Wait for it... an Eastern Shore native is Broadway’s latest Hamilton

No one can say Marcus John threw away his shot.

The 32-year-old Eastern Shore native graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia just as the musical “Hamilton” was becoming a sensation — an Obama-era homage to diversity, reinvention and revolution. The role called out to the trained dancer, who says hip-hop is his “love language.”

He auditioned 15 times before getting the 2019 call to play a “swing,” in the traveling show performing the “Sons of Liberty” roles: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Hercules Mulligan. Three years later, he debuted as the traveling cast’s Alexander Hamilton before a raucous crowd of 160 family members and friends at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

After his last traveling cast performance in 2025, he sent producers a farewell email saying he was ready for a promotion.

In May, he pulled on the breeches, snapped up the waistcoat, and began his nearly year-long Broadway run as the lead in one of the world’s most successful and culturally significant musicals.

“I’ve always been ready to go,” he said earlier this month in an interview from his Brooklyn apartment. “I didn’t care about the competition. I didn’t care who was doing it on Broadway versus who was doing it on tour or who was famous versus who was not. I’m about ‘put me in, Coach,’ every time.”

“Hamilton” is the rags-to-riches tale of a desperate orphan from the Caribbean who became the right-hand man in a revolution, as well as America’s first treasury secretary. It’s an AP history class of America’s founding through rap battles, whirling petticoats and nonstop footwork on a stage that spins like a Lazy Susan.

John has performed more than 100 shows this year: after 82 of them, he took his first night off. And if you think summer in the city is sweltering, imagine dancing in brass-buttoned wool coats and several layers of stretch panels.

Fewer than a dozen actors have worn Broadways’s most coveted boots. Each has personalized the role. Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda made his Hamilton an earnest striver. Miguel Cervantes, who played Hamilton for a combined eight years in New York and Chicago, was a melancholic yearner.

Marcus (whose last name is Briddell but uses John, his middle name) is kinetic, electric, mesmerizing: Wide eyes when wooing Eliza Schuyler. Anguish in his futile attempt to resist Maria Reynolds. He matches Donald Webber Jr.’s Aaron Burr wit for wit. Many of the actors at the Richard Rodgers Theatre are, like him, traveling cast veterans, so their camaraderie translates onto the stage.

More than a decade after the show made huge stars out of Miranda and costars Leslie Odom Jr., Daveed Diggs and Renée Elise Goldsberry, it still packs the house. Tickets routinely sell out; many go for more than $300.

John is aware of that, and is generous with fans. He signs Playbills on most nights. On a recent breezy evening, a Long Island woman pulled him in for a selfie. He obliged a shrieking group of teens who wanted a picture with him and his onstage love, Lauren Mariasoosay.

To decompress, he does something the audience can’t see before Eliza sings the play’s coda.

“I do some form of pushing at the wall or the ground or something to ground myself,” he said. “And I’m just telling myself like, ‘Okay, release it. It’s over.’” At home, he’ll play video games, write poetry, meditate, eat, connect with friends — habits that ready him to do it all over again the next day.

‘Broadway Briddell’

In New York, the song says, you can be a new man. But Broadway’s most recent Hamilton is much more of a tree-climber than a subway strap-hanger. His mantra is “pray often, worry not.” He says he gets that faith, as well as his love of the outdoors, from his Eastern Shore upbringing.

His Instagram handle is “@Broadwybriddell” to honor his heritage.

“My nickname is ‘Broadway,’ because that’s the thing I do,” he said. ”But who I am? That’s Salisbury and Berlin, one thousand percent.”

He spent much of his childhood in Briddletown, pastureland a mile from downtown Berlin that his ancestors purchased in 1878. As a teen, he would listen to his grandfather, James Briddell, talk of the importance of Black Marylanders owning their own property.

Longtime Briddletown residents included Louise Henry, who owned the Henry Hotel in Ocean City — the only lodging available to Black performers like Duke Ellington; the Rev. David Briddell, a Civil Rights leader close with Martin Luther King Jr.; and James Purnell Jr., who was elected Worcester County’s first Black commissioner after he filed a civil rights lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court.

A few years ago, the Briddell family created an exhibit with the Calvin Taylor Museum in Berlin. When executive director Melissa Reid, a “Hamilton” fan, learned that a Briddell was the titular lead, she said she was not surprised.

Hamilton is relentless, undeniable, manifesting dreams – until the ‘damn fool’ Aaron Burr kills him in an ill-advised duel. Over the past 50 years, the extended Briddell family has fought to close a landfill, secure a new water supply, install a safe crosswalk on the highway that cuts them off from downtown and attain fair representation.

“They keep their eye on what needs to be done and collectively do it,” Reid said. “These things are not by accident, or chance or luck. They are clear on their mission, and you can make a direct connection from them to Marcus.”

‘PG in the house’

John moved to Prince George’s County for high school and was one of the few boys in the drama club, where his nickname was “Broadway.” His mother, Kwanza Briddell, said her son had scholarships to several schools, but chose the University of the Arts to pursue his dream of becoming an actor.

His appearance in 2022 at the Kennedy Center remains one of his proudest moments, and one of his longest-standing ovations. After performances in the Philippines and Australia, he got to show his family from “Berlin and the Bury,” as he calls Salisbury, what he could do.

The Briddell family has established a foundation to raise money for scholarships and read-a-thons. He is seeking to expand that and bring more students to Broadway.

History, he knows, has its eye on him — a Founding Father in dreadlocks on Broadway, a Briddell son who has never been satisfied with the status quo and always wanted to stretch in what he could achieve.

“Those 12 cousins he has under him know they can be anything they want to be,” his grandfather said. “He’s the oldest grandchild, and he’s attained his dream.”