Javier Muñoz: adding sex and steel to Hamilton

Javier Muñoz had been waiting in the wings. As the “Sunday Hamilton”, Muñoz was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s alternate in the eponymous Broadway colossus, playing the role when Barack Obama came to see it. Since 9 July, when Miranda left the cast, Muñoz has been performing the role of Alexander Hamilton full time, seven days a week.

There’s no sugar-coating it; this was not good news to the ticket holders, ticket buyers and other hopefuls who thought they would be seeing Miranda, the show’s Tony, Grammy, Pulitzer and MacArthur Genius awards-winning creator. For Miranda’s final performance, ticket prices for prime seats reached $20,000.

Anyone would be daunted, if not downright terrified, to fill the shoes of the man credited with reinventing musical theater, especially in front of an audience who thought they had paid to see the more celebrated star. Yet Muñoz approached this as he has other challenges in his life.

“It’s a total opportunity to have a really vibrant conversation [with the audience],” Munoz says. “I’ve been asking the audience: ‘Please consider this other option of Hamilton and stay with me in the story.’ And audiences do.”

When Muñoz was the understudy in Miranda’s previous Broadway musical In the Heights, he experienced no such generosity from the audience – in fact, the actor felt overwhelmed by their disappointment that they were not seeing the composer performing his music. “I could feel their arms crossing,” says Muñoz. But he didn’t take it personally. “What it became for me was the opportunity to craft my skill as an actor, to bring the audience in and say, ‘Please trust me. I’m going to take you on this journey and it’s going to be great.’”

Muñoz is made of stern stuff. Last year, he was diagnosed with cancer; two months after surgery and radiation he was back in Hamilton and is now cancer-free. In 2002 he found out he was HIV-positive. “Feeling like it was the end of the world,” Muñoz says that for six years the diagnosis pervaded every aspect of his life and battered his sense of self-worth. Now, however, it’s a source of strength. “What it’s ultimately given me is the strongest fight that I didn’t even know I had. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.”

Muñoz knows that endings can lead to fateful beginnings, which is how he met Miranda. In 2005 Muñoz quit acting. Both his parents had been diagnosed with cancer within six months of each other and Muñoz moved home to help them. He took a job as a manager at a restaurant because he needed to earn a regular paycheck. “I loathed every minute of it,” he says.

When a college friend begged him to be in his play, he agreed. “I felt like that could be my swan song to the business.” At the first rehearsal, an actor approached him, insisting he would be perfect for a role in a show she was working on. “I’m someone who does not say no when the universe is knocking on your door,” he says. So he took the CD she gave him to listen to. “It was Lin rapping the opening number of In the Heights. I was blown away that someone wanted to put hip-hop on a commercial stage in the musical theater. This is like the marriage of all of my favorite things.”

He sang a George Michael song for the audition that Miranda happened to love, and got the part. “That was the beginning of our creative relationship and we just became fast friends immediately.” Muñoz and Miranda had much in common, from growing up Latino in New York, to loving the same cartoons, science fiction “and, you know, those really geeky things”.

Muñoz says their relationship includes a level of “trust and humility that I have with no one else, and that I cherish. I can walk into the room with Lin and I don’t really need to have a lot of conversation with him to understand what he is trying to craft in a scene or with a lyric in any given moment.”

This connection was integral to creating the role of Alexander Hamilton. When he played Usnavi in In the Heights, Muñoz felt that he was essentially playing Miranda playing Usnavi. Not so with Hamilton, which has seen close collaboration between the two inhabitants of the role. “My version is a married version of what he’s created and then my spin and a few of my creative choices on top of that,” says Muñoz. “Then we just keep swapping of switching back and forth and building the thing and. It’s really remarkable, really takes a great amount of trust and I believe it’s our friendship that makes that possible.”

Journalists don’t agree on how Muñoz’s interpretation differs from Miranda’s. The New York Times’ theatre critic Ben Brantley dubbed Muñoz “the sexy Hamilton”. Brantley assessed that Muñoz had a more aggressive and angular Hamilton, but Rolling Stone wrote that he was more centered and mellow. Muñoz says that there are so many variables and so many details from any given day can affect and alter a performance. “I can never repeat the conversation that I have with an audience tonight. It’s always going to be unique and that’s why I’m so in love with live theater.”

Whether his Hamilton is biting or laid-back, Muñoz says he is more like another character in the musical, Aaron Burr. He relates to Burr’s stillness and identifies with the way Burr methodically thinks through every choice and every option. “That’s how I’ve tackled all the big challenges in my life – be it putting myself through college, be it health challenges. Sit and be patient – but be ready to go when the opportunity arises. Wait until you can strike and then strike with all you’ve got.”