinet question: should you showcase this GPT at an AI engineering meetup?

Let’s frame it like a Cabinet Battle…”

I smile and laugh out loud. “That’s a pretty good one, actually. What do you all think?”

Nothing about my world today, this maskless city where COVID-19 is nearly extinct, feels familiar. Just as the cars that drive on the other side of the road, something about being here just feels a little “off.” A little wrong. A little like cheating. We’re deeply happy to be here but we’re guilty for our good fortune. We’re safe but we’re still afraid to breathe. And even when we’re in crowds, we’re lonely.

While late for a still-novel, in-person coffee meeting this week, I breezed past Hyde Park as I followed the bouncing blue dot on Google Maps in search of my destination. I looked the wrong way when crossing the street and almost stepped into oncoming traffic before doubling back quickly onto the curb.

Adrenaline beating fast, I looked up to the sky, saw a flicker of gold on a banner along the street and all at once, all of the blood in my arms and legs rushed into my throat and paralyzed me on the street corner. Lining both sides of the street around the entire intersection was a triumphant display of gold flags and black silhouettes, each bearing the unmistakable logo of a man who points his pistol to the sky.

When I take a moment to look around, I realize it’s everywhere. At the busiest intersections. At tram stops and on the side of buses. On flag-lined bridges and giant highway billboards. Phone booths and newspapers and taxis and bulletin boards.

Hamilton. Hamilton. HAMILTON.

We’ve made it, we’re back, we’re coming through on the other side. We won. Just like our apartment back in New York, the one we gave up to take this trip, this city too is speckled with footprints and exhaust and reminders of this show. The world may have turned upside-down, but I realize now: Where there’s Hamilton, there’s home.

“To maintain this show is unlike maintaining any other show. It can be tempting to think, "If I can just get there..." or "Once I do that, I'll be good...", but the truth is that there is always another mountain to climb, always another goal to be achieved. That was true of the people whose story we tell in our show and it's true of the people who tell that story every night. To be in Hamilton means we are always working, always striving, always reaching a little bit further than we thought we could reach.”

- Excerpt from “A More Perfect Union,” guidelines for Hamilton resident directors, music directors, stage managers, and dance directors around the world

From a sunny rooftop in midtown Manhattan in the middle of May, I saw most of the Cabinet together for the first time in a really long while, at Alex Lacamoire’s 50th birthday party. They haven’t worked as a collective since Hamilton, but I’ve seen bits and pieces of their respective works over the years. Only Gold, Andy’s choreographed masterpiece. Sweeney Todd, Tommy and Lac’s masterful revival. Moana, Encanto, the Lin musicals that timed out in perfect alignment to become the great Disney classics of our own daughters.

In a funny twist of multiple pandemic-era apartment upheavals, we now live just around the corner from Hamilton producer, Jeffrey Seller, for nearly two years now, but he doesn’t know it yet. (If I ever see him around the neighborhood, I plan to invite him to be a founding member of The Manhattan 75, the block association I rebooted last year, where I now serve as President.)

Jason couldn’t make it to Lac’s birthday due to a prior commitment with Saturday Night Live, a pretty serious leveling up in his sound career. But I went anyway. (After all, I was included by name on the invitation.)

I showed up hot off the release of an iPhone app I’d recently published into the App Store and decided to entertain myself by showing it off in action, along with my new AI glasses.

“Are those the Meta Ray Bans?” asked Lin, in a rare moment where he wasn’t caught in the midst of a throng.

“Yes! Want to try them out?” I offer, then promptly snap a picture.

Don’t do it, Bethany, warns my inner voice, as I watch him take in the view of the Empire State Building. Don’t ask him what you’re think–

“Hey Lin,” I start, slowly. “Can I ask you a question? What does it feel like to know you’re creating something a little ahead of its time?”

“I’m sorry, what?” he says, a little taken aback by the abruptness of my question.

“Well, it’s just – I’ve recently started doing the tech startup thing on my own. I built an app with AI. I think it’s cool, but I can’t really tell if people are ready for it yet. And I guess I’m wondering, with Hamilton and all, what was it like to create something before the world was ready for it?”

He took a long look at me. “I work in decades,” he said promptly. “Heights was my 20s. Hamilton was my 30s.”

I nodded thoughtfully as he handed back the glasses, wondering when he started the clock on each of his decade-long pursuits — and how far into mine I might already be.

I guess that’s what it feels like to put yourself back in the narrative.

It’s only a matter of time.

Acknowledgements
Our lives have been forever changed thanks to this show. I am so appreciative to have gotten to know so many people in the “Hamilfam” all over the world, many of whom I look up to as leaders, friends, and as peers. Thanks to Patrick Vassel, Ian Weinberger, and Scott Wasserman, for so many conversations, over so many years, about the raw ingredients that make up great teams. To Stephanie Klemons, J. Philip Bassett (JB), Kurt Crowley, Frank Swann, and Deanna Weiner - thanks for sharing your stories with me during those early days of Broadway’s shutdown in 2020. The unique paths you’ve taken in your careers has truly inspired me to do the same in my own.

Thanks to the Cabinet (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tommy Kail, Alex Lacamoire, and Andy Blankenbuehler) for making magic together, and sharing it with the world. And to Nevin Steinberg, sound designer - thanks for getting my husband a pretty great job, and for teaching me about leadership through celebration (and of course, drinks and snacks).

And finally, thanks to Jason Crystal, for his decade-long effort on the sound team of this incredible production, and for inviting me (plus our little ones) to travel the world with him along the way.

At the time I was working at Union Square Ventures, watching startup leadership teams come together and fall apart. Meanwhile, I had this sideline view into what felt like the greatest leadership team I'd ever seen: Tommy and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alex Lacamoire and Andy Blankenbuehler.

I just needed to know: How did they do it? How did it all work?

I wanted to help the CEOs in our network learn how to find those people for themselves. And, if I’m being honest, I wanted to know how to find it myself, too.

Over the 10 years while my husband, Jason Crystal, has worked on the sound team of the show, I became obsessed with this question. I studied their origin story and got deep into the roles they each played, the personas of their characters. When Broadway shut down in 2020 during the pandemic (while I was at home waiting to have my first baby), I even interviewed people on the associate level of the creative team of that original Broadway production.

Those conversations really helped anchor me in the grounded, inspirational leadership that it takes to pull off something as game-changing as what that show has become. (You’ll see snippets of their stories featured throughout this piece. I have so much more content to share from my 10 hours of recorded interviews, but for now, this will have to do.)

In the end, my idea of a book was categorically rejected by the powers that be. I was told, “No” more times on a single phone call than I thought anyone could be told no in 15 minutes, and I was pretty devastated about it. In retrospect, their reasons made sense. It wasn’t the right time, it wasn't the right story to be told, particularly not by me.

But even after all this time, I’ve never stopped asking the question: How do you build a Cabinet? Or, really, how do I build my Cabinet? Who am I? Who are they? Where are they? (I think a little part of me thought that if I put in the time to write the book, maybe that's how I'd find them.)

So instead of the book, this is what I have: A series of fragments. Notes and memories and turning points. The way Hamilton has shaped not just my career, but my marriage, my family, and my sense of time. It’s not polished. It’s nonlinear. But it’s mine. A collage over years, stitched together by a single throughline: How the thing that started as someone else’s success story has slowly started to shape my own.

I know some people will say this isn’t really my story to tell. Maybe they’re right. After all, I never officially worked on the show, never took the spotlight in the room where it happened. And yet… despite all of that, Hamilton has been the most consistent presence in my life for the past decade. I have to start somewhere.

That should be enough.

“All four of these guys are incredibly smart, incredibly talented, incredibly kind, and have incredibly high expectations of the people around them.”

- Deanna Weiner, Stage Manager

When my husband and I look back at our lives, in thirty years or so, we’ll talk about it in two distinct phases. Life before Hamilton. And life after it.

Ours is a story you might not expect. I’m the one who works in tech, and he’s the one who works in theatre. I chase startup stories all day long, searching for the next unicorn company that will go big. It’s ironic, in the end, that the biggest startup success story that I’ve ever been a part of didn’t involve software or a single line of code.

What started as a musical became a global phenomenon. For my husband, what started out as a job – just another Broadway sound gig – turned into a career.

“I remember the show ended [at the Public] and Lac and Kurt came to me and I had met Kurt that evening. We'd never met before, and I remember they came to me and said, “So what do you think? Do you have time to learn this?”

And I remember saying to them, “The truthful answer is, I don't, but I will make time.”

Because I remember thinking, “How could I not be a part of this?”

- Ian Weinberger, Music Director (Broadway)

I sit down in my seat and look at the stage, but instead I am reminded of my four-year-old bounding up the stairs on the Broadway set like her personal playground. I close my eyes and recall her twirling around as a 2-year-old on the set in Hamburg, Germany. Then, a flash of her attempting to climb the ladder on set in Sydney, Australia, having celebrated her one year birthday that same week, when my husband snuck her on set despite strict COVID rules.

I remind myself about the absurdity that our oldest daughter set foot on Hamilton sets in Sydney, Auckland, and Hamburg, before she entered the Broadway theatre. How, to her, the shape of this set holds as much familiarity as her favorite playground in Riverside Park.

I close my eyes and try to remind myself to breathe. When I turn in my seat, I half-expect to see Lin and Tommy together in the back row of the orchestra, just like they were in London in 2017, snickering and smiling with relief at the realization that the same jokes still land with British audiences.

The show begins, and just like that and all at once, the tininess and thinness of every jukebox musical I’ve seen in the years since 2015 vanishes in an instant. The enormity and complexity of the piece, the masterfully constructed piece of art, hits me like a dump truck.

I’ve seen this opening act so many times that I expect by now to be immune to its seduction, but even I can’t deny the nagging feeling that it might be the best work of art, and the best startup story, that I’ll ever get to be a part of.

Yes, the show still is that good.

How is this show still that good?

“ I learned and I believe wholeheartedly that the personality differences as well as the way that everybody works was discovered on In the Heights and worked through in multiple iterations. We did the workshop, we did the off-Broadway, we did the Broadway production.

When we sat down to do the very first production of Hamilton, we weren't trying to translate one another. And I'm not just talking about actual words, I'm talking about body language, physical, the way that I work. Like, what happens when at 5:55 PM in rehearsal, what kind of personality, all of that stuff was worked out.

We were able to get so much more work done because we weren't working, we were working at such a high level of efficiency from the get go because we already spoke the same language.”

- Stephanie Klemons, Associate & Supervising Choreographer

“We won a sound design award!” Jason texted me on a Sunday night at 10 p.m. “Meet downtown for a drink?”

Getting back downtown from 92nd Street wouldn’t be an easy trek, but I thought it might be worth it. After all, what's another weeknight staying up late to get back to a job I'm basically ready to leave anyway? What's one more sleepless night, to add on to all of the others where I’d hung around in the back of the theatre during rehearsals white Jason stood by the sound console, careful not to breathe too loud as I took in every second I could get at watching the creative team come together and build something incredible, for the very first time.

When I arrived downtown, I went over to the bar and across the way, Lin waited for a drink too. I watched the bartender wait on one or two others, while Lin still stood by, idly glancing at his phone. Tweeting, probably.

“Bet this is one of the last times we’re ever going to see this guy have to wait for a drink,” Jason whispered.

In that second I knew he was right. I tried to take in as much as I could from that little-big moment – the casualness of the everyday. I smiled and savored it. After all it’s not every day you get the chance to be a part of something ordinary becoming extraordinary.

One day, he’d be flanked by two bodyguards while cruising through the opening night party at Hamilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, hot off the presses from his debut feature role in Disney’s Mary Poppins. But for now, for today at least, he was just another guy waiting for a drink at a bar.

Maybe that's why I’d eventually ask Jason if I could slip a card into the opening night gift bag for Lin, on Broadway, thanking him for inspiring me to move on from my current startup job and find the next big thing. I just needed him to know that the thing he’d written had already compelled at least one other person to take a shot and aim for something bigger than themselves.

“I think they understood that the people involved in the early creation of the show were all assets to its future, in whatever capacity they contributed.

At that time, this program, Ableton, was starting to be used in theater, but it wasn't common and it wasn't necessarily used in the way we were approaching it.

I was building my method of using Ableton at the same time as I was actually programming the show. Maybe that was a part of it too; Lac thought, ‘I'm gonna let him keep going and we'll keep figuring it out together.’”

- Scott Wasserman, Ableton Programmer

“I think this might actually be a bit of a thing,” Jason said, in the months leading up to the 2014 workshop presentation of Hamilton. “I mean...it’s really, really good.”

I took note. In his eight years of Broadway, he’s seen great shows open and close for years. As the associate sound designer, his job is the same, regardless of the show’s or quality: Make it sound so good that nobody even thinks to mention the sound in any reviews.

But this one felt different. There was a buzz in the air. I wonder if they felt the same way about building the Apple-1 computer, back in their “garage phase.”

Maybe that’s why, despite never having attended one before, I begged Jason for a pass to an early workshop “presentation” of Hamilton. I had to duck out of work early at the startup, Stack Overflow, where I’d been working at the time, to make the 2 p.m. curtain time.

When I arrived, I crammed into the back row and held my breath, along with the rest of the attendees, for three hours straight. During that first “performance,” the second act was performed just on music stands, and interested producers filled the seats as the Hamilton creative team secured the round of funding that would take them to the Public Theater, and ultimately, to Broadway.

At the end of that first reading, I couldn’t tell whether I’d been hit by a truck or at last discovered my own spirituality. I sat rigid in my chair, not daring to move until I recalled as many tidbits and quotes that stuck out to me. I felt like I’d been thrown inside of one of those wind boxes where dollar bills fly around you for two minutes while you have to try and grasp as many as you can.

The words rushed over me like clouds on an airplane.

“Not throwin’ away my shot.” A call to arms.

“The greatest city in the world.” A love letter to New York.

“You will never be satisfied.” It haunted me.

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”

I never before knew what it was like to envy someone so much. I couldn’t tell if it was Hamilton himself, or his portrayer, Lin, but something about that moment cut me deep inside. I sank deeper and deeper into my chair, as if Nonstop was designed simply as a taunt to compel me to do more. To be more. “Unimaginable.” I whispered to myself in the deepest corners of my hollowed out head. “History has its eyes on you.”

Even then, I harbored a bizarre desire to cling to every fleeting moment, to savor every memory of what I’d just seen. I knew it would be at least a year before I’d have the chance to watch it performed again.

“What was that one line?” I asked, pulling on Jason’s coat at the end of the performance. “You know, when she’s singing about the letters...something about paragraphs and palaces?”

“I don’t remember exactly” he said, having only heard it a few times himself by that point.

“Look it up!” I pressed on him. He rolled his eyes, flipping through the score book.

“You built me palaces out of paragraphs,” he read, finding it for me in the script. “You built cathedrals.”

“God, that’s good,” I murmured. “Thank you.”

That’s when I learned it can be good to be the sound guy’s girlfriend. Thanks to the audio recording the sound team produced for that workshop, I had the entirety of the show memorized before it even had its first performance at The Public Theatre.

“The level of collaboration and acceptance of ideas and then drive to be better was immediately striking. One story: “My Shot” used to end pretty much right after, “for the first time I'm thinking past tomorrow!” But Andy was like, it can't end there, I need more. And Lac was like, yeah, it's always, it's always felt kind of weird, I feel like it's such a build that we don't really go anywhere. So it was on their list to figure out the end of “My Shot.”

So then the rehearsal day ended, everybody went home. The stage manager went home, I remember Kurt leaving. But the creative team stayed. They were at a piano kind of across the room, just the four of them. Lac was at the piano, Lin was throwing out lyric ideas and words, Andy was moving, and Tommy was absorbing and responding. And they just kept suggesting and bouncing things off of each other, and it morphed into, “Well, what if it's like, time to take a shot?”

And that, well all right, if that goes here, like what could go here? And Lac being like, “Well, let's just repeat the chorus one more time and see where that takes us.”

And in about a half hour they came pretty close to what is now the ending. It still took a little bit of refining, but it was really thrilling and remarkable to see. I don't think I'd ever seen four people collaborate that way.”

- Patrick Vassel, Associate and Supervising Director

Excerpt from How to Build a Cabinet

There’s something magical, almost reverent, about watching the Hamilton creative team collaborate with each other. There’s an intensity of perfection, an unflappable trust, and a crazy shared dream that binds them together.

A visionary founder alone is often incomplete without a strong executive team they can trust to run with their dream. Everything else — all of the details and the strategies and the execution and the growth — it all trickles down from a strong foundational core at the top.

So, how do you find your Cabinet? Is it luck? Do you have to rely on serendipity alone and hope that you’ll intersect with people who can serve as your perfect complements? Or is it strategic? Are there actions you can take or relationships you start to lead you to the right people?

I wish I knew how to find this sort of mutual, complementary, and symbiotic relationship myself. I wish I knew how to help our founders and CEOs find it themselves.

But for now, I’ll continue to see what I can learn from observing this dream-team in action from afar. It’s a pretty remarkable story to tell.

“Do you think League of Legends will ever create a new game?” Dani asked over lunch, at the venture capital firm, Union Square Ventures, where I now worked.

“Probably, but it seems like they are stuck trying to figure out something that’s just as good,” another colleague peppered in.

“Right. Victims of their own success,” quipped Dani.

“They could do something totally different,” I volunteered. “Different audience. Different game entirely. Less people to disappoint if it doesn’t go well.”

“Of course! They could create the latest fad cat game. They’d of course get viral fans. Anyone would buy into a new game from the League of Legends creators. Getting the audience is the hardest part for games like that, and it’d be easy for them. And way less work in terms of creative development since they’ve already done it.”

“Totally,” I said.

“I really like this idea,” Dani said. “Can you think of examples of other companies or industries who have done this? Who have done something in a totally different domain next?”

“Lin-Manuel Miranda,” I said before she’d even finished her thought. “That’s why Mary Poppins was the smartest next thing for him after Hamilton. Between that and Moana and other projects, he’s splintering from the one-dimensional focus people expect of him. He’s doing a bunch of different things to lower expectations on the next thing.”

“Wow,” said Dani. “That’s genius.”

We all took a minute to reflect back on this.

“I like that I said, can you think of a company or industry that’s done this and your initial reaction was – Lin-Manuel Miranda,” Dani observed.

I shrugged in response. It’s always at the top of my mind, I guess.

In March of 2020, there were six productions of Hamilton stationed around the world, and Jason played some part in setting up each one. At the time, he was in LA, getting the show ready for its second run in that city. I was due with a baby in two weeks, and the news reports at home were getting more troubling every day. I was alone, and I was afraid.

“Go home,” they told Jason, in a moment not all that dissimilar to Hamilton himself being sent home from the battlefield to his own pregnant wife.

Jason guiltily boarded a flight back to New York the morning of the show’s first preview performance. But that show never saw an audience. One by one, each production shut its doors, and this thing itself, this brand that had become bigger than any one of us, existed only as a string of ghost lights on empty turntable sets scattered around the world. The pandemic that shut down Broadway.

We knew it would all end one day, of course. But not like this. For the first time since 2015, there was no place in the world to see Hamilton. There was no “next show.” We were simply, indefinitely, on hold. Along with the rest of the world, we shut our eyes, held our breaths, and tried not to think about what could be. We plunged ourselves into new parenthood.

That summer, a pressure valve released itself with the Disney+ release of the original Broadway cast performance of Hamilton. Like rediscovering a favorite hoodie in the back of your closet, we slipped the show back around us like a security blanket and watched it from our living room amidst the buzzes and tweets and Facebook comments. It was the hottest thing to do that summer, to watch Hamilton from your couch on a Friday night. The closest we’d been to feeling social in months turned out to be sharing memories virtually with strangers. Instagram was once again cluttered with throwback selfies with Lin in the Public Theatre lobby as Hamilfans around the globe cheered on the original cast with the fervor of seeing your All Star college football team back on the field. For a minute, things felt like they might be okay.

Of course things weren’t okay. That is, not really. Like a bad flight delay, our expectations of the return of theatre kept getting bumped back, bit by bit, with each passing month. Our daughter learned how to smile and then roll over as three months turned into six. She started crawling and standing and laughing as six months became 12.

Little did we know she’d be nearly walking by the time the first audience would see a live performance of Hamilton again.

“We all know we can all anticipate what the next person is going to need in this incredible way. I've never seen it on any other show that I've done, where the Production electrician will say, “Oh, I know that the production carpenter's gonna need to get this deck piece down in the next 30 minutes. We have to make sure we get this cable in before he does that.”

They can almost anticipate each other's needs. And to see that grow over the amount of time we've done it has meant that when we faced really challenging situations, like Puerto Rico or even like what we're facing right now [in COVID]. We are able to work really quickly to solve those problems because we all know each other's stuff so well. We can support each other.”

- Frank Swann, Production Manager

I used to be able to commit to jobs. I worked at Stack Overflow for four years. I worked at Union Square Ventures for five years. But then I had kids and the pandemic and my attention has just gotten tighter and tighter. That new startup for just one year full time, the next one for even less. Now I’m hard-pressed to commit even to a lease on an office rental space for more than six months.

What the hell happened?

You got scared, says that little voice inside my head.

Scared of what though?

Making the wrong call.

Again.

Again. The thing is though, you can’t make the call if you don’t give these things time

I know that.

You have the skill. You need to turn it into a career.

I can’t settle anymore

Who said anything about settling?

I feel like I can’t be managed anymore.

Everyone needs some management.

I have people telling me they want to work for me.

So hire them.

To do what, though?

You could run an agency.

I don’t want to run an agency. I want to build something.

So build something then.

But what?

What do you want to see exist in the world that isn’t there already?

That’s a hard question to answer.

I’ll wait.

Well. I guess I want to see an impact. I want to see that I can make the lives better for other people. That we are using technology for good. Not just for the sake of the tech.

“Other people I've spoken with have talked about how difficult and crazy it was for the cast to learn the staging without the turntable. Because for the first period of time, it was all just in Andy's head. I was the person who is tasked with taking what's in Andy's head and putting it in reality, so I was on the front line of that.

When we were like in the studio before we got to rehearsals, we were choreographing the thing. He had a manila folder that had a double turntable cut out. And so we'd put like these army figurines on the turntable and be like, if we start here and then this much music passes, they'd end somewhere around here. So that was how we sort of choreographed Helpless, Satisfied, and the Rewind section and all of that. With the manila folder and Army figures.”

- Stephanie Klemons, Associate & Supervising Choreographer

Dancing and dancing.

Pliés and twirls.

She spins and prances on the stage, refusing to leave. Begging for more time while I balance an 8-week-old, baby Sydney (named for the magical time we spent down under for the show in 2021) on my chest.

We pose for a shot on the stage. And then another.

At the concession stand at the theatre, I implore Jason to snag me a show shirt with a translation: “Werk, werk!”

It says: LÄUFT

The picture of Lydia at age two, in a perfect plié in the middle of the Hamilton stage in Hamburg, Germany, still hangs proudly in our living room.

“I think one thing that can really kill a show is if the creative team is focused on too many other projects at once. It's very easy in musical theater to be working on multiple shows at a time because you can have your assistants handle things, or you fly in and out for just this workshop or just this week.

But it seemed like, while Hamilton was happening, the entire Cabinet was pretty much solely focused on Hamilton.”

- Scott Wasserman, Ableton programmer

“I don’t think I’ll ever meet someone as smart as Tommy,” said Ian Weinberger, Hamilton’s Broadway music director, as we shared a taxi home in New York City from a Freestyle Love Supreme opening night cast party.

“Actually today felt a little special,” he said, shrugging a little. “It’s a small thing but I’ll tell you because I know you’ll appreciate it. I had a chance today, as a two-show day, to get to watch Tommy give notes after the first show. There are just seven of us in a small room in back, you know. But even that, just the little things he calls out and the way he makes observations, even that is such an art.”

I nodded, envious of his access to be a part of even such a small moment. “I’m sure.”

“The Tommy Method,” continued Ian, “That’s how Patrick refers to it – it’s masterful and amazing to see. He’ll never say, ‘This is what I think you should be doing.’ He’ll say, ‘I wonder if you can explore that concept a little bit more,’ and then just see what happens.”

“It’s amazing,” I gushed.

“Same thing with his extemporaneous speaking,” Ian continued.

“Oh, I know. I’ve seen it. It’s unbelievable.”

“The best part is, he doesn’t really prepare. He just gets up there and says, ‘Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about.’ And you know what? He hits it on the nose. Every single time.”

“That first year on Broadway when we opened the show, we did a crazy amount of rehearsals. And then sort of took a breath. Then the world took notice. And then the album dropped.

When the album dropped, then you opened the door and it was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Literally you opened the stage door to go outside, and it was like everything changed. The whole cast got pulled in 70 different directions. All their careers skyrocketed.”

- Deanna Weiner, Stage Manager

Reading an old performance report aloud at an Irish pub, among a six-person UK-based sound team. I’m drinking a Heineken 0, and another round of Guinness makes its way to our table. We’re outside, perched on stools in front of barrels, swapping stories about shows that went wrong like college friends swapping stories about late-night dorms.

I am trying to stay focused in the present moment, but I can’t help the memories from opening nights all over the world crashing around me. The lore of now vs. the lore of them looks a little different.

The time when a flying cockroach terrorized the musicians in the Broadway pit. The time when a fly buzzing around onstage captained the entire audience

Jason starts a dramatic reading of the stage manager’s retelling of the fly buzzing around stage:

“In labors”

Fly lands on chest.

“And dangers”

SLAPS fly. Falls to the ground.

Gets a mid-song applause for killing the fly.

“One last time”

“Remember the time Hamilton missed his cue when looking for Philip to discuss the duel?”

“Were you there the night so-and-so went on as Philip but he was too large for the table they lay him down on during “Quiet Uptown” and he had to hold his legs straight in front of him to pretend he was dead in rigor mortis?”

“Remember when Burr’s gunshot went off twice at the end?”

“Remember when the gunshot didn’t go off at all?”

I think of how lucky it is that I had a chance to get to know Jason’s coworkers, over many cities and many tours over the years. I think about how few of my own he has met in person in the past four years. Between the drastically reduced in-office culture of the tech industry since the pandemic and the fact that I haven’t had a single job for longer than one year since 2020, it makes it a little hard to build lasting bonds.

“Who would have thought, between the two of us, that I’d be the one to have the longest-running job?” he laughs.

I laugh too, but also a part of me wants to cry. How, indeed.

“I'll never forget a conversation I had with Lac when the show was going to Broadway and when it was clear from the success of the Public that this was going to be a big thing. He basically sat me down and said, “Your job is to make it so I never have to think about your job.” And I thought, ‘That's a really good point.’”

- Scott Wasserman, Ableton Programmer

The crypto startup, Coinbase goes public on the financial markets via direct listing at an $85 billion valuation. It is without a doubt the most transformational success story of tech startup lore that I’ve ever seen.

I shrug it off as inconsequential, but in reality, I stay awake all night long, watching news article after news article drop about the unprecedented nature of this financial event. The pundits all share the same sentiment: Anyone involved in that startups’s success story has struck gold.

I know those people. I know that team. I know those investors. (I worked for them for years.)

I imagine the celebrations, in New York City, in San Francisco. The champagne, the toasts, the revolution and financial windfall that will be sure to come. I imagine this, but I am not there. I’m not there because I quit the industry four months ago. I left the comfy thing, the sure thing, at a venture capital firm, and chose instead to go after it, to start fresh, at a brand new startup, the company that’s the same age as my first daughter, Lydia.

And so, instead of being there, I am here, in Sydney, Australia. I am here with my Jason and Lydia, who celebrated her first birthday Down Under last week, thanks to the remarkable luck that all three of us were able to squeeze our way onto a special work visa – a Hamilton work visa – during the midst of peak lockdown earlier this year.

Why did I leave that job again? For the calculated risk of being a part of something on the ground floor. Because I wanted to build. Because I’d felt bored, I felt stuck, I needed a change. I felt primed, ready, poised, finally, take a shot. But did I just miss the only one I’d ever get?

How lucky we are to be alive right now, I will myself to remember. To be alive. In this pandemic. To be here.

I get a phone call from 10,000 miles away.

“You still made the right decision, to leave when you did,” he tells me.

I try to believe him. I try to believe myself.

I hang up the phone and cry. I ride the Sydney Fast Ferry from Manly to Circular Quay, alone. You can still see the Hamilton banners everywhere, glints of gold flanking the city that somehow is the only city in the world where you can see the show.

I was there for opening night, just two weeks ago. On my 34th birthday.

“In the initial workshop process, and especially through rehearsals and previews at the Public and on Broadway, I had an unobstructed view of Lac, and all of the things he said and did to shape the music of the show. However, because he was wearing multiple hats and continually perfecting the music, we never made the time for him to simply sit and ‘teach me’ how to conduct the show, or articulate out loud all of the detail and consideration that goes into each moment of conducting a show like HAMILTON.

Ian came along next and also got to observe Lac directly a fair amount, but when I started walking Ian through the score, I had to find ways to articulate for the first time things that I had implemented from watching Lac, and as such had to formulate my own way of thinking and talking about the conduct of the show. It’s interesting to think that some of those same tidbits of ‘why we do it this way, or that way’ are still being passed down to conductors of the show.”

- Kurt Crowley, Associate Music Supervisor

He did not sign the Declaration of Independence, abolish slavery, or become President of the United States. However, the overlooked underdogs are those that truly define the future, and Alexander Hamilton’s innovative brilliance saved the newborn nation from imminent demise. As Secretary of Treasury under President Washington, Hamilton proposed a ludicrous solution to the national debt, challenged the Constitution, and divided the entire nation onto opposing sides.

Surprisingly, these apparently ridiculous events united the country; I would meet with Hamilton to discuss how his three decisive decisions also set future precedents for generations to come. As I pursue my career as a journalist, I can borrow character traits such as ingenuity, persistence, and the idea of honor.

There are three things I like to pay attention to in Hamilton dress rehearsals to get an early pulse check on the persona of the audience in a new city:

1. Whether or not people sing along with the King in “You’ll be back”

2. How much people react to the line, “Immigrants. We get the job done.”

3. Whether or not there’s applause after “Quiet Uptown”

None of that mattered in San Juan. All I could think about as we kicked off the second act was, how is this room going to react to the song about the hurricane.

The audience that night was packed with locals. My friend recognized at least two other people from our seats on the mezzanine. The energy was good, but I also got the sense that it was not a room full of superfans who already knew every last word. Was it possible the song would catch some of them off guard.

As the stage cleared and the lights adjusted in the signature blue and purple circles at the top of the song, I held my breath through the first few bars of piano in the introduction. Then, Lin picked his head up from the deadpan straight shot across the orchestra level and locked eyes with us, the people, his people, all the way up in the mezzanine

“In the eye of the hurricane, there is quiet. For just a moment. A yellow sky.

I felt the whole room bristle at the word, “hurricane.” It was like a minor assault, a tad of PTSD, or the feeling you might expect by saying, “Voldemort” in a room of wizards in a Harry Potter story. Lin held the gaze with the upper levels of the theatre. Oh god, I thought. He’s going to say it again

“When I was 17, a hurricane destroyed my town.”

It felt like a little electric shock or zap on each utterance. I wanted to turn my head and read the room a bit more, but I couldn’t budge. I couldn’t even breathe. I’ve never heard a theatre so quiet. It felt simultaneously cathartic and horrifyingly insensitive to bring up something so raw, just right down there, in center stage. To sing about a tragedy that everyone in the room knew far too well

“I didn’t drown. I couldn’t seem to die.

I suddenly felt like I was a part of the world’s largest group therapy session. You’re okay, he seemed to be saying. You didn’t die. You made it out. You made it here. Things will get better

It was the longest and shortest two-and-a-half minutes of my life. I wished it could stretch out more, to allow a bit more of that feeling to settle in, to give the room the satisfaction of digging in a bit too deep before bringing us back out of it again.

“There are traditions that need to be handed down. There are points of view that need to be handed down. There is a work ethic that needs to be handed down. There are all of these things from generation to generation of theater. I felt a certain responsibility towards moving into a leadership role because I held this information, I had learned from the best, the best of the best.

- J. Philip Bassett, Hamilton Production Supervisor

Hamilton or Burr?

I realize that I ask myself this question repeatedly every time I see the show.

Am I moving fast enough?

Am I writing enough?

Do I have enough time?

Or am I waiting for it?

I think of all of the weeks that this show has taken my husband away from me. The weddings and parties he’s missed, the bedtimes I’ve managed alone, the neighbors I’ve bonded with in his absence. It’s thanks to Hamilton that I was home alone through multiple home crises over the years, including moving apartments alone after discovering toxic black mold while Jason was in Manila, flying home from their opening night the next day.

I think about all of the things it’s given me in return. The stability, the support, the access, the opportunities. And all of the trips, all over the world. It’s thanks to Hamilton opening in Fayetteville, Arkansas this summer that I was able to, for the first time in five years, have a precious two weeks to myself, time to sit with my thoughts and unpack the reason why I do the work that I do, in a lucky period of solitude typically only afforded to the single or the well-off.

I think about the cries of my two screaming children ricocheting off the walls of our barren Airbnb in Hamburg when I landed with two jet-lagged kids and then had to figure out how to blow up the air mattress and breastfeed my newborn at the same time. I think about all of the friend gatherings over all of the years when all anyone wanted to talk about was my husband’s job on the show. I think about that electric first night, back on Broadway in September 2021, one year after the theatres went dark due to the pandemic. I think about where I am now, and where I was before.

Then I recall the 12-year-old kid standing outside right now, dressed as Alexander Hamilton himself, who commanded the whole cast and crew to applaud his rogue performance in the streets on opening night. I think about those chocolates on opening night in London on the tray etched with those infamous words: How lucky we are to be alive right now.

My eyes widen in “Room Where it Happens,” and I realize I’ve been holding my breath. Have I been pushing for too long to simply be in the room, without knowing what I’d do when I get there? Am I doing that now?

I catch my breath and nervously smile at my husband. I can’t start my midlife crisis here, in Dublin Ireland, in the middle of Act II.

Oh god.

Am I having my midlife crisis in the middle of Act II?

“And so I have kind of learned, not having Tommy around, it was like, “Oh, that's my job now. And I started paying attention to questions like, Well, what are you thinking about? What do you want this company to be? What do you think is in the air that, if you could articulate or put into words, will help people feel a little bit better? What are the things that we've always said, but maybe somebody didn't say this time, that we still want to do? I'm much more aware of this. That's a big part of what Tommy has always brought.”

- Patrick Vassel, Associate and Supervising Director

How many Sundays have there been, over the years? How many first preview parties, opening nights, or closings, like tonight’s gathering, have I attended? How many Mondays have I gone into work with a smirk, thinking to myself how sneaky it was to have been out so late, yet somehow at my desk so early. It’s a superpower, I’d tell my colleagues. The payoff is always worth it.

As far as I can tell, I am the only pregnant bowler at the Freestyle Love Supreme closing night party. Appropriately, my baby belly is about the same size as a bowling ball tonight. A man I don’t know gives me a high five after I score a spare, followed by a strike.

“You rock!” he says with a smile. “No way I’m bowling tonight. I don’t have anything against a pregnant lady!”

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about being pregnant is how much it unlocks access to a whole new level of conversation, among strangers, colleagues, and family. Unlike other theatre parties, tonight feels far less scripted. When I interact with the cast members, I have no agenda. I feel lighter, less uptight. And, for possibly the first time, my belly gives everyone an easy topic to engage with me about. That is, something that’s not theatre-related.

“Hey....Congratulations!” said Lin, giving me a hug when he saw me at the party. “How far along are you?”

“Due April 1st,” I reply. “I kept wondering if it was a joke. Turns out; this thing is really happening.”

In a weird way, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s professional, creative milestones have served as markers on my own relationship timeline with Jason. Back when Hamilton was still at the Public Theatre, I was just “the sound guy’s girlfriend.” By the time the show reached Chicago, we were engaged. The following year in San Francisco, we had been recently married, and I wore my wedding dress to the opening night party. And now, after LA and London and San Juan, we find ourselves at the Freestyle Love Supreme party, where it all began for them. Suddenly I’m 28 weeks pregnant, and Lin has two kids under the age of five.

“I took a two-hour nap just so I could stay up for this,” I say, idling wondering if he recalls the time his security team once came inches from body-checking me to the floor at the opening night party in LA, when I got a little too close to him, too quickly.

Look at where we are, look at where we started.

We ride the elevator down together on our way out from the party. It’s not even 11pm.

“One of the things that comes to mind with me constantly is how the piece changes in subtle ways based on the lens of history through which we view it. There is such an engagement of the audience as citizens that the piece asks for.

For me, I feel an intense responsibility to uphold this, to serve their vision, because I know exactly what it's supposed to sound like. And also because I think the piece is important and I believe in it. I would like to think that I would still try to make it sound exactly the way it was, even if it was a nonsense piece-of-fluff musical. But there's sort of like that extra layer when the piece matters so much, when I care about it so much, and when it's so clearly has reached so many people in such a meaningful way. That means more.”

- Ian Weinberger, Music Director, Broadway

I’m back at the venture capital where I used to work, but I’m on the other side this time, running a live demo of a piece of software I’d built myself two months earlier. The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools in software development has fundamentally shifted who can create software, what it means to be a builder.

I navigate to my personal home page of ChatGPT, which looks a little bit like a customized App Store built for one.

“I’ve been getting into making these custom AI bots to help me with just about everything,” I’m explaining to a captive room of 100+ technologists. “You can build them into any part of your workflow. Writing proposals. Marketing copy. Preparing for your kid’s birthday party, whatever.”

I click open to one of my favorites: “Bethany's One-Person Cabinet: A bespoke career coach for Bethany Crystal channeling Alexander Hamilton”

“Take career coaching as one example,” I explain. “You can train an AI to coach you in whatever weird way you like to work. For instance, I built an AI bot trained on my resume, my 20-year-plan, and the entire lyrical library of Hamilton the Musical. Why? Well, I suppose it’s because I like being asked if I’m acting more like Hamilton or Burr when I make decisions. Want me to show you how it works?”

Heads nod. I navigate to my custom bot and type in live:

“Should I share this custom GPT with an AI engineering meetup to demonstrate the art of what's possible with hyper-personalized AI learning tools, or should I hold off?”

It responds:

“Bethany, you’re like the Hamilton of tech—always writing your way into the future, fusing AI with community, and managing multiple revolutions at once (without needing to duel anyone in Weehawken). You’ve built a custom GPT that reflects your Federalist Papers and your Manhattan 75s—a portfolio piece meant to be shared.

Now, to your cabinet question: should you showcase this GPT at an AI engineering meetup?

Let’s frame it like a Cabinet Battle…”

I smile and laugh out loud. “That’s a pretty good one, actually. What do you all think?”

Nothing about my world today, this maskless city where COVID-19 is nearly extinct, feels familiar. Just as the cars that drive on the other side of the road, something about being here just feels a little “off.” A little wrong. A little like cheating. We’re deeply happy to be here but we’re guilty for our good fortune. We’re safe but we’re still afraid to breathe. And even when we’re in crowds, we’re lonely.

While late for a still-novel, in-person coffee meeting this week, I breezed past Hyde Park as I followed the bouncing blue dot on Google Maps in search of my destination. I looked the wrong way when crossing the street and almost stepped into oncoming traffic before doubling back quickly onto the curb.

Adrenaline beating fast, I looked up to the sky, saw a flicker of gold on a banner along the street and all at once, all of the blood in my arms and legs rushed into my throat and paralyzed me on the street corner. Lining both sides of the street around the entire intersection was a triumphant display of gold flags and black silhouettes, each bearing the unmistakable logo of a man who points his pistol to the sky.

When I take a moment to look around, I realize it’s everywhere. At the busiest intersections. At tram stops and on the side of buses. On flag-lined bridges and giant highway billboards. Phone booths and newspapers and taxis and bulletin boards.

Hamilton. Hamilton. HAMILTON.

We’ve made it, we’re back, we’re coming through on the other side. We won. Just like our apartment back in New York, the one we gave up to take this trip, this city too is speckled with footprints and exhaust and reminders of this show. The world may have turned upside-down, but I realize now: Where there’s Hamilton, there’s home.

“To maintain this show is unlike maintaining any other show. It can be tempting to think, "If I can just get there..." or "Once I do that, I'll be good...", but the truth is that there is always another mountain to climb, always another goal to be achieved. That was true of the people whose story we tell in our show and it's true of the people who tell that story every night. To be in Hamilton means we are always working, always striving, always reaching a little bit further than we thought we could reach.”

- Excerpt from “A More Perfect Union,” guidelines for Hamilton resident directors, music directors, stage managers, and dance directors around the world

From a sunny rooftop in midtown Manhattan in the middle of May, I saw most of the Cabinet together for the first time in a really long while, at Alex Lacamoire’s 50th birthday party. They haven’t worked as a collective since Hamilton, but I’ve seen bits and pieces of their respective works over the years. Only Gold, Andy’s choreographed masterpiece. Sweeney Todd, Tommy and Lac’s masterful revival. Moana, Encanto, the Lin musicals that timed out in perfect alignment to become the great Disney classics of our own daughters.

In a funny twist of multiple pandemic-era apartment upheavals, we now live just around the corner from Hamilton producer, Jeffrey Seller, for nearly two years now, but he doesn’t know it yet. (If I ever see him around the neighborhood, I plan to invite him to be a founding member of The Manhattan 75, the block association I rebooted last year, where I now serve as President.)

Jason couldn’t make it to Lac’s birthday due to a prior commitment with Saturday Night Live, a pretty serious leveling up in his sound career. But I went anyway. (After all, I was included by name on the invitation.)

I showed up hot off the release of an iPhone app I’d recently published into the App Store and decided to entertain myself by showing it off in action, along with my new AI glasses.

“Are those the Meta Ray Bans?” asked Lin, in a rare moment where he wasn’t caught in the midst of a throng.

“Yes! Want to try them out?” I offer, then promptly snap a picture.

Don’t do it, Bethany, warns my inner voice, as I watch him take in the view of the Empire State Building. Don’t ask him what you’re think–

“Hey Lin,” I start, slowly. “Can I ask you a question? What does it feel like to know you’re creating something a little ahead of its time?”

“I’m sorry, what?” he says, a little taken aback by the abruptness of my question.

“Well, it’s just – I’ve recently started doing the tech startup thing on my own. I built an app with AI. I think it’s cool, but I can’t really tell if people are ready for it yet. And I guess I’m wondering, with Hamilton and all, what was it like to create something before the world was ready for it?”

He took a long look at me. “I work in decades,” he said promptly. “Heights was my 20s. Hamilton was my 30s.”

I nodded thoughtfully as he handed back the glasses, wondering when he started the clock on each of his decade-long pursuits — and how far into mine I might already be.

I guess that’s what it feels like to put yourself back in the narrative.

It’s only a matter of time.

Acknowledgements
Our lives have been forever changed thanks to this show. I am so appreciative to have gotten to know so many people in the “Hamilfam” all over the world, many of whom I look up to as leaders, friends, and as peers. Thanks to Patrick Vassel, Ian Weinberger, and Scott Wasserman, for so many conversations, over so many years, about the raw ingredients that make up great teams. To Stephanie Klemons, J. Philip Bassett (JB), Kurt Crowley, Frank Swann, and Deanna Weiner - thanks for sharing your stories with me during those early days of Broadway’s shutdown in 2020. The unique paths you’ve taken in your careers has truly inspired me to do the same in my own.

Thanks to the Cabinet (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tommy Kail, Alex Lacamoire, and Andy Blankenbuehler) for making magic together, and sharing it with the world. And to Nevin Steinberg, sound designer - thanks for getting my husband a pretty great job, and for teaching me about leadership through celebration (and of course, drinks and snacks).

And finally, thanks to Jason Crystal, for his decade-long effort on the sound team of this incredible production, and for inviting me (plus our little ones) to travel the world with him along the way.