Thayne Jasperson has left the building. Don’t worry. Just for lunch. It happens sometimes.
The actor is in the middle of a grueling two-show day, that show being the smash hit “Hamilton,” which opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway 10 years ago Wednesday. And for this day’s midday meal of a salad with salmon and piles of freshly grated parmesan, he’s only ventured across the street.
Jasperson, a member of the ensemble who pops up briefly as the snooty British loyalist Samuel Seabury, is the only remaining original cast member in the show about founding father Alexander Hamilton. He’s still thrilled to be in the room where it happens, finding new ways to make sure starring in a pop culture phenomenon doesn’t become just another job. It’s a running joke that he’s moved into the building. Fans predict he’ll haunt the place one day — they call him the Phantom of the Rodgers.
Earlier this year, he even recorded a tongue-in-cheek video series called “At Home (The Richard Rodgers) with Thayne Jasperson.”
“Thayne has done so many dispatches from that theater, it’s hard not to believe that he lives there,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, said in an email.
“It feels like I live there,” Jasperson said.
He has certainly made himself at home. He keeps a cozy robe in the dressing room he shares with several cast members. He sometimes handwashes laundry there, grabs a nap, takes a shower. You’ll find him doing pre-show pull-ups stage right.
“You guys, sometimes I’m a little crazy, but who wouldn’t be?” he says in the final installment of the video series. “Ten years at ‘Hamilton?’ You would too.”
Jasperson was part of a workshop in early 2014 as the show prepared for an off-Broadway run and helped add some of the nuances that made Seabury the character he is today. He didn’t originally see himself staying at the show for a decade.
“And then I was like, ‘Hamilton’s’ going to be epic,’” he said. “I didn’t know how epic.”
The show — starring a diverse cast as the nation’s founders and featuring hip-hop, jazz and other modern musical styles — became a critical darling and a commercial juggernaut. Oprah saw it. Beyoncé was there. President Barack Obama visited.
“It’s allowed us to have multiple moments where you feel like you are at the center of the universe, in the eye of the hurricane,” he said. “Like, Obama comes and suddenly you feel like you’re at the top of the world.”
Still, Jasperson said that at the beginning of the run, he doubted whether fans would want to meet him at the stage door. They wanted to meet Miranda, he figured, or Jonathan Groff as the king, Christopher Jackson as George Washington or Phillipa Soo as Eliza. Who’d want to see the guy who stands up on a box to discourage the Revolutionaries, only to get repeatedly dissed by A. Ham himself? As it turned out, Seabury has his admirers — even if only because his song, “Farmer Refuted,” is so much fun to sing.
Even now, fans bring him bracelets with a key phrase and signature vocal flourish: “For shame.” On his recent two-show day, he was second out the stage door in a button-up shirt, athletic shorts and cowboy boots and made his way across the crowd signing autographs, posing for pictures and complimenting costumes.
“Now I go out and it is so sweet, because people are like, ‘You’re the last original!’” he said. “It’s such an honor, and it really touches my heart.”
Being on top of the Broadway world for so long does not come without sacrifices. The personal toll can be steep for someone who consistently works nights and weekends; Jasperson, who recently turned 45, said a dating life is nonexistent. “You’re perpetually single and hoping for somebody to come along,” he said. He spent a recent packed day teaching, speaking and singing to music educators, going to the dentist, doing a meet-and-greet and joining a panel discussion in front of an audience.
“As we started, my tongue started not being numb, so that was nice,” he said. Then — finally — it was time to go do the show.
He lives uptown in a 290-square-foot apartment, where he says it is not, contrary to the title of a song in Act 2, quiet. He will often bike to the theater, doing vocal warm-ups on the way by singing scales through a straw in his mouth.
At the theater, he stretches and exercises to prepare for the physical work ahead, which includes lifting tables, chairs and other humans and appearing in almost every song over more than 2½ hours.
He tries to be conscious of what he eats, making sure he has protein but avoiding anything too heavy before prolonged dancing. He said people at the theater will often poke fun at him for one pre-show snack in particular: a bag of kale.
“I’ll just sit there and eat it out of the bag,” he said. “I’m telling you, the kale gives me so much energy, my body loves it.” Another go-to: a “giant lavender matcha.”
End of carousel
Jasperson said that after playing Seabury thousands of times, he doesn’t need to review the part before he goes on. He’s an understudy for the role of King George, and on nights when he goes on, he sings through the lyrics offstage. Sometimes he’s called in to play John Laurens, and “I want to feel like I’m cool, like I’m fiery, like I’m a rapper,” so he listens to rap music to get in the zone. When he then has to switch to Philip Hamilton in Act 2, he starts out playing a 9-year-old, which Jasperson enjoys as someone who eats cereal and watches cartoons in the morning. (He also tries to keep his language family-friendly as someone who grew up Mormon, leading him to substitute more profane utterances with “mother-of-pearl.”)
After a show, he essentially collapses. He’s a no for bar hangouts because he doesn’t drink. Plus, yelling over the noise could mean losing his voice.
He suspects that being conscientious about his lifestyle has made it possible to keep doing the work. “Because, you know, I’m not 20 anymore. I mean, I try to pretend like I’m 20.”
Andrew Chappelle, who spent five years in the “Hamilton” cast, remembers when he informed managers that he was leaving in 2019. He ran right into Jasperson, who had an idea.
“You and I can just be in the show until it closes,” Chappelle recalled him saying. “I said, ‘Thayne, I have some very bad news to tell you.’”
Jasperson said he cried when every member of the original company left, but he had to be intentional about staying open to new performers.
“I wanted to make sure I was giving everyone the opportunity, not keeping them in a place that, for me, had like a wall between us,” he said. “So I wanted to find how do they approach the role and to love it and to accept it.”
Chappelle, who writes and directs and hosts the podcast “Tactful Pettiness” with Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby, said he’s not surprised Jasperson wants to remain in the show.
But, Chappelle adds, “Anyone who’s done ‘Hamilton’ will always say it’s one of the hardest shows you’ll ever be asked to do,” because of the sheer amount of furniture-hoisting and rafter-climbing and how much time ensemble members remain onstage. “I think that a lot of times in a Broadway career, you want to stay in a show longer and sometimes just physically you’re like, ‘Uh, I think I need to not do this anymore.’”
Still, when Jasperson reunited with the 2015 cast this year for an anniversary performance at the Tony Awards, his glee was palpable. He bounced around clapping, waving and hugging with a barely containable grin.
“I felt like a puppy. I was just like, ‘Hi! Hi! Hi!’ My tail’s wagging,” said Jasperson, who actually played an energetic dog in “Finding Neverland” at American Repertory Theater. “I just had to hug and kiss everybody. It was so magical.”
Jasperson said it would be hard to leave a show where he feels like his role is important and carries the story forward. He finds creative fulfillment through side projects teaching or performing. In 2022, he stepped away briefly to join a two-month run of an off-Broadway show, “Only Gold,” choreographed and directed by “Hamilton” choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. There was, of course, the pandemic shutdown for 18 months.
But now, how do you keep an eight-show-a-week gig from feeling mundane after so long?
Jasperson said he still tries to make small choices and improvisations to keep the performance fresh. Maybe Seabury will be stoic one day and flamboyant another.
“I really like to fall into the world of ‘Hamilton’ and find how can I continue to make this something that people would be proud of,” he said. Miranda hailed his “incredible dedication” and work ethic, and recalled how “adventurous he was in the space” when he joined the ensemble. “Thayne Jasperson is the f—ing best. Full stop,” he said.
Blankenbuehler, who choreographed for Jasperson when he competed on “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2008, said he enjoys how Jasperson attacks the show in new ways and still wants to “dig deeper.”
“So many people, once it’s in their body and they think of it like a job, they don’t really want to be told that there’s a different way to dig,” he said. “He’s just like, ‘No, let me keep digging.’”
Jasperson said he feels a responsibility as a kind of unofficial “Hamilton” mascot to never slack, especially to set an example for newer members of the cast.
“There will be a day when we can’t do this anymore,” he said. “My body will be like, ‘No,’ and I don’t ever want to regret and look back and say, ‘Man, why didn’t I do more? Why wasn’t I doing this better?’”
Miranda recalled how Jasperson suffered a rib injury in the first year of the show and had to spend a couple of months recovering.
“A part of me thinks that the fact that he is still with the show 10 years later is him making up for that lost time, and that initial feverish first year,” he said. “I’m here to say: ‘Thayne, it’s okay. You can stay at the Richard Rodgers for as long or as short as you want, as long as you still love coming to work.’”
