Huntington's Jakeim Hart makes Broadway debut in 'Almost Famous'

In March 2020, Huntington's Jakeim Hart was set to star in Broadway's "Sing Street." But that musical got scuttled in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic just as the production was transferring from Off-Broadway.

Hart was almost famous. And now he is a star of "Almost Famous," the just-opened Broadway musical based on the 2000 movie about a high school boy on the road with a rock group in order to write an article for Rolling Stone magazine. Hart plays band manager Dennis Hope, portrayed by comedian Jimmy Fallon in the film, and understudies the role of the band's lead guitarist, Russell Hammond, played by Billy Crudup in the movie and Chris Wood onstage.

"We were actually rehearsing the Broadway version of 'Sing Street' while we were performing the Off-Broadway version," Hart, 28, recalls in a phone interview. "So it was kind of like having two different plays in your head at once," he adds, chuckling. "But it was a really exciting time. We actually spent one day in [Broadway's] Lyceum Theatre where the show was going to go up, and basically had a glorified sound check. And then we were told to go home for I believe it was two weeks at that time. And now [almost] three years later, here we are!"

And he almost wasn't. His father Keith Hart, an educator and musician who as Keyth Hart performed regularly at such Long Island bars and restaurants as Teddy's in Oyster Bay and Pace's Steak House in Hauppauge, died unexpectedly in January at age 66 — leaving Jakeim, who by then had auditioned for the Russell Hammond role, so bereft he nearly passed on the producers' callback request.

"I really kind of wanted to shut myself off from the world," he reflects. "I just wanted to grieve by myself and not have anything to do with music." But his mother, entrepreneur Jan Hart, persuaded her son to go on. "She was like, 'Hey, you really can't get in the way of opportunity when it comes knocking and you never know where it's gonna go.' She was like, 'Are you crazy? Why are you trying to watch this go down in the drain?' So I ended up going through with it."

Born in Mineola, Hart lived with his family in Uniondale for a short while before settling in Huntington (with a sojourn to Virginia with his mother for his fifth-grade year). He graduated from Elwood-John H. Glenn High School in 2012, performing annually in the school musical — "Little Shop of Horrors," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Once Upon a Mattress" and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" — and concurrently took classes at the Long Island High School for the Arts his senior year. All during high school and in summers, he studied at Huntington's From Stage to Screen performing arts academy.

Hart went on to earn a theater degree from Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College, and his first job out of school combined that with his minor in Africana studies: working with the Syosset-based nonprofit ERASE Racism, "doing outreach to kids and helping to develop culturally inclusive programming so students of color could feel included."

Looking back on his Long Island upbringing, with so many theater academics available, the Manhattan resident says those years "feel very purpose-affirming now. Like, 'Oh, that kid, he was on to something. He knew in his heart what he wanted to do and he just never gave up.' "