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

Bootsing, cuts in, bussing.

Hello friends, I'm Jillian. Welcome back to The Hamilkast. This week we're picking up

where we left off with Julius Thomas III, Alexander Hamilton on the End Peggy tour.

If you missed last week's episode, go back and give that one a listen. You'll hear all about his

journey growing up in Indiana, singing at PTA meetings to kermit the frog songs. His experiences

on Broadway and national tours, the work that went into getting there, booking gigs with self-tapes,

and being part of making art that has an impact. But if you're all caught up, I'll leave you to it.

Here's part two of my conversation with Julius Thomas III.

So I met Lin outside of the Tony Awards performance in 2010 for the Scottsboro Boys.

He walked up to me and he said, and at this point I knew who he was and I knew what he was doing.

And he walked up to me and he was like, oh my god, hey man, I saw you show the other day. It was

so fantastic and done it, or I saw your show. We had since closed, but I saw your show. It was so

fantastic and I was, you know, very star-struck and very much like, oh my gosh, Lin-Manual Miranda

came to see our show. That's very cool. And then I didn't think anything of that for a long time.

I didn't see in the Heights in the movie theater. I didn't, excuse me, in the theater. I didn't

audition for it because it was rap and I did not consider myself a rapper. I wasn't music that I was

too much interested in. I was mostly a soul gospel R&B. You give me anything with a beautiful

melody, but rap was really not my thing. So I wasn't opposed to it. It just wasn't my fancy.

And by the time Hamilton rolled around, I had firmly set in that thing that like, I was not going

to be in a rap show. So I hadn't listened to Hamilton. I wasn't like on the train. I knew everybody

thought that it was amazing, but I couldn't get a ticket to it because I couldn't afford it.

...