Casting call as Broadway musical Hamilton comes to Sydney

An audition process will kick off within weeks after confirmation that Hamilton has been booked for an Australian tour.

Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stars in Hamilton.

A high-stakes audition process will kick off within weeks after confirmation that Hamilton, one of the most popular Broadway musicals ever, has finally been booked for an Australian tour.

Six years after its Broadway debut, a new production about one of America’s founding ­fathers, featuring a cast made up largely of local talent, will open at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre in March 2021.

“Thank you to everyone in Australia who’s been asking for Hamilton,” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said. “It’s on its way.”

The selection of Sydney is a blow for Melbourne, which in ­recent years has hosted the Aust­ralian premieres of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Book of Mormon and Kinky Boots.

Australian producer Michael Cassel, who oversaw Harry Potter and Kinky Boots, said the intimacy and scale of the 2000-seat Lyric space was a perfect fit for Hamilton. One of his other shows, Beautiful: The Carole King Mus­ical, opened at the same venue after its refurbishment in 2017.

While details of state government incentives remain under wraps, Cassel said he would work with Destination NSW to sell international packages for Hamilton, particularly in the Asia-­Pacific region.

“It’s no surprise that with a show such as Hamilton, everybody is extremely enthusiastic about wanting to premiere the show in their city,” he said. “We want to be in Sydney for a long time and bring as many people (as possible) to Sydney to come and see the show.”

An Australian casting brief will be issued next month before auditions get under way later this year.

Cassel, who first saw the show on Broadway in late 2015, said he would be looking to find new talent­. Most of the cast will be ­Australian, including the key roles of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, with indig­enous actors expected to be front and centre.

“We are going to go and cast an entirely diverse Australian company,” he said. “I think this show really lends itself to people from all kinds of performing arts styles, particularly given the music and the choreography in this prod­uction.”

Tickets will go on sale next year. An Australian website, launched yesterday to allow people to register interest, crashed soon after the ­announcement.

With a score that owes as much to the history of hip-hop as to musical theatre, the show tells the story of the rise and fall of Hamilton, America’s first Treas­ury secretary and the right-hand man to Washington.

Since opening on Broadway in August 2015, Hamilton has toured across the US and Britain, where it opened on the West End in late 2017. It has been showered with awards, among them 11 Tony Awards, including best musical, and seven Olivier Awards, while Miranda won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2016.