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Monday, September 23, 2024
'Hamilton' Star Leslie Odom Jr. Joins Head of CMU Drama in Connecting With Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Audience
onstage pittsburgh: You can see Carnegie Mellon School of Drama alumni on almost any given day there is a live performance in the region, but the university was looking for a direct way to bridge its Oakland campus with Pittsburgh’s Downtown Cultural District when it approached the Tony Award-winning star of Hamilton.
I was so happy to be able to go to “BEHIND THE SCENES: A Conversation with Leslie Odom, Jr.” on Tuesday night. In addition to the conversation itself, it was also interesting to see what the audience of mostly theatre people reacted to. Personally, the part of the discussion that has stuck the most with me was when he talked about stories in the broad sense. He said that if you don’t tell this story, it won’t get told, and that statement really resonated with me. There are times when I’m telling stories that it feels like a balloon has inflated inside me and the only way for it to deflate is to get the story out into the world, or at least the part of the story you’re working on. The comment in this article about the theatre being a place to gather as a community resonated greatly with me as well, and the community formed in the O’Reilly on Tuesday night was truly something special.
Having been a fan of Hamilton since 2017, it felt like a fever dream to meet Leslie Odom Jr. just a short bus ride away from where I was. Before meeting him at the O’Reilly Theatre I had never met a celebrity, or anyone vaguely well known. Even though I am not planning on a career in acting or musical theatre, there were many lessons to take away from his conversation with Robert Ramirez. He brought up a lot of interesting points, and I really enjoyed hearing about his thought process going into Hamilton. One of the things he said that stuck with me was when he couldn’t figure out how to get out of a TV show contract he had already signed in order to be in Hamilton. He said he ‘just asked’, and that sometimes you just have to ask, instead of overthinking it. It’s such a simple thing, but I have struggled with this in the past and will definitely be taking it to heart in the future.
2 comments:
I was so happy to be able to go to “BEHIND THE SCENES: A Conversation with Leslie Odom, Jr.” on Tuesday night. In addition to the conversation itself, it was also interesting to see what the audience of mostly theatre people reacted to. Personally, the part of the discussion that has stuck the most with me was when he talked about stories in the broad sense. He said that if you don’t tell this story, it won’t get told, and that statement really resonated with me. There are times when I’m telling stories that it feels like a balloon has inflated inside me and the only way for it to deflate is to get the story out into the world, or at least the part of the story you’re working on. The comment in this article about the theatre being a place to gather as a community resonated greatly with me as well, and the community formed in the O’Reilly on Tuesday night was truly something special.
Having been a fan of Hamilton since 2017, it felt like a fever dream to meet Leslie Odom Jr. just a short bus ride away from where I was. Before meeting him at the O’Reilly Theatre I had never met a celebrity, or anyone vaguely well known. Even though I am not planning on a career in acting or musical theatre, there were many lessons to take away from his conversation with Robert Ramirez. He brought up a lot of interesting points, and I really enjoyed hearing about his thought process going into Hamilton. One of the things he said that stuck with me was when he couldn’t figure out how to get out of a TV show contract he had already signed in order to be in Hamilton. He said he ‘just asked’, and that sometimes you just have to ask, instead of overthinking it. It’s such a simple thing, but I have struggled with this in the past and will definitely be taking it to heart in the future.
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