Not Throwing Away His Shot

LONDON — Jamael Westman was 14 when he took the stage in his first musical, a school spoof of “Pirates of the Caribbean” called “Pirates of the Curriculum.” After that, he gave musical theater a nice long rest.

But break time is over for Westman. Now 25 and a year and change out of drama school, he is making his West End debut — and his return to musicals — in the splashiest way possible: playing the title role in “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s steamroller of a hip-hop hit, in its hotly anticipated British premiere.

“Musicals are not something I’m too familiar with, or have been,” Westman said one late-November morning at a restaurant in Westminster. Next door, the Victoria Palace Theater was, from the street, a picture of disarray. Major renovations that delayed the start of the show’s run were still underway.

Westman, by contrast, was utterly composed — thoughtful, quick-witted and funny as he talked about his induction into the world of a juggernaut show whose power and scale didn’t quite hit him until he’d already won the job.

It is only the third role on his resume since graduating last year from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and when he first heard about auditions for “Hamilton,” he couldn’t imagine that he had a chance. “I kind of just wrote myself off,” said Westman, a 6-foot-4 Londoner who spent his early childhood in Brixton, a neighborhood that — like the American founding father Alexander Hamilton himself — has strong Caribbean ties.

But “Hamilton,” which started performances here Dec. 6, didn’t get to be a phenomenon by having a clumsy way with casting. If you count all of the show’s companies — Broadway, Chicago, London, the tour of the United States — the team has found more than a dozen Hamiltons so far, understudies included. Westman, an intellectually curious, classically trained actor who loves hip-hop and whose own speech is rapid-fire and emphatically italicized, seems a natural for spitting Miranda’s intricate lyrical rhymes. The director Thomas Kail, who won one of the show’s 11 Tony Awards last year, said that part of what got Westman the role was his unflappability throughout the auditions, during which he performed in close quarters for potentially unnerving audiences that included Miranda and Cameron Mackintosh, who owns the theater where “Hamilton” is expected to settle in for a long run.

“I was not just impressed by it, but I was moved by it,” Kail said by phone. “Jam was unfazed, and just got deeper and sharper. That sort of fearlessness is essential to play this part.”

Westman credits his ability to keep in check “all these things that could easily explode in your mind” partly to the awareness that losing focus would be counterproductive — the sort of disciplined alertness that can only have been helped by his enduring passion for playing soccer. Yet when he was auditioning, he also didn’t know enough about “Hamilton” or Miranda to be outright awed.

“It was just, you know, standing right next to a monolith and not really getting the scope of what this thing was,” he said.

Westman can tell you now that his first experience of seeing “Hamilton” — on Broadway last spring, hours after he got the job — left him blown away, bawling his eyes out, suddenly understanding the show’s full force. “I had to call my mum,” he said. “It was the most uplifting thing I’ve ever seen.” A few months later, he brought her and his teenage brother to see it in New York, too.

But back in drama school, when he and some friends were “just vibing on hip-hop albums,” sharing them with one another, he casually mocked a friend’s suggestion that he listen to “Hamilton.”

“He was like, ‘Man, this is a musical,'” Westman said, making the scornful face of his smart-aleck student self — not just a hip-hop snob, but also an actor dedicated to straight plays despite a lifelong love of singing. “I’m like, ‘Stop what you’re doing, put your pens down, the test is over, you’ve failed. I’m sorry.’ But he was like, ‘No, man, listen to it.'”

Westman, whose experience of musicals at the time was limited to a West End visit to “The Lion King,” eventually followed his friend’s advice.

He has, of course, long since been thoroughly won over by “Hamilton,” if not necessarily by musicals as a genre. “As much as this is a musical,” he said, “it’s like an evolved superbaby of musical and hip-hop. That’s where I come in.” By now he has twice read Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton,” the biography that inspired the show, and twice traveled to New York. His first time ever, for four days last spring, was for his final audition, where he performed for the producers Jeffrey Seller and Oskar Eustis.

Westman made a Hamilton tour of the city, visiting spots like Trinity Church, where Hamilton is buried, and breathing in the city’s up-tempo energy on long walks that lasted into the wee hours. On the morning of the audition, he went to Hamilton Grange in Harlem, where the Hamiltons retreated after the death of their son, to listen to the song “It’s Quiet Uptown.” He was at Fraunces Tavern when his agent called to say he got the part.

“Didn’t get to Weehawken,” Westman said, referring to the spot across the Hudson River in New Jersey where Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr played out. “That was a shame.”

“Hamilton” is a very New York story, and a very American one, about the nation in its infancy as it was breaking away from British rule. Yet the show’s racial politics resonate in London, too.

Just as it is on Broadway, “Hamilton” is unusual in the West End for having a majority-minority cast — a fact that Westman (whose alternate, Ash Hunter, will play the role at certain performances)finds frustrating in a multiethnic society. He wants more inclusivity in casting, which is often white by default, especially in period pieces. “It’s like we’re putting chains on our imagination,” he said.

The show, with its pro-immigrant message, arrives in London at a time when the fallout of the Brexit vote, and an accompanying anti-immigrant fervor, have many re-examining their Britishness.

Irish on his mother’s side and Jamaican on his father’s, Westman is among them.

It’s quite a moment, then, for this grandson of immigrants to be starring in a show that celebrates the people who came from elsewhere and helped build a nation. No matter that, in “Hamilton,” that nation is the United States. To Westman, the resemblance to his own country is clear.

Generation after generation, he said, immigrants have arrived in Britain in need of “a safe place to start over again” — just like Hamilton in the American colonies, an ocean away and all those years ago.