WRIT LARGE
Big cases, big clients
Loren H. Plotkin
LEVINE PLOTKIN
& MENIN
ENTERTAINMENT
& SPORTS,
INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY
Nancy Rose
SCHRECK ROSE
DAPELLO & ADAMS
ENTERTAINMENT
& SPORTS
A hip-hop musical about the first secretary of the Treasury?
The guy on the $10 bill that nobody wanted on the $10 bill?
The founding father of our national bank?
“It didn’t sound like a commercial slam dunk,” admits
Nancy Rose of Schreck Rose Dapello & Adams, who reps
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton. “But Lin-
Manuel is a brilliant artist and I believed that if he was
driven by the subject matter, he would make it great.”
“Did you read the book?” asks Loren Plotkin of Levine
Plotkin & Menin, who reps the show’s producer, Jeffrey
Seller, referring to Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography,
Alexander Hamilton. “I read it, and I just didn’t see how
you could make a musical out of this biography, which is
a very dense 600 to 700 pages. But when you deal with
artists—and I’ve been dealing with artists most of my adult
life—they see things that aren’t there. Lin is an artist who
sees things other people just don’t see.”
Now everyone’s seeing it—or trying to. Hamilton,
which began at the Public Theater January 2015, and
moved to the Richard Rodgers last August, is sold out a
year in advance. It set a record for Tony nominations with
16, and won 11, including best musical, director, cho-
reography, actor, featured actor, featured actress and
score. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, only the ninth
musical to be so honored, and the cast album has won
a Grammy and gone platinum. Miranda has graced the
cover of countless magazines, including Time (as one of
its “ 100 Most Influential”) and Rolling Stone (“Hamilton
Mania!”). It even changed our currency: The popularity of
Miranda’s opus is probably the biggest reason why Alex-
ander Hamilton remains on the $10 bill. It’s all a hugely
improbable success.
Then again, improbability is what Hamilton is about. It’s
the rags-to-riches story of a founding father (“How does a
bastard orphan / son of a whore and a Scotsman …”) told
against the improbable founding of the United States
(“How does a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower /
somehow defeat a global superpower?”).
But the legal work behind the play? Not only probable
but fairly congenial.
Satisfied
Theater negotiations tend to be collaborative anyway,
says Plotkin. “You have to create a show that costs somewhere between $10 million and $15 million,” he adds. “So
you can’t have a hostile contract and expect to be able
to do the work of producing a Broadway show. … What I
explain to the young lawyers in my office: When you’re negotiating a marriage, you’re negotiating something very
The Room Where It Happened
How did a bastard orphan go on and on to become a musical phenomenon?
Loren Plotkin and Nancy Rose on the legal work behind Hamilton BY ERIK LUNDEGAARD
different than negotiating a divorce. [With the former],
you want everybody to feel good about the outcome.”
It helps that, with Hamilton, everyone knew everyone,
since many of the principals worked on Miranda’s previ-
ous musical, the Tony-winning In the Heights, in 2007 and
’08. “Tommy Kail is the director, Andy Blankenbuehler is
the choreographer,” says Plotkin. “There was no question
about them coming in. No question about interviewing
any other directors or choreographers to do it. This was
the team that was going to put this show together. It was
a relatively direct and compact kind of trajectory and
negotiation.” Plus, instead of negotiating with a separate
composer, lyricist and book writer, as is often the case,
Plotkin had to negotiate only with Miranda.
Meanwhile, Rose negotiated with Chernow’s agent for
rights to the book. Miranda had been working informally
with Chernow since 2008, when he was still talking about
a concept album; but once the project morphed into a
musical, a deal was struck. “The basic facts of Hamilton’s
life are well-known and available from many sources,” Rose
says. “But Lin-Manuel felt that Ron’s book helped him to
unlock the musicalization of this chapter in history, and his
book served as a huge inspiration.”
The other main inspiration was hip-hop. Hamilton is
peppered with homages to The Notorious B.I.G., DMX,
Grandmaster Flash, Mobb Deep and others. “For example,”
says Rose, “when Hamilton introduces himself, he spells
out his name in the same cadence that Biggie used to spell
his name in ‘Going Back to Cali’; and the song ‘Ten Duel
Commandments’ is a riff on Biggie’s ‘ Ten Crack Command-
ments.’ So we needed to vet the score to identify all third-
party interpolations, and then consult with Lin-Manuel on
which ones needed to be cleared or could be dropped.”
Non-Stop
Once the play opened, the negotiating wasn’t over. “I think
it’s more work after it opened than before,” says Plotkin.
“Before it opened, it was just a regular show. ... Now what’s
happening is we’re working on two companies in the United
States; there will be a London production sometime in
2017; and we’re working on a number of things that haven’t
become public yet.” He also negotiated a profit-sharing deal
with original cast members. “It’s an attempt to compensate
the people who helped make the show such a success,” Plot-
kin says. “It also serves to develop the familial relationship
that producers want to promote. ... It’s a win-win.”
For Rose, there were negotiations on the cast album,
mixtape album, coffee-table book and PBS special. “In
every deal,” Rose says, “our goal is to secure partial or