Chris Jackson

Stage actor and composer Christopher Jackson amassed an impressive resume on both the New York theater scene with starring roles in Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musicals "In the Heights" and "Hamilton," while also maintaining an Emmy-winning second career as a composer for children's public television. The Illinois native - born in Metropolis and raised in the city of Cairo - sang regularly in church during his formative years, but believed that his future lay in baseball rather than musical theater. But he shifted his focus while attending Cairo High School, and moved to New York City to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Jackson began working immediately after graduation, landing a role in the Off-Broadway show "Time and the Wind" in 1996, and then moving to Broadway to star as Simba in "The Lion King" from 1997 to 2004. His screen career also took off during this period, with a recurring role as Perry Loftus, the murderous assistant to Zeljko Ivanek's Governor James Devlin, on "Oz" (HBO, 1997-2003). In 2006, he began a three-year stint as musical director for several PBS series, including the updated version of "The Electric Company" (2009-2013) and "Sesame Street" (1969- ). The experience proved to be a positive one for Jackson, who took home a Daytime Emmy for the song "What I Am" for "Sesame Street" while also forging a longstanding professional relationship with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who served as an actor and writer on "Electric Company." Miranda cast Jackson as the lovelorn Benny in both the Off-Broadway and Broadway runs of his first hit musical, "In the Heights" (2007), and began performing with him, along with "Heights" and "Electric Company" producer Anthony Veneziale and "Electric Company" songwriters Chris Sullivan and Bill Sherman in Freestyle Love Supreme, an improvisational hip-hop group which performed on the New York club and theater circuits. Jackson's own theater career rose steadily during this period, and included appearances in "Memphis" on Broadway in 2010 and "Bronx Bombers," which cast him as Derek Jeter in 2014. After a brief turn in the Tupac Shakur musical "Holler If Ya Hear Me" in 2014, Jackson reunited with Miranda in 2015 for his blockbuster musical "Hamilton," for which he earned a Tony nomination and Grammy Award as George Washington.