♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." are, a man there you who you call his creative spouse, you talked to him as much as he talks to his wife. how did this begin? this working relationship? >> i would be curious to hear your version of this. if you want to go to the room where it happened, i remember

when i first saw lin, i had heard about this early version of a show he had done from a couple of good friends and we went up in 2002 to see his senior thesis. he walked around the corner. >> not my finest hour. it was pretty good. senior thesis, not so much. >> lin walked around the corner and i promptly dropped something showing my sloppiness -- nesspiness -- suave immediately. >> he dropped his soda. >> he saw me dropping a soda and rubbing it into the carpet and like, i'm going to change your life. >> i might have just said hello. the first time we sat down to was to talk about the heights. he said he is a great characters but should be in more of the show.

"washington heights" should be the first song. and i realized this guy is going to make my show a lot better. he is after the same thing i am. >> i had heard this demo version in 2000 and i had two years to think about what i was going to say when i met him. charlie: what was the buzz about this one? >> bold. not interested in doing things the way they should be done. he was -- charlie: sort of like alexander hamilton? >> if only i had known. he was the freshman that was in the play. he was the guy writing the show and producing it his freshman year and freshman did not do that. my initial hearings of him, which were the whispers of this

slightly aggravating, overanxious freshman, his refusal to play by the rules. i then heard about the show he wrote the next year when i graduated. once i heard that, i realized he was after something that was full of depth and that ambition was not without reason or merit. charlie: did you feel like that at your time, you could add value? >> yes. but i felt like i was in the process. i had just turned 25. i was in the process of trying to surround myself with things i could not do. i was looking for fellowship. i was looking for other people who seemed to be on the same frequency. and my hunch from listening to those early versions of "heights ", i thought we might have a similar pool of things to draw from. charlie: fluent in the same language. >> yes, which is for me english,

and for him, something else. what lin showed was he wanted to use today's music to tell a story that may not be focused on. when people talk about, what do about, he said, what if i wrote about the neighborhood where i was? what if i wrote about the neighborhood i wanted to belong to or try to find your way and establish an identity? that was somewhere unarticulated with me. i found access in the show. charlie: with today's music. when did you first hear the idea of "hamlet?" lin: i was rehearsing the show with the music director who went on to play at the white house. it was somewhere when the ask came through. lin had talked about it. i have an early e-mail where lin

took a vacation where he grabs the book. this famous vacation, where he went to mexico. he grabbed this big book by ron chernow and we were instant messaging, and there is a g-chat on august 1, 2008. not yesterday. charlie: what did it say? >> hey, i am drinking a lot of this kind of alcohol. [laughter] i am catching up on "mad men" and reading this hamilton book. and i think i said something like, great, when are you back? charlie: did any part of you, when you realized this was much more than this book he is reading, did you think, man, that is crazy. >> no. i have been down crazy road. [laughter] this was not crazy. i stopped doubting him in 2002.

when i first met him and realized in that initial conversation what he was after and the passion of his pursuit. i would be foolish to not listen and to try to -- charlie: when did you know you are better if he is working with you? lin: 2002. but i knew he was the right fit for "hamilton," because he was saying all the right things. charlie: saying all the right things? lin: one, tommy grew up in virginia. tommy grew up in the part of the country i don't know. and is also well represented in the show. his mother is a historical architect. he comes by all that as honestly as he came by all the things in "the heights." that is also with him. he heard the second song i wrote for the show and said you could be writing this a lot faster. he said, it is great that you

are taking your time, but a song a year is not a great output. charlie: we will be here a while. lin: we just started plotting. that day, i think, started plotting. what are we going to work towards? to lin's credit, and when the thing happened at the white house, it did not exist. there was no video of it. i remember lin saying a film that. it went really well. i wonder if-it will see the light of day. then they decided to put out this youtube on whitehouse.gov. lin: there were six months between me performing it and it appearing online. >> he said it went really well. great. where do you want to have lunch? charlie: so did you know what everything was talking about? tommy: i had heard the song. he played a song for me. the other thing i think about this, all of the sliding doors that needed to slide into place

for us to be sitting and talking to you is that if lin had choked on that white house stage, i mean it happens to be something, no matter how many times i watch it. no, you should do it like that. he knocked it out of the park. that happens. it comes out six months later. we were doing a benefit for a show we had and lin decided to perform a song. now, we are looking back through e-mails, which is opening night is, a chance to go back through correspondence and say with how foolish we were then. after looking at e-mails from 2011 and lin is going to perform a song he wrote. it was a standalone song and it was in the run down for the night. in the next e-mail, my shot is in that run down. whatever conversation that was that nudged you to do that, he does "my shot" by himself. 98 people are watching.

it is a very small theater. we are now in the summer of 2011. a song every 16 months or so. everyone is coming up and patting his back and wiping his brow and i'm sort of staring at him. and i said, you know, we should get going because it would be great if you were younger than hamilton by the time this thing was finished. [laughter] something kicked in because the next day we had talked the night. let's find anywhere to do this. pick a date six months from now. we next day when we spoke, had a plan. the needle dropped. charlie: there is a bit of alexander hamilton in him. pushing, urging, let's get it going. 16 months is not enough. one song is not enough for 16

months. tommy: a lot of the moments between snobby and sunny in "heights," which is what we did coming out of our early adulthood. i look at scenes between washington and hamilton and i think lin is writing about us. [laughter] i am not sure who is who. it is a familiar theme. it depends on the moment. i think the two of us have recognized in each other this ability to use the other standard for our own procedure. -- pursuit. i hear lin's conversations when he is on stage and i am talking to one of my designers. looking at the picture in trying to figure something out without the benefit of having him right next to me. i hear him. that certainly allows some sort of expedited process because there was a moment what we were

working on something and rehearsal and someone was hearing the song for the first time and i looked at him and he looked at me and he said, i got it. you don't know what i'm going to say. he said, i got it. i said, write it down. he wrote it down. we finished the moment and i asked, what was i going to say? not only did he say it verbatim, in my annoying cadence, but he said it. now we are at a telekinesis level where he just knew. it was an early thing with a few of us in a room. lin: i don't remember that. tommy: it happened so unconsciously for him. i want to make sure we're on the same page and telling the same story. simplest focus i have. , it isu work with people

not only finishing each other's sentences, but having the paragraph in your head before you say it. charlie: do you have to hold it in as well or is it simply giving him the surroundings that make what he does better? tommy: it depends. it is song to song. some of these things come out fully formed. some of the smartest comments i've ever had are good, keep going. --rlie: is it an absolute affirmation of your instinct? lin: absolutely. but there is a moment where -- tommy has an insight and it unlocks the song. one of the songs we will for broadway, washington. washington is stepping down from

office and i have written -- ton versions of it and it all feels writerly and it does not feel like something someone says. tommy says, offhandedly, because he is a son of virginia, you know, there is also washington's vine and fig tree. i said, i don't know what you are talking about. and he said, that is washington's favorite bible quote. everyone gets their own vine and fig tree. i looked up the passage and it was exactly what we needed to capture. it was washington's favorite bible quote underscoring how his main concern was the safety of the future of this nation. and it was so beautifully put by the bible. i can't improve on the bible. i just needed to quote it. tommy knew that. it totally unlocked the moment. tommy: it was the washington-hamilton moment. i felt the need to investigate.

[laughter] the other thing in that situation, which is a credit to the speed at which all of our experience has led us to, we were rehearsing in the other room. and he was running a sequence and i popped into the place where lin was. this was like a six minute conversation and he is banging his head against the wall. we are trying to figure this thing out. i am always very struck when lin says he does not know something. that will happens once every seven and a half months. it is very strange for me. we have the conversation and he comes in 45 minutes later and says, i got it. once the penny drops or the faucet is on or whatever image you want to use, it is unlocked and it just happens. and then that song was done. he took that seed and he grew it and you walk in the next time

and that is a redwood. it does not become a sapling. charlie: the other feeling for that? lin: when the right idea hits? absolutely. charlie: seeing it become a redwood. lin: yeah. and it is song to song. there are songs like "the room where it happened" that take weeks because it is a crossword puzzle. you are trying to find the best way to impart that information. there are also moments in the show, there is a song called "that would be enough," and her husband has been fired and she is pregnant with her first child and she basically says i need you to come home at the end of the day. i wrote that song in 45 minutes, cried the whole time i was writing it. it is about as pure of expression as i think what we hope for in our relationships as i can get.

it does not require party history. it does not require knowing all of these historical facts. it is just a wife saying to her husband, i don't care about what you make and what you do. i just need to come home at night. moments, you are grateful for it. tommy: i remember reading about writers and how they work and i think it was hemingway who talked about the fact that you are always writing. when something gets unlocked in an hour or a day or two. that was eight and a half months of thinking about it. even if it is something we did not know we needed. we knew we would have this wait for it idea that we talked about, just as we talked about the idea for a

washington-hamilton moment. that song felt right for a fact -- actct -- in two to see our two heroes come together and have this one last chance to express their affection, to speak to the country, to do all of these things. that is the one i kept saying, yeah. then there is the song with those guys. he would say, yeah, but look what i wrote. there was so much room to expand and to cover. when they come out, there is not a lot of shutdown in the writer part of him. so then it is about unlocking. a lot of my job is about creating an environment where if it is unlocked, it has a place to go. charlie: how important is it to have someone that can do that? lin: it is the whole ballgame. it is the whole ballgame. because it requires -- tommy has

to know how to unlock the guy creating a costume. he has to know the right thing to say to paul when they are having their meeting, just like he has to come to me and say i am not quite there yet, what if you did this. it is what i do in a thousand different directions. of that.ll -- awe that extends to every actor and when a word of praise is exactly what is needed or whether it is a deep philosophical discussion or whether it is good, keep going. he coaches every person he interacts with. that is super. charlie: choosing actors. tommy: the fun part. charlie: why? tommy: putting the team together, that is the thing we talk about a lot. when you do a show, the show starts at 8:00. between 8:00 and when the show in, i know where they will be standing, how quickly they will move through the moment.

the show is 2.5 hours in a day. it is the 10 hours in the dark that matter. one of the things we talk about constantly is try to find the people who can do the job between the lines but let's try to find human beings we want to be around. and so that takes time. but when you have material that gives the actors so much information and so much blood and fuel, i'm not always able to say i know who it is, but i'm getting pretty good at identifying when they walk in the room. and that is the thing with putting together this particular company, which is as fine a company that has ever been assembled. it allowed him to write at a level that would be elevated. we were all trying to put

something out there that was unlike what we have done. charlie: let me take you through the characters. george washington. tommy: sometimes me and sometimes lin. [laughter] always chris jackson. there is a dignity and an inherent understanding of what it is to lead that you can coach and you can't teach. chris jackson has it. he was given that and we have understood in our dozen years from knowing him to understand that if you want someone to play the greatest american superhero, you know, who can also play george, who can also play a guy named george to -- who was scared sometimes and did not know what he wanted to do and wanted to go home and have that humanity there, you know, lin

keeps holding onto the idea of who these people could be as characters and chris jackson was someone who was never far from any conversation about washington was able to do in our show. charlie: aaron burr. tommy: despite lin's best efforts to play aaron burr -- [laughter] charlie: what does that mean? i know what it means. tommy: lin wrote himself into snobby and out of burr. lin: this guy is getting pretty singy. [laughter] tommy: you know your skill set. has said this many times. there is a little of every character in lin and there is a lot of lin in all these characters. the hamilton part of lin understands going after something with focus and determination and blinders. the part of lin that also wants

to make sure it is the right moment is the burr part of lin. so he writes them both with equal compassion and ability. i think what leslie provides in this show is the other temperature of lin's hamilton and hamilton, the character. because part of the conversation we were having earlier in the show is the show has to be about hamilton, not lin playing hamilton. lin's generosity of spirit is like a good host. he makes sure everyone has eaten before he eats. i will eat in a minute. here is something for you, george washington. everyone else gets theirs and the last thing that gets written is the dual. there is a reason for that and it is that spirit of generosity. lin: i'm a good host. [laughter] charlie: thomas jefferson.

him -- tommy: lin and i were working on the show early on, when it was just the two of us kicking the tires and we were sure we wanted lafayette to come back as thomas jefferson. the idea of doubling characters. his friend would become his foe. his closest friend would become his son. this was a secret that we knew about that we also happen to know about, who can do this? they also have to do this, but they have to be a better rapper than hamilton. oh, it is david. we called him and i remember saying, what you are doing a couple of weeks, but if you could cancel it, it would be great. we are trying some stuff out and working on a new show with lin. we had known him. our friend anthony introduced us years before. lin had been on stage with him.

and he has a relationship with the audience which is chemical. because he walks on stage and they stop looking at anything other than him. thomas jefferson and lafayette needed to be that commanding and powerful to be on hamilton's level. daveed has proven day in and day out that he has those qualities. charlie: i said to him earlier, if you come back for a third term, you can't wait for his entrance. which is exactly the qualities you talk about. these are success stories. did you ever get it wrong? did you say, let's go here and it turned out either you thought about it, you got closer to it, i mean casting. tommy: the casting extends to everyone on stage.

the fullness of this ensemble and the fact the storytelling is embraced and supported by everyone on stage, that is something that made our rigger rigor extend all the way down the line. everyone down the stage needed to be able to view and dimensional eyes -- di mensionalize every moment. there is nowhere to hide up here. charlie: what is interesting is it is not just, here is the "music man." tommy: it is like a real gimmick like he has. [laughter] charlie: here is the music man. but you know exactly if that music is missing something.

or needs to be underlined or needs to be expanded. tommy: i have an instinct to it and i'm smart enough to surround myself with people that if i can't discern that, i can turn to our music director alex, or andy, and identify collectively what that is. and it is something we talk about all the time. this is a shift for me. when you are young director, you feel like you have to have all of the answers and you get to a certain place in your career and you realize identifying the best ideas is more important than having the best idea. when you are working with people at this level -- charlie: it is called judgment. tommy: that was the new level for me. charlie: you are confident in your judgment? tommy: yes. i think getting older is about silencing the noise and listening to your instinct. that little man inside of you in "double indemnity" that is saying, hey, him or her, or yes, you need something else. you know how to listen to that more effectively. lin said something early on that

i think is is also true. you get a lot of ideas flying around. when you wake up the next morning with a stomach ache, one or two of them, that is probably the thing you should work on. ♪

♪ us, the opportunity to get back in after off-broadway was not cutting time. it was making sure we were staying along the branch that we wanted to stay along and not

breaking off and taking away the energy from the audience so the end of the show was not being able to be fully absorbed. lin is judicious and as ruthless with his work as anyone i have worked with. no more conversation about it. his ego works in different ways. [laughter] charlie: how does his ego work? tommy: the number one question that i get, after what does the director do, is how is lin handling this? if i was to do my family feud, that would be the one that comes up. what lin thinks about himself and his perception of himself, it is not informed by that. it is about trying to make something he can be proud of. in -- and i think that standard

is the thing that can drive him. do i think he likes reading about himself? yes. [laughter] but lin will read the article and find the one thing that says he is not quite, or almost, and that is what he takes. or just laugh at it. i might be on the cover of magazines. it does not mean i am a supermodel. [laughter] charlie: he has talked about the 11 things here. it is such a collaboration. how do you take a set -- is this considered in the annals of musical theater a simple set or a complex set? tommy: it is a simple set that is, of course, a goldberg machine. charlie: interesting. the question i have is is the set designed to fit this music? tommy: yes, because the set designer and i have worked on a few things. we knew the actors would be

populating a world that would be brick and rope and wood, and he encouraged us to be conscious of the fact that the people that were building houses back then were also building ships. i do not want it to look like and i did not want it to look like a boat. i had this reaction to it. that unlocked and i thought, that is what they had. oscar is right. lean into that. we wanted to create a palette. nothing would be an obstruction. we could have a song like the end of act one that is seven or eight years, like a song like "satisfied" which goes over one night and five minutes. because of the telescopic nature of lin's writing, we wanted to make sure this environment is something that embraces the ability to move quickly and the publicness of the

time. the way we try to make the second level is the operating theaters of the day. looking at parliament. these fights were happening in front of people and privately, but if we wanted our storytellers to be witness to history as we are talking about fundamentally to tell stories and how we absorb that, then we needed to be able to be in the shadows and watch. we needed to embrace the fact that the people who work in this country were doing so for all to see. and that is why we wanted the levels. charlie: and the turntable? tommy: the turntable was a late addition that our set designer mentioned in our first meeting and we said we can do without it. we did a workshop without it in the show played and then we started thinking more. our choreographer andy had not

worked with a turntable in a play. it is like learning how to ride a bike on the moon. if you don't know how to use this thing, there is a mathematics to it that you have to understand. he understood it and taught himself how to get on top of this thing. david said, think about what we can do with it if it is a double turntable and we can have different directions. someone has a better idea. learn how to say yes. we never looked back. charlie: and then when you did the cast album? this was an elaborate doing. lin: i grew up not seeing broadway shows, but loving cast albums. when you have are cast album, you have the aural experience of our show. we try to represent that and you imagine your own version of "hamilton." it is tough to get a ticket to our show right now. it is the way it lives in the world for most of the world. so it really is our ambassador, our representation of what we have created on stage to the

world at large. charlie: can you do things here that you could not do at a public theater? tommy: you can share the show with more people. i think the performances grew and became deeper. the experience of just doing the thing, of doing 100, 150 performances teaches something that makes it better than what i am doing pushing and pulling and poking. that is why a show is better to -- two months after you open an -- then then when we are noting the show every day. frankly, part of the job is knowing when to take my hands off.

but something is saturated, when something is full and just needs to embrace whatever is there and get the nutrients out of that, you have to learn how to just watch the show and know that when you go backstage and see somebody, you are going to talk about the game, what their dog did that day, and say, see you tomorrow. that is invaluable. i had two thoughts about that. trust the people you have trusted all along. that is not hard to do with this group. charlie: what has the audience taught you? lin: the audience has taught us a lot. one, man, are they paying attention. and i have learned -- we have nights when they are raucous. we have nights when they are silent. and i love both. they both mean we are in and we are along for the ride and we are trying to catch every word you are throwing at us and every idea you are throwing at us. and they also -- there are moments. tommy said it really well when he was telling us to be quiet backstage. he said, some of the loudest

he said, some of the loudest moments on broadway and some of the quietest moments on broadway, and all in one show. in i can feel that in the audience. i can feel them rise and fall with us as hamilton rises and falls. they are with us. we learn an enormous amount from them. there are moments where the audience explodes. we added bars to give them room to explode. charlie: is that because it is a hot topic? lin: i think it is because it is such a simple idea that we always forget. charlie: yeah. lin: of course they created the financial system and one of the greatest countries in the world were both immigrants. most of the people in the audience, if they are not immigrants, there parents were, their grandparents were. it is an american idea that we forget every 20 years or so.

they remember and go, ha! they are delighted to remember. charlie: thank you. remarkable partnership. ♪

♪ charlie: jonathan groff is here. he plays king george iii in "hamilton." ben brantley calls his performance "delicious."

he previously starred in the hbo series "looking." i am pleased to have jonathan groff to the table for the first time. jonathan: i love this table. charlie: the table loves having you here. we turn to "hamilton." why? it has such a hold on all of us. everyone i know who lives in new york is wanting to go and waiting to go. part of the genius of lin-manuel miranda is all there. what is it for you? what makes it so magical? jonathan: it is unlike anything i have ever been a part of or ever seen before. i got to see the show before i joined the cast off broadway.

and i said yes to doing the show before i had seen or heard anything. the actor who was playing king george off-broadway had to leave. the week after they opened to the public, i stepped in. i'm friends with lin. he is the most energetic, positive, intoxicating human being. we had met years before when i was doing "spring awakening." he asked me to step in for this actor who was playing king george off-broadway and i said yes without having seen or heard anything because of lin. because lin is a person you say yes to. and i had seen "the heights" and i loved it. i sat in the audience in the public theater and you could feel the energy in the theater before the show began. and the show began and i just wept from start to finish. i was so moved, as everyone is, by the ingenuity of the writing

and the freshness in the direction. tommy's direction. the choreography and the cast and the whole idea was so incredible, let alone the story itself. it is just such an emotional, moving, inspiring piece. so then i got to go into it off-broadway and then i got to join the cast for the move to has been one of the most extraordinary things. charlie: you never saw brian? jonathan: i totally saw him do it. yes. i flew into new york on a friday. i saw the show over the weekend, five times in a row, and i went in on tuesday. charlie: five times in a row? jonathan: yes, five times in a row. at the end, i said to lin i feel like i need therapy. because if i see the show again and weep for three hours, i will have a mental breakdown. charlie: but you seemed to have

shaped it in your own way. was it written that way or did you shape it that way? jonathan: i have this theory. and wespring awakening," had a lot of actors come through and replace. i have that sometimes people would come into a show and try to make it their own right away, i find it really annoying. my take on it is you go in, you respect what has been there before, and you try not to mess anybody up. you are there to come in, stand in and do things. i came in, did the job that was there, did what brian did, and then as time wore on and i became more familiar with the part and more familiar with the company and more familiar with the audience and be -- the piece and show, i started to shape it and make it my own and i got excited to do an accent, i decided to do a british accent, which started as an rp thing and

morph into a character accent. the off-broadway run for me was two months of a rehearsal in front of an audience. it was amazing and exploratory and i learned a lot from it. charlie: how many appearances did you make? no, how many appearances did you 2.5 hours of the production? jonathan: i do like -- i have three numbers. it is nine minutes of stage time. when we were off-broadway, i watched the show every day. because the way the public theater is set up, is a column where you can enter from the audience and i could stand there and so perfectly watch the stage. every night when we are off broadway, i would leave it. i would leave the stage and go stand and watch. the show was still evolving and finding its power and the performers were still discovering some big things.

the room where it happens, leslie's big number, it is almost like i watched through the course of the two months, and that it ran for two months, i watched that number become a production number because it is suddenly, the performances get bigger, that by the end of the public theater run, the show wanted to explode out of the theater. between the audience's anticipation growing and the actors on stage filling the space, it was like -- i could not not watch it. i couldn't not leave the stage and watch because it had this explosive energy to the public. charlie: what happens when you come out, it is almost like king george says to america or to the colonies or to the revolution, we have a love affair. you have got to come back. you really will come back. if you don't come back, i will have to kill you and your family. that is what he says. but the way you say it, it is a

showstopper. that is what it is. you know that. jonathan: it is such a brilliant piece of writing. because i feel like, in the show, it is the first song that really isn't rapped and it is the first character from history that we see walkout that is completely recognizable. granted, i'm 30 years old so it is a little different than we are used to seeing in history books, but the costume, and the wig. the moment king george walks out, everyone knows who this person is. everybody knows his perspective. they are projecting already the minute he walks out his feelings. it is a brilliant moment in the show writing-wise that everything -- and tommy, who is the amazing director, and andy who choreographed it, the show was so full of movement. there is a revolving stage, and the show itself stops and king george walks out.

and the audience immediately knows who it is and tommy, our director, said to me this is a moment about stillness. that was his big thing of direction to me. it is a moment of stillness. it is the one moment the audience gets of stillness. and so whatever that means to you, embrace it how you made. -- may. being as still as possible is the most powerful thing. charlie: what are your first words? jonathan: you say the price of my love is a price you are not willing to pay. [laughter] you cry when you hurl your tea in the sea when you see me go by. why so sad? [laughter] it is so brilliantly written. it is delicious writing. i love saying it every night. and i really -- before i joined the show, i knew it was nine minutes of showtime, and i thought, that will be fun. it is lin. i am there for him and i heard great things about the show, but i have not gotten sick.

i have done it over 100 times and it is nine minutes, but it is so -- it is so naughty. [laughter] and wonderful and the audience is always so receptive to it because of the reasons we described that it is like a drug coming out there every night. it is so amazing to be breathing in the air of the hamilton experience. alone is incredibly special and something i will never forget. charlie: has broadway seen anything like this in a while? jonathan: no. this is one -- what was really interesting, when we were in previews, the album had not come out and the "60 minutes" piece had not come out and they had not released clips from the show. for about two and a half months

, we were sold out, no one knew anything about the show, and the lights would go down and people would start screaming. like they knew what was going to happen. it was like "rent" in its 10th year when people have the words memorized and the lights go down and people are excited. this is the lights going down with people excited about an original piece of theater with no celebrities and it. charlie: hispanics and blacks. jonathan: yeah. charlie: playing the founding fathers. playsan: chris jackson george washington. daveed diggs is thomas jefferson. charlie: and lafayette. jonathan: it is brilliant. people are embracing it. and when president obama came to see -- charlie: the first or second time? jonathan: the first time he saw the sixth preview. it was a saturday matinee.

he came backstage at intermission to meet everyone. he could not come back after because they closed down 46th street. everyone was locked in their theater until the president left. so he could not come back after. so he came back at intermission and said, and it was really meaningful what he said. he said people make great things and often times it never gets recognized or it takes a long time for it to get recognized. and you guys should really take in and enjoy the fact that you have created something great and from the beginning, it has been embraced in the way that it shou be. charlie: george lucas saw it and said it is shakespeare. beyonce saw it in goes backstage and says, i'm going to take that walk. i'm going to put that walk in my act. [laughter] your walk. jonathan: i loved it.

charlie: you doing beyonce is making me blush. jonathan: i am obsessed with beyonce, as so many of us are. charlie: around the globe. jonathan: the world is obsessed with beyonce. she came to the show with jay-z. we were all freaking out. there were only two times. it is a big cast and a loud, rowdy, energetic group and famous people and politicians come on stage and it feels like a party. everyone is talking. there were two times when the entire company has been on stage surrounding someone and you could hear a pin drop. and it was president obama and beyonce and jay-z. were the two times where everyone was like -- just waiting to hear what they're going to say and listening to hear what they say to everyone. jay-z and beyonce were so generous and kind to everyone. charlie: the guy who created the characters in terms of the lines

and songs and lyrics looks out to the audience and he sees today's leaders. there is the vice president. there is the president. there is dick cheney. he is singing these songs about the conflict at the time of the founding of the republic. there is george washington with thomas jefferson and thomas jefferson engaged with a war of words with alexander hamilton. if you told someone this was going to happen, they would say show me. so how will it change you? i mean, personally and professionally? jonathan: the great thing about theater, i think, is you do it eight times a week, so it is almost a religious experience when you are doing theater because you are repeating the same words every night. and you are listening to the same words every night. and it can't help but have an indelible print on your soul

after you are done with a theater piece. as an actor, i've tried to pick my theater pieces carefully because of that very thing. you end up getting infected by whatever sort of message the show is. because you sing it every night. it is like a prayer, almost, every night. in front of an audience, you are sharing this thing every night and it becomes a part of you. being surrounded by lin's energy alone. lin and i share a dressing room , and we call it the year we shared his studio apartment in midtown. [laughter] that alone. he is such an inspirational human being. that being surrounded by him is like -- you want to take in that air. charlie: he said to me, i will

know it's great when kids are learning it in high school. that will be the real test. jonathan: won't that be great? imagining high school kids performing "hamilton," and i know that is a big dream for him, and i know it is a dream he is trying to expedite so it does not take as long to get to schools has shows normally do. they have to wait for the whole broadway run usually. i know he is trying to expedite that. charlie: the show has had a real sensitivity to young people coming in. the whole production has. jonathan: totally. we had schools coming in, student matinees. charlie: i will never forget opening night when lin came out. it was unbelievable. he just stood there. jonathan: this is the thing about lin. lin is a genius. literally a certified genius. and yet he is so celebratory of everybody. at that opening night, he came

on stage, you were there, and it felt like a high school pep rally. it did not feel like fancy, highbrow, new york, i am a genius and welcome to my amazing piece. there was nothing sophisticated about it. i mean, there is everything sophisticated about the writing. it speaks for itself. but when he came out on stage, he called everyone out like a high school pep rally and everyone was like -- [drums on table] charlie: pick this up. this is something actors do not like to do. i will fight the fight and win the war for your love, for your praise. jonathan: for your praise. charlie: i will love you till your dying day. jonathan: when you are gone, i will go mad, so don't throw away this thing we had, because when push comes to shove, i will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love. [laughter]

charlie: i wanted that for the close. [laughter] thank you so much. jonathan: thank you. so great to be here. charlie: go see "hamilton" if you can. ♪

mark: i am mark crumpton, you are watching "bloomberg west." an american servicemen killed in iraq is identified as a navy seal. a u.s. official says he was killed during an attack by the islamic state on iraqi-kurdish forces in mosul. a resolution, demanding medical personnel and hospitals be protected against violence and attacks. >> when strikes end up hitting surgical wards, something is deeply wrong. explanations are hollow to parents burying their children,