‘A dream come true’: New Eliza ready to Burn in Hamilton’s Australian return

When she was a final-year student of musical theatre at Queensland’s Conservatorium in 2015, performer Vidya Makan would play the soundtrack of a new musical called Hamilton, over and over again, singing her heart out to her favourite showstopper tune, Burn.

Now she will get to sing that song nightly before audiences at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre, performing the role of Eliza Hamilton, in the highly anticipated return season of the Tony, Grammy, Olivier and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“It is an utter dream come true to play Eliza, she is the heart of the show,” said Makan, who most recently played Catherine Parr in the Australian Tour of Six the Musical.

Makan’s family is of Indian origin, from the South African city of Durban. Perth-raised performer Jason Arrow, who reprises his lead role as American founding father Alexander Hamilton, was also born in South Africa.

“My family just love musicals,” Makan said. “It kind of doesn’t make sense, they come from apartheid South Africa, you’d think, ‘Why do they love musicals?’, but they just do,” said Makan, who first watched the Sound of Music aged 18 months.

While her parents, originally from the Indian province of Gujarat, were supportive of her musical endeavours, they often wondered if perhaps pursuing her first love, soccer, might have been a better career choice. Or optometry, like her younger sister, Rya.

“We went to a lot of musicals, but we never saw someone who looked like me on the stage, so my parents were worried if I was going to be able to make a career out of this, it was a really scary thing for them,” Makan said.

“Things have definitely changed because of shows like Hamilton, there is way more diversity in casting and on stage now.”