HAMILTON's Javier Muñoz, Broadway's Newest Once-A-Week Star

As Lin-Manuel Miranda's alternate in HAMILTON's title role, for one day a week,Javier Muñoz stars in the season's biggest Broadway hit.

While eight performances a week is the Broadway standard, there have still been numerous occasions where stars have played work weeks with alternates filling in on a regular basis. Unlike understudies and standbys, alternates work a fixed schedule, usually one or two performances a week, and the audience knows in advance that the billed star will be out.

Some rather big names have served as Broadway alternates. Phyllis Newman was already a Tony-winning star when she took the assignment to fill in for Barbara Harris twice a week in THE APPLE TREE. When Robert Preston and Mary Martin began working a shortened schedule during the run if I DO! I DO!, audiences got to see no less than Carol Lawrence and Gordon MacRae.

Muñoz may not be a high-profile star yet, but as the song goes, "Just you wait, just you wait."

During the Broadway smash's initial Off-Broadway run at The Public Theater, Muñoz started playing the title role at pre-announced performances so that author/star Lin-Manuel Miranda could watch the show while working on revisions. Now that the musical has settled comfortably into Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre, Muñoz's current schedule has him playing Sunday matinees. In fact, it was Muñoz's performance that was seen by President Barack Obama when he first took in a performance. (The President has since seen it again with Miranda in the role.) The alternate's performances have been highly praised by fans, as were his performances during his assignment as a replacement for Miranda in the starring role of Usnavi in IN THE HEIGHTS.

"We literally tag each other in. 'You're up: Go," he explains in an interview for Vulture. "It's all about finding what works. There's no other agenda... It takes a great deal of humility and even a greater deal of trust for two artists to do something like this together. From the very first moment of Heights, together with Lin, we had that. It's an honor to be trusted that much by anyone, let alone Lin."

The project was still called HAMILTON MIXTAPE when Muñoz was asked to partake in development readings.

"It was just an idea brewing. But from that first rehearsal, I can definitely recall hearing the music for the first time and thinking, 'I don't know what this is gonna be, but damn it, it's just so good.'"

HAMILTON and IN THE HEIGHTS have been his only Broadway credits, and as an actor who is Latino, Muñoz has certainly experienced career limitations from an industry that still isn't completely open about diverse casting.

"To be able to walk out onto this stage and see a diverse cast that looks like who I see when I take the train, that I see on the sidewalk, that I see at the gym and the grocery store when I'm out doing chores and exercises, to see the society I live in represented on that stage with me, makes sense. And all of the best actors for the role were hired. That, to me, is the best that theater can do."

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From the creative team behind the Tony Award-winning In The Heights comes a wildly inventive new musical about the scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America: Alexander Hamilton. Tony and Grammy Award winnerLin-Manuel Miranda wields his pen and takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on a new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is.

From bastard orphan to Washington's right hand man, rebel to war hero, loving husband caught in the country's first sex SCANDAL to Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy, Hamilton is an exploration of a political mastermind. George Washington,Thomas Jefferson, Eliza Hamilton, and lifelongHamiltonfriend and foe,Aaron Burr, all attend this revolutionary tale of America's fiery past told through the sounds of the ever-changing nation we've become. Tony Award nominee Thomas Kail directs this new musical about taking your shot, speaking your mind, and turning the world upside down.

Photo Credit: Jessica Fallon Gordon