In February 2014, Patrick Vassel got a brief voicemail from director Thomas Kail: “Call me. I'm about to change your life.” The two had worked together on Magic/Bird on Broadway where Vassel was Kail’s assistant director. When Vassel called him back, Kail told him he was workshopping a new musical that was supposed to premiere at the Public Theater in 2015. Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing it, and it was about the life of Alexander Hamilton. And Kail needed a, well, right-hand man.
By that point, Vassel had left the industry—he was teaching seventh graders. But the workshop was during spring break, and Vassel didn't have any vacation plans. So Vassel got onboard “that Alexander Hamilton hip-hop thing." He hasn’t left it since. Over a decade later, Vassel is still a constant presence in Hamilton on Broadway and on tours.
After a show opens on Broadway and has its first productions internationally and on tour, it is typical for the director and lead creatives to step away to pursue other projects. So the job of making sure the original creative vision and intention stay intact, and to bring every new actor up to speed, falls on a team of associates and stage managers. As associate director of Hamilton, Vassel oversees the acting companies of not just the Broadway productions, but also the national tour and the U.K. productions—he even traveled to Germany and Australia for those productions.
“It’s a lot of travel,” Vassel answered one July morning from his apartment in New York, where he was checking in on the Broadway production. “I will be in Grand Rapids, [Michigan], with the tour next week. And then the week after that, I head to Plymouth in the U.K., which is a new tour stop. And then I'll stop in London for a couple of days. I'll be more around in the month of August as Leslie Odom Jr. returns to the show. And then I'll head to Montreal later in August to check on the tour.” Even when there isn’t a new company member, Vassel will check in on every currently running Hamilton production in North America and the U.K. every four to six weeks. He also works closely with each production’s resident director, such as national tour director Ashley Brooke Monroe.
“The comfort that I have with the information in the show and the history that I have with it allows me to, hopefully, just come in and continue to support the work that [the actors] are doing and encourage them to keep going,” Vassel explains. Though he does admit traveling so much is tiring and he’s lost count of how many times he’s seen Hamilton at this point (“probably in the thousands”); at the same time, “it’s really remarkable to kind of see the different versions and all the really inspiring and amazing performers in very different places.”
As an assistant to Kail during the workshop and world premiere of Hamilton Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, Vassel helped keep a checklist of questions that still needed answers, details that still needed to be worked out. At the top of every rehearsal at the Public, Kail, Miranda, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, and music director Alex Lacamoire would meet. “When we were Off-Broadway at the Public, the band was on a platform off stage left. And so we affectionately refer to it as the downtown loft. And that was the space that they would meet and kind of go through that list, and then come back and say, ‘Okay, there were however many questions, we've got this many answers, so we're going to try those things today.’ And then you do it again tomorrow.”
Vassel helped Kail communicate and implement any changes and notes to the actors and design team. Though Vassel says that after he came onboard, "the overall shape of the show and running order of the show really never changed significantly." Instead, the changes were more minute and surgical, such as changing “One Last Ride” to “One Last Time," and nixing the idea of having a multitude of moving stairs and platforms to having just one moving staircase.
Giving notes on performances is now something that Vassel does regularly at Hamilton. Though Vassel is clear with each new performer who comes in that he doesn’t expect them to do an impression of the original cast. Instead, when casting, the team is usually looking for performers who have the “essential qualities” of the character but are also “different from what we had maybe seen before,” says Vassel. “It's never been a show where we've said, ‘You have to stand on this number and look this way and get this laugh.' The show is so living and breathing and organic and unique to the people that are telling the story, that the real work is being able to be in there with them and figure out: Okay, what's your version as an individual, and what's this group's version? More so than recreating anything that's existed before.”
He's been most proud of the performers who started off in one role in the show before moving onto another role, such as Wallace Smith, who played Hercules Mulligan/James Madison on tour before moving to Broadway, or Michael Luwoye, who once played Alexander Hamilton in a matinee of Hamilton before playing Burr in the evening performance. “The gift of the long-running show is you get to kind of check in on wherever somebody is,” he says.
It’s not just the actors. Vassel has also noticed over the years an evolution in the audience response to the show, from the celebratory Obama years to the more “America, question mark,” mood that has pervaded more recent performances. “The place that we're getting a big cheer for [now] is immigrants,” he says, in reference to the line: “Immigrants, we get the job done.”
But what he has noticed, especially having seen the show abroad, is how universal and timeless the themes of Hamilton have become: “It's much more a human story than it is a political story. There happens to be these historic figures and dates and things like that. But hopefully it's offering people the opportunity to see a group of people that imagined a life that is different than the one that they were in, and fought and worked and lived to create that new reality.”
In short, it’s been a busy decade for Hamilton and for Vassel. The director admits that his busy travel schedule in Hamilton means he doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to work on side creative projects—he’s been working with Hamilton music assistant Khiyon Hursey and original cast member Jon Rua on a show for the past few years. But at the moment, Vassel is grateful for that voicemail from Kail a decade ago.
“How long am I going to stay with this?” he asks rhetorically. “There have been these very unique changes and opportunities for me, whether it's a new company or a new place. But also, it doesn't feel the same way to do the show now than it did 10 years ago, in a really interesting and exciting and challenging way. That has been unique to my experience of the show—is continuing to be aware of what that means, and knowing that a month from now, it might feel quite different, depending on who's up there and who's playing what role. Every day with the show is a chance to kind of look and ask: 'Who's telling the story tonight, and what's possible? What might we be able to do tonight?'” He then adds, proudly, “That's a pretty good job.”
Daveed Diggs in Hamilton
Leslie Odom, Jr. in Hamilton
