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There are certainly people who have committed horrific, evil acts in the history of humanity. I don't think Aaron Burr's one of them.
Leslie Odom Jr.
I feel like every night, when you see a really good production of 'Romeo and Juliet' or something, you should hope that it ends differently. That's why we watch our favorite movies again and again.
That was the bat signal for me - 'Rent' changed my life. It took me years before I got beyond that show.
I've done a lot of translation in TV, and I can do it. I'm trained to do it. I know how to inject a certain amount of my naturalness into that and where I come from into those things, but it helps if somebody's writing with my experience in mind.
Josh Gad was in my class. Katy Mixon. Griffin Matthews. Josh Groban - he ended up leaving to become a huge star, but he was in our class in freshman year. I remember Josh was this nerdy kid in a turtleneck with a voice from heaven.
If I'm allowed it, I'm really looking forward to a little time on the couch and a little time on a beach in Brazil.
I'm in no way running from 'Hamilton' or its success or these beautiful songs that I've been blessed to be able to be the one to introduce them. I certainly won't be the last to sing them, but to be the first, I feel very lucky.
There was a lot of the 'Hamilton' experience that was like a locomotive. It was a hurricane, so the apartment often looked like a hurricane. There were clothes and shoes all over. We were getting more things in than we had room for. We had to figure out how to make space for all the blessings and goodness coming toward us.
My dad was an early hip-hop fan.
What is the future going to say about us now? What are our kids going to look at us and say, 'How could you not stop that person from getting into power? How could you not stop that environmental disaster that you saw coming a mile away?'
I've been involved with 'Hamilton' for about two and a half years. I've learned so much. I came into it a young man. Now I've dropped the 'young.'
It is said an artist spends their whole life trying to get to the place where their heart was first opened up. 'Rent' was that place for me.
'Hamilton' has restored my faith in theater.
We want to pull out songs from the American song book, and we want to make them palatable for a modern audience.
What goes up must come down; I'm not going to be in 'Hamilton' forever. Everything I work on won't have this kind of success.
You gotta love this thing. Whatever you choose to pursue - medicine, law, writing, you have to love it. You study it, you eat it, you drink it, you try it, you do it, you love it in every way.
We don't get to get swept up, because we have to start over every day at 8 o'clock.
Making $1,260 a week at 17 years old? That was a million dollars a week to me!
I can only imagine what the show would have meant to me as a 16- or 17-year-old. I know what 'Rent' meant to me in my life, how that show changed the course of my life, and we can only hope that 'Hamilton' will have the same effect on a few kids.
I'm addicted to growth.
I know what feeling broke feels like real well. I know that real well.
I think that the best songs to sing are songs that you love, because you sing them with love when you love them.
I don't have any control over the offers that are going to come to me or not come to me. But I can't go backward, and so that's what's tricky.
I remember when I was in 'Rent', Daphne Rubin-Vega threw a party. At the time, she had a loft in TriBeCa, and the elevator opened right into her apartment. I was like, 'I've never seen anything like that.' I didn't know it was possible.
You need to put your head down and... try not to lose hope.
As an artist, I'm very used to waking up and sort of not knowing what my day's going to be and not knowing where my next paycheck is going to come from.
I haven't had a chance to decorate my dressing room yet, but I have these pictures of myself as a kid that I want to put up because I said, 'I really want to make sure that I take that kid with me on this journey.' I want him to experience this.
Sometimes I think of creativity or art as this well that we all draw from.
'Rent' opened up my heart, my senses. I was never the same. I hadn't been back in that place in the same way since. 'Hamilton' put me back in that place.
The time I spent in New York when I was 17 gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams with my whole heart.
I got my Equity Card with my Broadway debut when I did 'Rent.' I was in high school, and I came to New York to do that show.
You hear a song like 'Wait For It', you hear a song like 'Dear Theodosia' - if you get one of those songs in a musical - one - it's worth dropping everything to sing that one song.
What's a better foundation for drama? You have power, you have ambition, you have sex... that's the stuff of drama.
I studied at Carnegie Mellon. I went there with a bunch of really, really talented kids.
The record company felt wisely that we should get something out before I left 'Hamilton' or around awards time, and that deadline was not easy.
I think I spent most of my childhood, and my early years as a performer, in student mode. And I think that's OK - I mean, it led me to where I am.
I know what not being able to pay your bills feels like real well... I know that way better than a room full of beautiful people and Tony awards and Grammy awards.
I have a great foundation, a great training foundation. But it took me a long time to let the training go.
I wanted to make an album that was hopeful and encouraging and inspiring. That was the goal.
I'm the nap champion.
Until you make a name for yourself, they're like, 'Be a little more Denzel', 'Be a little more Wesley Snipes.'
If you're an open channel when you're onstage, if you're just a vessel, things are going to come out that are stored away deep in your DNA.
You can't judge the people that you play anyway; you leave that for somebody else to do.
The only reason to keep talking about history is if you are juxtaposing it with the world that we live in today, if you are learning something about our world by looking at the way they shaped their world.
It's still a political statement to stand on stage as a person of color and be excellent. We still need those images to combat the narrative we're often fed - as someone innately inferior or inexorably linked with lack.
I've been fortunate in my life. It hasn't been easy, but there has been a focus on the positive, and it has reverberated. Eventually, the outlook mirrors itself back to you in the friends you have, in the partner that you choose.
I was a good student; I was a good boy. I got A's, and I did all the papers right.
I've dedicated more than 15 years to this theater and television thing; I want to spend the next 10, 15 years or so devoted to music.
They're people who had flaws and who had affairs and had sex and had scandals, and very rarely do we look at the totality of our heroes' lives.
My dad was always in sales. My mom had a heart for the ages. Worked in recreation, doing rehabilitation in nursing homes. Very nice, practical folks who were very proud of me but had no inclination toward the stage in any way.
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