NEW YORK (AP) – During an early version of the Founding Fathers musical “Hamilton,” Leslie Odom Jr. was in the seats with the audience, blown away. The guy playing Aaron Burr was making him a little envious, too.
“I said to myself, ‘Whoever gets to do that eight times a week is going to be the luckiest actor in New York City,'” Odom recalls. “It’s the role of a lifetime.”
A few months later, the New York native got a chance to make the role his own and – to snatch a line from the groundbreaking hip-hop musical – he wasn’t about to throw away his shot.
“If you get one of these in a career, you did it. So I’m going to enjoy every second of this year,” Odom said in his dressing room at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. “I have to remind myself that it may never be this good again.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s buzzed-about biography about the nation’s first treasury secretary opens on Broadway next week, showing America’s revolutionary men and women as red-blooded, fully dimensional figures.