Trey Curtis Will Always Be a Hamilton Fan First and a Broadway Star Second
(Photo by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)
Trey Curtis has been in Hamilton for the better part of his adulthood. All the years he’s been old enough to rent a car have been spent rapping the Revolution. “My first rehearsal was in November of 2018,” he tells Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show. “I think I was 23. I’m about to turn 30—you know what I’m saying?”
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
What Curtis is saying is it hasn’t just been seven years. It’s been arguably the seven most formative years of his life, which saw him grow from a hopeful college grad to a seasoned Broadway star with the most coveted role in town. Within the Hamilton universe, he’s gone from a touring swing/standby, to Hercules Mulligan in the Lin-Manuel Miranda-led Puerto Rico stint, to Broadway’s full-time Alexander Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. He celebrated his one-year anniversary in that dream gig this past January, and is primed to be the show’s title star when it hits its own double-digit landmark this August.
“It being 10 years is weird—because I also was a fan first,” Curtis says. “I learned ‘Guns and Ships’ in a grocery store in Austin.” He was a college student at University of Texas at Austin when Miranda dropped the cast album as an NPR “First Listen.” You can still find 2015 Reddit posts by tortured fans who can’t decide whether it’s kosher to listen before seeing the show. Curtis wasn’t one of them. “I pressed play on Act One, and I got to see everything come to life,” he remembers. “I don't even know how it looks. No one really knows how it looks.” (Remember, in 2015, a Hamilton seat was as hard to come by as a ticket to the Eras Tour.) “Pressing play was just hearing all that come to life.”
"I pressed play on Act One, and I got to see everything come to life." –Trey Curtis
(Photo by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)
Go back in time seven more years and you’ll find the true starting line of Curtis’ Hamilton marathon. “My journey starts with In The Heights. If I could just talk about In The Heights just real quick…” he tells Fadal, his face one big heart-eyes emoji. “I was in the back seat of my parents' car, learning every single lyric to that show,” he says. “It was the greatest thing ever.” He remembers being an eighth-grader watching the 2008 Tony Awards where Miranda accepted his first Best Musical trophy. “He freestyled his entire speech. I'm sitting there [thinking], I can do this. I want to work with him. I want to do that stuff.” Nowadays, Miranda will casually pop by Curtis’ dressing room (originally his dressing room) to eat a slice of pizza and shoot the breeze.
“I’m kind of still afraid of him,” Curtis says, “In the best way though.”
They're peers and colleagues now—a fact that's difficult to internalize when he still feels like the middle schooler at home in Houston watching the Tonys and rapping show tunes in the back of his mom’s car. “I took all day thinking about being in the back seat, learning In The Heights, and not really knowing where I would be,” Curtis says, thinking back on his year leading Miranda’s blockbuster musical. “It's really overwhelming. It really is. I don't know if it'll hit me until later, but I tell you what, I do it for that kid who's in the back seat. I feel like a superhero to him.”
Watch the full interview below.
