Hi, I'm Stage and Stages, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and you're listening to The Hamilkast.

Bootsing, cut, sin, bussing!

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Hamilkast. I'm Jillian, and this week I'm back with Marcus

Choi, who plays George Washington in the Philip Company. Last week, Marcus talked about getting

back into action after nearly a year and a half away from the stage. Plus, how he came to

theater, his early connections to Alex Lacomore, and how the raucous Philip Company came to be.

So if you're all caught up, here's part two of my conversation with Marcus.

Right now, he's in the middle of telling me how dance injuries made him want to take a step back

from theater and take his career in a different direction. But you know what? I'll let him tell it.

So ultimately, that was the reason why I moved back to LA. I was like, you know, I need to switch gears.

I know I didn't want to stop performing, but I had to stop dancing. Like, I had to stop

focusing on dance as my main vehicle to work. You know, so I had always wanted to swing the

so-to-speak when it came to TV and film in LA. So like a winter of 2008, I moved back to LA and

and you know, one of the things that I love about New York is that like it taught me how to hustle.

Like, if you can hustle and work in New York, you can work anywhere. You can figure it out and

work anywhere. And so I kind of took that same work ethic, that same mentality when I got to LA.

And I got on my feet, started auditioning, got my team together, and then probably around 2010,

like summer of 2010, is when I really started getting out there and I started auditioning and

booking jobs and you know, worked, worked pretty solid for like the next six, seven years.

I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, I was very fortunate. I was very fortunate to kind of, you know,

be exposed to the other side of entertainment, you know, and having that theater background.

And you know, it's funny too, because like in LA, maybe it's different now, but in LA at that time,

...