If you play George Washington in Hamilton, you are the wise warrior figure. The soldier on his way to becoming a statesman and POTUS No 1. The commanding officer and mentor to the guy with his name on the marquee.
No, the Broadway show that since 2015 has become a pop-culture Mt Rushmore to your fellow Founding Father Alexander Hamilton isn’t about you. But you’re still out front on many of the show’s hip hop-powered songs, which are delivered at roughly 144 words a minute in 140-plus minutes on stage.
Plus, your Washington gets the best entrance of anyone. Early in Act One, he swaggers on to the sound of Right Hand Man/Here Comes the General, a song that is part Gilbert and Sullivan, part Eminem and part heavyweight fighter ring announcement.
After nearly 700 performances of the Australian production, Matu Ngaropo is not at all sick of the fanfare.
“It never gets old,” he says with a laugh from Whakatāne, where he’s been staying with whānau between the Brisbane and Auckland seasons. “But it can be really overwhelming when that introduction is happening. When I’m walking onto the stage, I am not thinking about anything else except walking to the right place, in the right timing, doing the right choreography, grabbing my sword at the right time and making sure that it’s going into my scabbard … If I listen to the roar of the audience, or the introduction, then I’m not going to be ready to fulfil the moment.”
Ngaropo first pulled on Washington’s boots, breeches and bluecoat in Sydney in early 2021. He finally hangs up his sword this month at the end of the show’s Auckland season. He’s added some personal touches along the way. As creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said after finally seeing the production in Brisbane: “Well, it’s the first time I saw haka moves in the Battle of Yorktown.”
Ngaropo says in rehearsals the performers were encouraged to bring something of themselves to their roles.
“I remember looking around the room thinking I’m probably the oldest and one of the more experienced, so I felt a responsibility to be brave with bringing our Māori culture to the rehearsal floor.
“I thought about what it meant to be a leader, what it means to be a rangatira, what it meant to be a leader of an army, and that is something in our history with the Māori Battalion and my links to the East Coast.
“So, when you see the show you’ll see a whole lot of nods to being Māori – not a way that takes over the storytelling but punctuates it.”
The original Broadway show with Miranda in the title role cast the Founding Fathers as people of colour. Washington, a slave owner, was first played by African-American Chris Jackson, though slavery wasn’t an issue addressed directly. What’s not mentioned at all is Washington’s complicated and problematic history with indigenous Americans. The Iroquois nicknamed him Conotocaurius – “destroyer of villages”.
How has Ngaropo reconciled all that?
“I think if we look back a few hundred years, a lot of people were problems for themselves and for other people, and the way I connected to him was the idea that he was a leader thrust into a position of responsibility, doing the best he could with what he had. He never wanted to be this mythological, Herculean kind of person.”
In the Australian production, Ngaropo is one of two Māori principals, with Akina Edmonds as Angelica Schuyler. The ethnically diverse, 35-member cast includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performers. Its Pasifika contingent includes Iosefa Laga’aia, the son of stage musical veteran Jay Laga’aia.
At home, Ngaropo is possibly best known for being a founding father of the Modern Māori Quartet. His stage career of more than 20 years has been strong on Shakespeare and Māori drama. He’s played a few real-life great leaders before: Sir Āpirana Ngata in the feature Whina … and then-deputy prime minister Winston Peters in the Circa Theatre election-year satire PSA. Clearly, casting directors see someone statesman-like in him.
“I think it’s my height,” he deadpans. He’s 1.89m.
The production has been his longest career commitment and the hardest. He was in the 2013 Australian Lion King production and has done Pop Up Globe seasons on both sides of the Tasman. But Hamilton’s demands are relentless. As a principal character, Ngaropo is on stage all the time, feeding into scenes and singing backing vocals.
“Even if you’re a performer who’s done other big shows – and I’ve done other big shows – no one in the world knows what it takes to do Hamilton unless you’ve done it. Because it is something else.”
In Australia, the show played for months in theatres of up to 2000 capacity. In Auckland, the fortnight-long season is in the stadium setting of Spark Arena with video screens. If it’s not quite the same Broadway experience for the audience, Ngaropo says it will be exactly the same show.
He’s looking forward to seeing how it translates to a bigger space and also how rangatira-in-chief George Washington goes down at home. Given recent events, he thinks it may be a good time for Hamilton to hit town.
“It’s the most amazing, exciting, overwhelming, slightly nerve-racking feeling and I’m mostly overwhelmed and excited because I think we really need this right now, here.”
Hamilton, Spark Arena, Auckland, May 26 to June 11.
