You and Daveed Diggs, who plays Thomas Jefferson , have both said publicly that doing this show is the first time you've really felt like a part of the early American story. What does performance do for you, in that sense, that traditional education maybe can't? I think it's empathy. It is literally stepping in somebody else's shoes for a couple hours, walking around in them and seeing how it might have felt to be them. It's playing pretend. And the same thing happens for the audience, because they're watching people that look like them, or that they connect to — whether it's me, or it's Lin, or it's Daveed, or it's Renée [Elise Goldsberry], or it's Philippa [Soo], they are able to feel what that person is feeling. Empathy is just ... it's the first step in bringing two people from opposite sides of the table a little closer to each other. So, the show has made me a better friend, a better husband, a better, you know, artist. It's started a tremendous amount of growth in me.
And that was another reason why I had to stay a part of it, because I could see those seeds flowering right from the first reading that I did. How do you walk away from that? I mean, this thing is making me a better me. I know you saw an early version of the show, before you were in the show. And you saw the guy LED Street Light playing Aaron Burr. Yeah. Did you envy him?
 Um, I ... I didn't envy him. I wasn't thinking that I would play Aaron Burr, ever. I was just so carried away by this thing, which was presented with such simplicity — they were just at music stands, you know? It was presented in such a way that we were all kind of in it together in that theater, just loving this thing. This is weird to say, but the way that you talk about the show sometimes reminds me of the way I hear new parents talk about their children, in terms of that wonderment of seeing the world with new eyes. Yeah. I think that's exactly what it felt like. Or it felt like falling in love, just in that you are giving yourself to this thing a little more each time. I have to ask about the two songs that are kind of your big solo moments: "Wait For It," which is about Burr standing on the sidelines while his peers are chasing glory, and "The Room Where It Happens," where he finally dives into the fray and starts changing history. The more I listen to these two songs, the more they seem like allegories for performance. Maybe it's just something in your voice — the mixture of awe and longing and lust for the thing that makes you feel like a whole person. When people are born performers, that really is what it's like when they can't perform. That's really well said. And those two things were never lost on me in the creation of this.
The room where this thing happened, the room that this show was created in, was the most loving, creative gentle space that I've ever been a part of. Nothing was "wrong"; you could fall flat on your face and try again tomorrow. So, yes, singing "The Room Where It Happens," it was very easy for me to connect that to my actual life. And even "Wait For It" — you know, when we would do these early readings, there was no timeline for me. I was not aware of when Hamilton would happen off-Broadway.