Jason Arrow, the newest star of Hamilton, is not throwing away his shot

It was only last week, six months after Jason Arrow was cast as the lead in the Australian production of the blockbuster Broadway musical Hamilton, that he experienced the moment when it finally felt real. He’d met the rest of the cast, sung the songs, been at the centre of rehearsals and Zoom meetings with the original creative team in America, even moved with his girlfriend from Melbourne to Sydney mid-pandemic. Yet after such a chaotic year, which laid waste to the arts and saw countless shows cancelled, the Perth performer had not allowed himself to believe that this role — this life-changing, career-defining role — was actually his. Then last Wednesday, during final fittings for Alexander Hamilton’s costumes, he put on the white parchment outfit the character wears at the top of the high-octane, hip-hop-inspired retelling of the story of America’s founding fathers, winner of 11 Tony Awards, a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who played the role in Manhattan. “I put it on and that was the moment the penny really dropped,” Arrow remembers. “I was like, ‘OK, there it is. This is very real for me now’.” In just under three weeks, he will take to the stage at the Sydney Lyric Theatre, plucked from relative obscurity for one of Australian theatre’s most coveted roles. Opposite him will be a familiar face: Lyndon Watts, who plays Aaron Burr, was a couple of years ahead of Arrow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (other WA talent includes Shaka Cooke, Brent Hill and Tainga Savage). Arrow, who has performed in Beautiful: The Carol King Musical and Disney’s Aladdin, says there is a gravity in rehearsals; a recognition of the fact that COVID means this is the only performance of Hamilton anywhere in the world. “For this show in particular there is a special vibe in the room,” he says. “Everyone seems so connected to what we are doing and so keen to honour what we are doing ... We are all very aware that the industry is still coming back in Australia and in other countries, it doesn’t exist ... That definitely gives it a weight and gives an energy to the room of how lucky we are to be there. That definitely shows through in the work on the floor — there is a lot of love.” At the first rehearsal, original producer Jeffrey Seller and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler spoke via video link of how emotional they were to be working on it again after the long shutdown in the US. They, along with Miranda, were involved in the casting process remotely and Blankenbuehler told The Guardian Arrow “has something really special”. “When any Hamilton gets the part, we can’t have question marks,” Blankenbuehler says. “The person who gets Hamilton for us is the person who blows us away ... His type, his ethnicity, his look, his spirit — you know, we’re all about the fact that Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant, he was an outsider. He had to fight harder because he was an outsider. “And nine times out of 10, our Hamiltons share that. They’re a bit of an outsider and they’re often playing a lead role for the first time in their careers because they took a long journey that has ended here. He fits right into the mould of our best Hamiltons that way.” Arrow’s long journey began in South Africa, where he was born and lived with his parents, Anthea and Earle, and elder sister Stacey until the family moved to Perth when he was about five. Arrow says he was simultaneously an “overactive” kid, putting on an annual Christmas performance for his family, and an “insular and self-reflecting” character who loved video games and relished his own company. He grew up listening to the music his parents always played around the house — Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Earth Wind & Fire. “They were all those great high singers and I used to sing along, which I think is where my ear trained itself,” Arrow says. “I didn’t ever go out to try and sing but I guess I knew from that that I could do it, so when it came to singing with nothing in but the music and my voice, it didn’t seem that far removed from what I had already been doing.” A breakthrough came when his mum encouraged him to enrol in drama at Kolbe Catholic College in Rockingham when he was in Year 8; he got the minor role of Mr Bernstein in the school’s production Little Shop of Horrors. His proud parents went along to watch and were floored. “We were shocked at how beautifully he sang. He was our wild child, always playing video games and hardly speaking some of the time,” Anthea tells STM, laughing. “We were dumbstruck and a bit embarrassed that we didn’t know our child could sing like that — he was always noisy and he used to do opera-style singing in the shower but in a comedic way. But he sang that night and people stood and applauded. From there, he never looked back.” They hired him a vocal coach and Anthea used to drive him to rehearsals and shows just about every night. “It was always after work and I was always so tired,” she remembers, but Arrow was passionate. Arrow says he signed up for every school play he could and when he graduated “basically migrated” to Mandurah to take advantage of its vibrant local theatre scene. “I just thought, ‘I need to find a way to keep doing this, it is too much fun’,” he says. “It was my hobby, other than gaming. I used to play a lot of sport growing up but I would never stick to one for long so I decided that this was my sport. Dancing and singing was my cardio.” He joined Stray Cats Theatre Company under local stalwart Karen Francis, who he credits with moulding him into the performer he is today. “She is basically the reason I am doing what I am doing,” he says. “She cultivated my passion and fanned the flame ... Without her and my high school drama teachers, Ms Blackborrow and Ms Phillips, I don’t know if I would have thought about doing theatre. I mean, it is such a niche thing to get into; it’s not like saying, ‘I’m going to be an accountant’. Especially in Australia, such a sports heavy nation, it is not something you always consider as a hobby, let alone a career. But the three of them, especially Karen, pushed and pushed and when I wanted to give up, they pushed some more.” Francis recalls vividly then-teenager Arrow’s audition for We Will Rock You, just before he went on a family holiday to Africa: “I remember giving him strict instructions to contact me the moment he came back, as within seconds of singing, it was obvious he had raw talent.” “This was the start of many hours working together on shows,” she says. “Jason displayed enormous passion and drive for perfection both on and off the stage ... only surpassed by his humble and giving nature, as he always looked to help others and never backed away from a challenge.” Arrow immersed himself in amateur theatre, sometimes doing three plays a year (he remains a staunch advocate for a sector that is often maligned). He enrolled in musical theatre at WAAPA, where he established a reputation as a well-rounded talent with incredible musicality, able to play any instrument he picked up. Crispin Taylor, senior lecturer, says he was also a generous classmate, often volunteering to help arrange music for other’s work. “When people are casting for a show like Hamilton, they look for a principal actor who is not just a tremendous talent, but someone who will lead that company of actors in the right way and that is absolutely who Jason is,” Taylor says. “We have a credo at WAAPA that we don’t do divas. It is not a star school, although stars come out of our courses, and it is because of their ability to work with others and collaborate and have that sense of ensemble ... The people with the most integrity get the gigs; that is why people like Hugh Jackman or Lucy Durack are so successful, because they garner immense respect.” Arrow moved east after graduation, which paid immediate dividends: he had auditioned remotely for Beautiful while still in Perth but didn’t get a call-back. Once he lobbed in Sydney, the show’s producers emailed asking for another audition, which led to a part. He then worked on Aladdin, touring the country. After a couple of face-to-face auditions for Hamilton in late 2019, Arrow planned to join the final workshop stage in about March of last year before COVID took hold. Instead, there was a lot of waiting and hoping, a request for more material to be taped and sent in, even an interview with visiting American directors Patrick Vassel and Kurt Crowley. “Then after that, I didn’t hear anything for quite a while and with the year being what it was, I just kinda wrote it off,” Arrow says. “There was no point in my mind in hanging onto something that for all intents and purposes might not happen at all. It wouldn’t have been good for my mental health, so I just let it go.” It was in that frame of mind that Arrow answered the phone in his Melbourne apartment one day in August last year. He was home alone — under lockdown, only one person was allowed out to do the grocery shopping and it was his girlfriend’s turn — and when his agent suggested he sit down, he assumed the bad news was that Hamilton was not going ahead, just as he had thought. Instead, his agent said he had been offered the lead role. “Because I wasn’t expecting to hear that the show was going ahead, let alone that, it went into that strange thing where everything sounded muffled and I didn’t really hear the rest of what he said,” Arrow remembers, laughing. “I said, ‘Hang on a second, what?’ He repeated himself and I didn’t say anything for quite a while; he was saying ‘Hello? Are you still there? Jason? Are you OK?’ Then I went into a string of expletives that I won’t repeat. “But it was such a shock in a year that was already so random and different and rogue. This just seemed like another rogue thing, like a dream. I couldn’t process it so I went and unpacked the dishwasher to get back to reality.” Apart from girlfriend Alexandra Cornish, a fellow WAAPA graduate, Arrow couldn’t tell anyone but the secret was made easier to keep by the fact they were in lockdown and not exposed to anyone who might ask a pointed question. The move to Sydney amid borders closing and opening and closing again became front of mind for he and Cornish, who ended up moving in October. For Arrow, the opportunity in front of him can’t be overstated. He used to rap in bands around Perth and came across Hamilton on the recommendation of friends when he was studying. “It was exactly the kind of music I had been brought up on — my sister introduced me to 90s R&B and hip-hop and rap and those influences because she used to listen to it around the house,” he says. “So when I heard the show, I thought it was amazing. I had never heard a show do this, actually really reference those musicians, those artists that we haven’t really seen on a musical theatre stage ever.” There was also the chance to be part of a diverse cast, something Miranda insists on for Hamilton. The actors are overwhelmingly people of colour, including people from First Nations, Maori, African and Pacific Islander backgrounds. For Arrow, it wasn’t until he saw everyone in the same room that he realised how far it was from anything he had worked on before. “It is definitely not lost on us how special it is and we do have conversations about it from time to time ... You can’t help but love to see it and it’s not something we see often,” he says. “I don’t think I fully realised until I saw the cast together for the first time. That was a moment for me where I went, ‘Wow, I knew this was an issue but I have actually never seen this before’. That felt really strange to me. And there was so much interest in the fact the cast was diverse. It almost seemed odd that in 2020, 2021, that this is groundbreaking. It shouldn’t be groundbreaking, it should just be the norm.” There is trepidation about stepping into a role beloved by so many and made famous by the man who created Hamilton. “It is not lost on me how incredibly large the shoes are that I am trying to fill but I guess the best way to do that is to try not to think about it,” Arrow says. “There have been so many iterations of Alexander Hamilton that at this point, it belongs to anyone and everyone who touches it. I know we obviously have it on Disney Plus now but as they keep saying to us in rehearsals, that is just one version of the show ... As time goes on, I feel less and less intimidated by that thought because it has become apparent to me that there are so many versions of Hamilton and this will be ours.” Besides, there is no time to ponder those kind of questions when there is mindbendingly complex material to master: there are about 20,520 words in Hamilton, spat out at a hectic 144 words a minute (one statistics website calculated that if performed at the pace of other Broadway shows, it would be between four and six hours long). Arrow says it took the cast four weeks to master Act One; they moved onto Act Two last week. “That’s how long it takes to put this monster together,” he laughs. “It’s a juggernaut”. It’s exhausting and exhilarating — Arrow says he and Watts joked recently that their brains are so full that they’re falling apart — but in the words of Alexander Hamilton, he is not throwing away his shot. Just you wait. Styling Karinda Mutabazi & Melissa Byrne Hair and makeup Carla Mico