Stars flock to hot-ticket 'Hamilton'

NEW YORK — Not long after the acclaimed hip-hop-infused musical Hamilton began performances at the Public Theater last winter, cast member Leslie Odom Jr. peered into the front row and spotted Busta Rhymes.

"Busta Rhymes is not a small man," notes Odom, who plays Aaron Burr, our nation's third vice president and the man who murdered Alexander Hamilton, the show's protagonist. "You don't miss Busta Rhymes."

What Odom did not know at that point was that in the same audience were author Salman Rushdie and stage and screen veteran Mandy Patinkin. Backstage after the performance, Patinkin approached the show's creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda "in tears," recalls Christopher Jackson, who plays George Washington. "And there's Busta, holding court. It was crazy that night."

Hamilton's move uptown to Broadway already has brought more of the celebrity guests that the show became accustomed to during its off-Broadway run. "The range of them, that's the beauty of it," says Renée Elise Goldsberry, cast as Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton's sister-in-law. The audiences in general have been just as eclectic, she adds. "That's been one of the most exciting things for us."

Goldsberry, Jackson and Odom are gathered behind the mezzanine section of Hamilton's new home, the Richard Rodgers Theatre, during a recent rehearsal break. They're joined by Daveed Diggs, who plays both Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, the elite French officer who fought with the founding fathers during the American Revolution.

Diversity would seem a pertinent issue for these four artists, who all happen to be African-American. Diggs, a veteran rapper who has performed with Miranda and Jackson in the hip-hop improv troupe Freestyle Love Supreme, is making his Broadway debut. The others are established theater actors. Jackson, who appeared in Miranda's In the Heights, and Goldsberry have Broadway résumés stretching back to the '90s.

"I don't think about us being people of color and in these roles as a statement, or a stretch," says Goldsberry. "People may see it that way, but what surprises me more is when a cast does not look like the world outside."

Still, she says, "I realize that this moves people. Daveed and I met this awesome young Indian man recently who's a rapper and an opera singer. He was so excited knowing something like our show exists. He rapped and sang for us, and I literally burst into tears."

Diggs says, "As part of a cultural movement, this show makes a lot of sense right now — given who our president is, given all the attention being paid to race and class, good and bad. My mom used to have to color the people in my children's books with a brown crayon. She's a white woman, but she didn't want me to see a world where I didn't fit in. She's seen the show five times now — she'll be back opening night (Aug. 6).

Performing in the musical also has Goldsberry pondering the future. "It's not lost on me that we may be soon electing a female president," says the actress, noting the fiercely intelligent and independent Angelica "might have been Hillary Clinton, had she lived in another time. I think that Lin has made the women (characters) as empowered as possible."

In the end, Jackson believes, "our show is less about what happened or is happening than it is about possibility. When my 6-year-old daughter goes to school, she sees a picture of a black man who's the president. I didn't have that. People come to this show knowing as much or as little as they do about American history, but what they learn is what is possible."