NEW YORK, NY.- After a curtain call at a recent performance of “Hamilton,” Trey Curtis, who stars as Alexander Hamilton, put his arm around J. Quinton Johnson, who had played George Washington. They basked in the applause, shared a laugh and walked together offstage at the Richard Rodgers Theater.
A block away, and nearly simultaneously, Vincent Jamal Hooper, who stars as Simba in “The Lion King,” was absorbing the cheers of the 1,700 theatergoers at the Minskoff Theater.
It had been about a decade since the three men, now 29, had spent aimless nights in Austin, Texas, riding around in Johnson’s 2007 Jeep blasting show tunes — dreaming of plays they were still to perform in and music they were yet to write.
Today, they are musical theater stars, appearing in some of the most commercially and critically acclaimed productions on Broadway.
It is difficult enough for any single person to realize a dream of Broadway success. Consider the odds of three best friends from Texas moving to New York and triumphing all at once.
Their collective success has been the result of indisputable talent, individual effort and also a rare friendship built not on competition but collaboration. They have offered one another couches to sleep on and airfare for auditions. They write and produce music and musicals together. They hype up one another before callback auditions, promote the others’ gigs on social media and cheer wildly from the mezzanine during performances.
Even they have a hard time believing how it has all worked out.
“You try to take small moments to zoom out a bit,” Hooper said, “and we used to be — and in some ways still are — three young Black dudes from Texas who used to wonder, ‘How do people even get Broadway auditions?’ So many questions that swirled, and then to transition from that to 45th and 46th streets in New York. …”
His friend quickly finished his thought. “It’s just ridiculous,” Johnson said.
Usnavi and Benny
The men met as teenagers in Austin, where each had come to focus on acting, singing and writing music.
Johnson grew up in Athens, Texas, population 13,000, about two hours outside of Dallas. He taught himself to perform by watching Michael Jackson videos and got an opportunity to study musical theater at the University of Texas at Austin after a director spotted him at a high school talent showcase and that very day began to prepare a scholarship offer.
Hooper, who grew up in nearby Round Rock, Texas, was performing at a professional theater in Austin while still in high school, having quit football to focus on performing.
Curtis came to the University of Texas as an acting major from Houston. His freshman year, he and Johnson were cast together in a production of “In the Heights,” the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical. Curtis was Usnavi, the protagonist. Johnson played his best friend, Benny.
And over the past decade — in careers that would take the men from stages in Texas and Chicago to Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Australia, finally landing them all on Broadway — each has served offstage as the Benny to another’s Usnavi.
“These three gents from Texas clearly grew up together — they shared something, whether by going to the same school together, by hanging out together, by supporting each other,” said Alex Lacamoire, the musical supervisor of “Hamilton,” who won a Tony Award for the show’s orchestrations.
“You are more likely to find people bonding over their favorite movie or their favorite sports player than their favorite Broadway show,” he added, “so it’s no surprise that they clicked once they found out they shared a love for this niche art form.”
Swagger, Grace and Command
When you see them hurrying down a midtown street, they look like average busy New Yorkers.
But when you see them onstage — Curtis’ swagger, Hooper’s grace, Johnson’s command — you know they are stars.
It was this way when they were teenagers, said Lyn Koenning, who worked with them at a theater program in Austin and as the director of the now-defunct musical theater program at the University of Texas.
“No one could have predicted this because it is so difficult to get to the highest professional level of our field,” she said. “But I will also say I’m not surprised at all.”
Johnson had long been the center of gravity for the friend group. He met the others individually and longed for them to become a team. Today, he takes every chance to boost his friends’ confidence and serves as an unofficial social media manager when one has a new project to promote.
Hooper is quieter and more reflective. When he travels home to Texas, he visits his old high school and encourages young theater students there.
Curtis is funny and projects an aura of cool. When he reflects on his current success, he is quick to credit his mother, a high school theater teacher who exposed him to theater from a young age.
Their friendship cannot be disconnected from their theatrical resumes and ambitions.
Johnson first saw Hooper perform in 2012, when he acted in professional productions of “Ragtime” and “Passing Strange” while still a senior in high school. Johnson, then a freshman at UT, watched, agog.
“I was like, ‘That bro is doing something,’” Johnson said.
Later that year, Johnson and Hooper were cast together in a professional production of “Les Misérables.” By the time rehearsals concluded, they were best friends.
“It was the first time that I had found another like-minded individual,” Hooper said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is another young Black man in theater who is really trying to go for it.’”
Enter Curtis, stage left. He became aware of Johnson when — at his freshman orientation — Johnson and his fellow musical theater students performed “The Eyes of Texas,” the school song.
“This man right here,” he said, gesturing to Johnson, “I honestly never heard a voice like that come out of a teenager.”
In the spring of 2014, Curtis and Johnson played side by side in “In the Heights.” Well before opening night, they, too, were close friends, on the stage and off.
Hooper sat in the audience and was wowed. “He’s fantastic,” he said he thought of Curtis’ performance. “I’m like, ‘I get what Q has been talking about this whole time.’”
About two years later it was Curtis and Hooper onstage together, cast in a professional production of “Helldrivers of Daytona,” a musical set in the 1960s about race car drivers. The show was produced in Chicago to explore if it had a Broadway future. (It did not.)
The experience bonded them. “It was the first time we shared some eyes,” Curtis said, “some telepathic communication that was like, ‘I can see we’re going to be best friends, too.’”
Taking His Shot
“Hamilton” — Miranda’s musical megahit about Alexander Hamilton — is a fourth character in the men’s story.
A “Hamilton” cast album dropped in 2015 just as the show was opening on Broadway, and 1,700 miles away in Texas, the men were jumping into Johnson’s Jeep for nighttime rides — singing, rapping and analyzing every lyric.
Soon, Johnson took his shot: In the spring of 2016, he had been cast in a television version of “Dirty Dancing.” The production was choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, who had also choreographed “Hamilton.” When Blankenbuehler wandered into a practice room one day, Johnson began performing the opening number of “Hamilton.”
It earned Johnson an actual audition, and a few months later he was hired to make his Broadway debut, playing Hercules Mulligan and James Madison in “Hamilton.”
New York, Finally
Curtis and Hooper traveled to New York to be in the audience for one of Johnson’s early performances — their first time seeing a show on Broadway.
After the last bow, they hustled to the stage door on West 46th Street to greet Johnson. When he spotted his friends, he called out, “Trey, top; Vince, melody. I’ll go bottom,” and they broke into the Boyz II Men ballad, “End of the Road.”
This spring, as they gathered in Hooper’s Washington Heights apartment, they burst into Boyz II Men harmony again as they described the stage-door moment.
“You do melody,” Johnson said to Curtis.
“Don’t start it too high, bro,” Curtis replied.
As Johnson settled into life in New York, he worked to get his best friends to join him — in the city and in “Hamilton.” Both men were eventually hired, but it would be several years before they were all back in New York.
Hooper and Curtis were cast in a company of the show, which headed to Puerto Rico in 2019 when Miranda reprised his role as Alexander Hamilton. Later they performed with the production in Australia.
Johnson left “Hamilton” on Broadway in 2018 to appear in “Choir Boy,” also on Broadway, and to star in the Kennedy Center production of “Footloose.” He wrote, with Julia Riew, a musical, “Alice’s Wonderland,” about a teenager computer coder and returned to Austin to direct and music direct it for Impact Arts, a nonprofit theater company.
He rejoined the Broadway company of “Hamilton” two years later as a principal standby, meaning he plays all the leading male roles when he is needed.
Hooper appeared off-Broadway in “White Girl In Danger,” from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson in 2023. In the fall of 2023, he was cast as Simba in “The Lion King” and made his Broadway debut.
And in January, Curtis was announced as the new Alexander Hamilton on Broadway. When he got the call, his mind went back to 2008, when as a middle school student he watched Miranda freestyle rap his acceptance of the Tony Award for the “In the Heights” score.
“I saw it right there on the TV that there would be space for me,” Curtis said.
Despite finally being back in the same city, the men do not spend much time together. Their jobs are demanding, and they are all working on creative side hustles. Hooper recently released “Hero,” the first single from a forthcoming album, “Tune Inn.” Curtis is working on four projects, including a follow-up to his 2021 album, “You Happy?” Johnson is working on a licensing deal to bring “Alice’s Wonderland” to professional regional theaters.
They maintain their friendship in a stream of daily texts. And they show up for each other’s big moments.
The night before Curtis made his Broadway debut as Alexander Hamilton in January, he sat in the audience to watch the show as Johnson performed the role that he would take on. “It was something that was super special,” Johnson said — to hand off the role to one dear friend knowing that a block away, another was commanding a different Broadway stage.
The day after, Curtis, Johnson and Hooper posted on Instagram a photo of themselves standing together in the empty Minskoff Theater.
The caption read, “Where do we go from here?”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
