Unknown Jamael’s star role Hamilton
25-year-old cast in West End version of hit musical
Jamael Westman — a 25-year-old actor from Brixton, south london, fresh out of drama school — has won the coveted title role in the eagerly awaited london version of smash-hit musical Hamilton.
Westman, a Royal academy of Dramatic arts graduate (and fully trained football coach) won the role in President Obama’s favourite show after five auditions, including one in front of Hamilton’s creator lin-manuel miranda, the show’s director thomas Kail, music director alex lacamoire and producers Jeffrey seller and Cameron mackintosh.
the part of alexander Hamilton is one of the landmark theatrical roles of the 21st century — and a towering achievement for the 6ft 4in actor who graduated from RaDa only last year.
But Westman is an impressive character. He has deep feelings about what it means to be a black man in the UK. He’s confident. He told me that if he doesn’t know something, he’ll work at it until he masters it — whether it be playing a musical instrument, learning a role or sussing out how to play every position on a football team (even goalkeeper, which he hates).
Hamilton will start previews at the Victoria Palace theatre on november 21, with the opening night set for December 7.
michael Jibson — a fabulous actor whom I have watched in shows in the West end (including Our House), off West end (Brighton Rock at the almeida), and in works for the RsC and shakespeare’s Globe — will play King George. and, as I revealed back in January, Rachelle ann Go will play Hamilton’s wife, eliza.
lin-manuel miranda — who, as well as writing the book, lyrics and score, took the title role on Broadway — said he’s delighted with the British cast so far. Both he and Cameron mackintosh insisted the london Hamilton would not be a ‘carbon copy’ of the new York company.
‘Its going to be its own thing,’ miranda told me. ‘Jamael’s got that ease with rap and acting and singing. It’s in his core.’
after seeing Jamael perform at auditions, mackintosh agreed, saying: ‘the part’s second nature to him.’
HamIltOn uses rap to tell the story of alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the West Indian islands of nevis and st Croix, who went on to serve under George Washington in the revolutionary wars and was america’s first treasury secretary.
those of you who have visited the United states will be unwittingly familiar with this particular Founding Father, because his face graces the $10 bill.
During one meeting with the audition team, Jamael was asked: ‘Can you rap?’
‘Yeah, man,’ was his swift response.
In fact, he regards rapping, singing and acting as his ‘holy trinity’.
‘singing is an early passion,’ he told me, adding that it was the first art form in which he felt he could express himself.
He sang at the local Roman Catholic Church and miles Davis, marshall mathers and Bob marley were all part of the eclectic mix of music playing at home in south london, where he was raised by his Irish-born mother — a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths College — and his Jamaican-born football coach father.
Rapping, he declared, ‘is in my bones’. Which is one of the reasons he won the role.
miranda told me that he was lucky enough to catch Jamael at a ‘call back’ in london at Cameron mackintosh’s office, and he was bowled over by the countertenor ‘He was just fantastic, and versa tile, and all those things Hamilton needs to be,’ he said. ‘You know “Young, scrappy and hungry (that’s a line, in case your
wondering, from one of Hamilton’s best-known songs, My Shot.)
In fact, during my interview with Jamael, he used the very same line to describe himself.
Both Miranda and Mackintosh, in separate conversations in London and New York, observed that Jamael had the skills to make it seem as though each performance was being given for the first time.
‘Well, that’s the whole ball game, isn’t it?’ Lin-Manuel said. ‘To make it feel as though it’s happening for the first time on stage at night.’ He added that he’s seen a of people audition, both in the U.S. and UK, for the role that he created.
‘So when you know you’ve got it, you’ve got it — and I know we’ve really got it here, with Jamael.’
Miranda told me that when he was writing the concept album for Hamilton, he had hip-hop and R&B voices in mind.
‘I wasn’t thinking about what colour the people were. I was thinking: “Who’s the best rapper to embody Thomas Jefferson? Or Alexander Hamilton?”
‘I was having fun with the idea of matching rappers with these people,’ he said, adding that when the director, Thomas Kail, was developing the stage show, he decided to elevate that idea of diversity to a principle for the casting of the show.
‘When you take the people out of the stuff of legend, and destroy the statue version, it actually makes them more accessible,’ he said.
The Latin-American, Asian and Afro-Caribbean faces in his show mirror society.
THAT colour-blind idea resonates with Jamael, too. He said that the opportunity to work and play with a company ‘made up of people of colour, without the subject matter having anything to do with race’ would have a positive impact not only on him, but the whole ensemble — and the audience, too.
‘A story that traditionally would have been told by an all-white cast is being given a new lease of life, superseding the deluded expectations of prejudice.’
Jamael said he gets his confidence and strength from his mother. ‘Her people — my grandmother — are from Coose in County Galway; and I heard her stories, and the stories of my other grandparents.
‘Some came here from Ireland and Jamaica in the Fifties, and having heard their stories gave me an appreciation of their struggles. It’s what’s bought me to this place . . . to this very room where it happens,’ he said, a reference to another famous line in Hamilton.