How this Kansas Citian is now starring in the musical ‘Hamilton’ — in German

Kansas City native Charles Simmons’ resume might not immediately connect to his current gig.

Eurodance performer. Fitness instructor. Contestant on “The Voice.”

Take a closer look at Simmons’ life and career, and it becomes more obvious that Simmons is ideal in the role of George Washington in the first non-English production of “Hamilton” — in Germany.

It certainly makes sense to him.

“Just knowing the story of George Washington — knowing what he went through as a general, as a president and my journey as a coach and a teacher and a father — it just fits,” Simmons said. “It fits quite perfectly, actually.”

It makes sense to others as well.

“Charles‘ natural authority is undeniable,” said Denise Obedekah, resident director of the German production. “Not only is he an expert on everything to do with George Washington, he also has the military background running in his family.“It’s incredible how he seems to bring everything this role demands naturally. It’s this wonderful mix of authority and father-figure especially to Alexander Hamilton but also to the cast in general. We are extremely lucky to have him.”

“Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning blockbuster, is still playing on Broadway and London’s West End and continues to tour North America (with a stop at Kansas City’s Music Hall March 21 to April 2).

The German version opened in Hamburg in October. Exporting a quintessentially American tale to another country in another language was difficult. And so was Simmons’ path to become one of its stars.

“That was just the weird thing about this whole journey,” he said in a wide-ranging, 90-minute interview via Zoom, “in that I was able reach this kind of success so late in the game.”

His first notes in Kansas City

Simmons has few — but vivid — memories of his early childhood in Kansas City. He was the older of two children of Charles Sr. and the late Rhonda Simmons.

“We were a young family,” Simmons said. “My dad was just starting out.”

Simmons’ most powerful memory of Kansas City is of his paternal grandmother’s home near 43rd Street and Indiana Avenue. “We didn’t live far from there,” Simmons said. “I have memories of being at my grandmother’s house because my grandmother took care of us a lot when our parents had to work.”

“I have very fond memories of her.”

And he remembers his first time singing at age 5 at his grandmother’s Baptist church.

“I was the one who was always singing,” Simmons said. “It caught me at a very early age.”

His whole family, including his younger sister, sang.

“My father was always musically inclined,” said Simmons, adding that he was always impressed that his father learned to play electric bass as an adult.

“I was always messing around with sound. My dad would buy me little gizmos for Christmas, and I would make sound and noises.”

It was around that time that Simmons’ father joined the U.S. Army, and the family moved to California.

About three years later, his father got his first assignment in Germany and the family settled in the small town of Wertheim.

“When I moved to Germany my interest wasn’t so much music; I was more into drawing and the visual arts,” he said. “I was always sketching. By the time I was 12 I got so good my dad’s unit buddies would ask me to draw portraits to hang on their walls.”

He dreamed of being an architect someday. “But I always had music on my side.”

After four years in Germany, the Simmons family moved to Tacoma, Washington. And music became his focus.

“In 1984 I was bitten by the Prince bug,” he said. “When ‘Purple Rain’ came out it just blew my mind. From that moment on, I wanted to be a singer.”

He taught himself keyboards and entered talent contests. He went to school dressed as Prince.

“I had a little side hustle as a Prince double when I was 15 years old,” Simmons said. “I just loved the music, and the more I got into music, the less I was drawing pictures.”

His family made one last move back to Germany, this time to Stuttgart as Simmons was starting his senior year in high school.

It didn’t take long for others to notice his musical talent among those attending Stuttgart American High School.

In fact, Simmons’ talent was so revered that when it was time for the school’s spring production of “Fame” there was little doubt who should be cast in the role of Bruno, the aspiring musician.

This was despite a school student body of 1,200 to 1,500 teeming with talent, said Michael McDowell, the high school’s drama teacher at the time and director of that production. “He played the part,” McDowell said. “It was just a magical fit for him. He was already in the music business. He didn’t have any competition. He had the part.”

McDowell said he connected with Simmons through social media about 10 years ago, and follows his life and career.

“He is a multifaceted, thriving human being. His talent exceeds acting, voice, fitness,” McDowell said. “What is obvious about him is his self-affirmation and his self-confidence.

“He exudes confidence. He gave confidence away to other people. In a sea of students trying to achieve confidence, he was like giving it away.”

Not a one-note career

As a young adult, Simmons commuted back and forth between the United States and Germany for a while until he decided to marry his first wife and become a permanent resident of Germany in 1991.

He took a job on a military base and enrolled in a few college courses. And then came his first record deal in 1993 with then Bertelsmann Music Group, a German media company.

“The music business is very global but it is extremely local. And the music I was doing at the time was not the kind of music I could have done in America. It was not the music I grew up on,” Simmons said.

It was the popular Eurodance music, electronic dance music. “But the song we did kind of flopped so I lost that deal,” Simmons said. So he broadened his resume.

He had a two-year deal with Sony and toured successfully as a pop star in Scandinavia. Then he struck out on his own with a string of bands. He formed his own label, released a solo album and became a remix producer. He toured as a hip-hop artist.

He was on the first season of Germany’s edition of “The Voice.” He performed “Purple Rain” with a full orchestra in concert in Germany.

He started giving voice lessons. More recently, he developed a home workout program that combines fitness training with vocal exercises.

“My career path was a double-edged sword,” Simmons said. “If I had the choice of sticking with one thing in order to financially sustain myself and my family, I would have loved to have done that. Doing all these things was primarily out of necessity.

“In the end, I am really glad that I did try all these different things because I learned through that, in this country, the only way to have a long career is by diversifying. It is by doing all these things.”

“I have so many friends who have done one thing, who have stuck with their one thing and they hit a peak and they rode that wave as long as they could and they fell off and no one ever heard from them again.”

That never happened to Simmons.

“When I see an opportunity I take it,” he said.

“Through my career path I have learned a bunch of valuable skills that basically led me to what I am doing today. I was able to channel all of that knowledge into this new field I have entered and able to reap the benefits of it.”

The room where it happens

Simmons’ road to “Hamilton” was similar to “Fame” in high school. He was asked.

“When I first saw the invitation I was about to throw it away. I thought it was spam. And then I thought, let me just check to see if this is legit or not.”

It was legit.

Simmons hired a coach to prepare for the audition in 2018 in London. But, living over in Germany, he really didn’t know anything about the show.

“I didn’t know anything about the piece itself. The only thing I knew about Lin-Manuel Miranda was the guest spot he did on an episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother.’

“I really had to cram to prepare for my audition in London, and even then I had very little knowledge about what the piece was about. I just thought it was a rap musical about the first treasury secretary. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘I can do this, I guess.’”

In the end, he couldn’t. He made it to the final round but was not cast.

“It wasn’t until later when ‘Hamilton’ came out on Disney Plus I was able to see it for myself and I understood. I thought, ‘OK, now I know why I didn’t get the role.’

“From that point on I morphed into a ‘Hamilton’ ultra-fan,” Simmons said. I had plenty of time to do that because we were in lockdown just like everybody else.”

At the beginning the pandemic, Simmons, an asthmatic, contracted a case of COVID that was so severe he struggled for months to be able to sing.

So he focused not on what he couldn’t do, but rather what he could do: his sports training, his fitness workout business and his online teaching.

“My situation during COVID was a lot different than a lot of my colleagues.” Simmons said. “I had so many more things I could do during lockdown.

“I had colleagues who didn’t handle the lockdown, the COVID situation, very well. We had two really close friends who took their own lives because they could not handle not being able to perform. These are among the most talented people I have ever known in my life, and the stress of not being able to go out and do what they loved mentally took its toll, and they ended their lives because of that. That affected me more than anything.”

Then Simmons, still healing from the toll of COVID, got some hopeful news.

“It was during that time, during my rehabilitation, word got out that they were going to bring ‘Hamilton’ to Germany after all.”

A different audition

When Simmons received his second invitation to audition for “Hamilton” in the fall of 2020, things were different. For one, the cast being formed was for the show’s first non-English production. It was set to open in Hamburg.

Simmons says he was different, too.

“I had to go in knowing what I was talking about,” he said. “It made a huge difference because I was able to sell it better. I understood it.”

Simmons found out he made the final round of auditions two days after his 50th birthday.

“The arts, in general, is a young man’s game,” he said. “The fact I was able to keep that trajectory going up and get this role at 50 — well, I would have never thought that 20 years ago.”

Simmons knew that because of his age, the only role that really fit would be George Washington, the towering and revered general and statesman.

“When I did my audition it was really the only role I wanted because I knew that I could do it,” Simmons said.

“I’ve known about George Washington all my life. You learn about him in school. But the details of his life I didn’t actually realize or knew about until I read his biography by Ron Chernow (who also wrote the Hamilton biography that inspired the musical).

“When I read that (I) realized that a lot of his journey paralleled mine. He, as a reluctant leader, as a guy pretty much forced into the leadership position: It is similar when you become a father or when you teach a class.” Simmons said.

“As a fitness trainer I teach a lot of people who don’t want to be there. I also teach a lot of people who are very enthusiastic and learning how to navigate all that, which is pretty much what Washington had to do with his own life.”

Giving it their best shot

Bringing “Hamilton” to Hamburg was difficult.

“It is a very challenging show to put on in this country,” Simmons said. “You have to understand that just like on Broadway or the West End in London, the vast majority of musical pieces that are out right now are copies of famous movies or Disney shows.

“It’s no different here in Germany.”

For example, “The Lion King” just celebrated its 21st anniversary in Hamburg.

“And it’s almost sold out every night — for 21 years,” Simmons said. “Hamilton” was an unknown.

“No one in Germany knew who Alexander Hamilton was, much like it was in the beginning of ‘Hamilton’ in the States,” Simmons said. (But at least in America, Hamilton is on the $10 bill.)

“In Germany, if you say ‘Hamilton’ the first thing people think about is Lewis Hamilton, the race car driver.”

And then there is the musical’s hip-hop format and the casting of people of color.

“Hip-hop has a long history here in Germany — but there are still a lot of Germans who don’t listen to hip-hop or don’t identify with the hip-hop culture.”

“There are Germans who are confused about people of color playing traditionally historically white people.”

And then there are the translations.

“In Germany, most translated shows are horrible. The translations are not very good, so that was always a very critical part of the process of bringing this show to Germany. The translation has to be good.”

Simmons said “Hamilton” in German does have more words than in English, and some cultural references that only American audiences might understand have been changed so German audiences can relate.

“The main point is even though it has more words it still has the same rhythm and the same flow as the American version,” Simmons said. “It’s just the nature of the German language that sometimes you need more words to say the same thing that you do in English. But in other parts you can get away with fewer words.”

For example, Washington’s speech from “One Last Time.”

“They don’t translate word for word but intent for intent,” Simmons said.

“The words for Washington’s speech is actually shorter than the English version but it still says the exact same thing just in fewer words.”

“The reason ‘Hamilton’ works in German is because German is a very aggressive, very consonant-heavy language, which is perfectly suited for hip-hop,” Simmons said. “That’s one of the reasons so many non-Germans love German hip-hop — because it sounds more in your face from a verbal standpoint than in most cases English hip-hop is.”

Simmons said several visitors from the United States specifically came to see the German version of “Hamilton.”

“They all walk away saying the same thing: ‘I have no idea what you guys said but it sounds awesome,’” Simmons said.

Even though “Hamilton” is about American history, Simmons said the story is familiar.

“It has taken a lot of effort on our part to convince people that while the show takes place in American history, the story itself is extremely universal,” Simmons said. “There are parallels. Look at the war going on in Ukraine. If you look at the struggle they have now, fighting against Russia, it is parallel to what America went through with the British.”

Simmons who is now remarried and the father of two grown kids, said his model for playing Washington is Chris Jackson, who originated the role on Broadway in a Tony-nominated performance.

“I play Washington very much like how he is written in the Chernow book: The reluctant general, the father figure, the guy who really is a mentor to Hamilton. He is worried about Hamilton. You see that in the way that he acts.”

Simmons’ aunt, La Tanya Patton of Kansas City, said she isn’t surprised by his success.

“He was always singing and entertaining us as a kid,” Patton said. “He was so amazingly proud when he sang.”

Simmons said he “is having the time of my life.”

“I am really enjoying myself and hope I can stay on this ride for as long as I can.”