Jersey Boys on Broadway news

Life at the top's a little turbulent for 'Jersey Boys' star, but who's complaining?
Sunday, April 15, 2007

By VIRGINIA ROHAN
STAFF WRITER


When a show called “Jersey Boys” becomes an overnight sensation, what happens to the life of its actual Jersey-boy star?

“It’s taken it over,” says John Lloyd Young, who has won raves and a Tony for his breakout role as Frankie Valli in the Broadway musical about the Four Seasons. “It’s far more than I expected it would be. … It was only by accident that I realized, ‘Oh, I also have to be an ambassador for this entire production and for Broadway.”

It’s a Wednesday evening, two hours before the opening curtain of another “Jersey Boys,” which started previews in October 2005 — the same month Young moved to Jersey City.

“I’ve been a Jersey boy ever since we opened,” he says, in his dressing room at the August Wilson Theatre.



Posing for photos under its marquee a little earlier, he was an impressive ambassador, cordial to fans passing by — even to the startlingly loud guy who shouted, “John Lloyd, you are a handsome man.”

He is. But what’s really striking is his candor about the turmoil that accompanied his triumphs of the past year and a half.

“It was exhilarating, but it was also emotionally painful,” Young says. “Someone told me ‘the wind blows strongest at the top of the flagpole,’ and I was like, yeah, I guess this means I’m doing something that people are noticing.”






JOHN LLOYD YOUNG



Lives: Jersey City

Portrays: Newark’s Frankie Valli in Broadway’s “Jersey Boys”

Age: 31

Born: Sacramento, Calif.

Awards/honors: 2006 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World awards for “Jersey Boys”; his own caricature at Sardi’s.





“Jersey Boys” is the story of how four teens from Belleville, Bergenfield and Newark became the Four Seasons. It’s told, “Rashomon”-style, from the perspective of each original group member — Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi, Bob Gaudio (the group’s prolific songwriter) and lead singer Frankie Valli (born Castelluccio).

“The four of us talk directly to you. We need you to believe our point of view,” says Young, who says the format helps keep the actors “fully engaged” every night.

To prepare for the role, Young watched Valli perform in Las Vegas, but he also talked with Gaudio, who, as a Bergenfield teen musical prodigy was introduced to the others by their pal Joe Pesci (yes, the future Oscar winner). Gaudio has been Valli’s musical partner for 43 years on handshake (or “Jersey contract,” as they call it), and he produced the Broadway show’s Grammy-winning cast album.

‘Key to the character’

“If you talk to someone’s best friend, you’ll get a better version of them than you’ll get from them themselves, because, especially when you’re famous, you’re concerned with legacy, and image, and all that,” says Young, who was particularly interested in Gaudio’s very first impression of Valli.

“He said that he was a little man with a big heart. I thought, ‘That’s gonna be the key to the character for me.’ ”

By Young’s count, Valli has seen him in the role eight times, and he takes it as a “high compliment” that the singing legend has often said Young’s performance spooks him a bit. “It means I’m getting too close for comfort, and that’s my goal as an actor. … I think it’s more interesting to an audience to look inside somebody and see their vulnerabilities.”

The son of an “East Coast WASP” dad (who was in the military) and an Italian-American mom, the actor describes his background as “a nice meeting of the stiff upper lip and the simmering, uncontrolled emotions of a hot-blooded Sicilian underneath.”

Voice training

Born in Sacramento, Calif., in the mid-1970s — “by the time I knew what music was, the Four Seasons songs were already Muzak” — Young grew up all over the country, but mostly in Plattsburgh, N.Y.

He studied political science, then drama, at Brown University, but always wanted to act. Before “Jersey Boys,” he’d done mostly plays (including a few at Millburn’s Paper Mill Playhouse. Though his professional singing experience consisted of “a few songs in small musicals in New York,” Young always knew he was “a very strong singer.”

After learning that the actor who originated the Valli role in La Jolla, Calif. — a production Young had unsuccessfully tried out for — was not coming with the show to Broadway, Young guessed that this juicy role was “vocally a killer.”

And so, in the four months from when he was cast to when rehearsals started, Young trained every day with voice teacher Katie Agresta, who’d worked with performers like Jon Bon Jovi. At first, he got hoarse after a few of Valli’s trademark falsetto songs, but he could sing the whole score by rehearsals.

Though he looked at photos of the Stephen Crane projects in Newark, where Valli grew up, he already had a “personal context” for playing the role: His maternal grandfather, whom he thanks in his Playbill bio, was a first-generation Italian-American from Brooklyn and then Queens.

Young’s mom died of cystic fibrosis when he was 2, but as a kid he spent every summer with his Italian-American relatives in Whitestone. “Those summers were very important to me,” he says. “My father remarried, and I had a happy childhood, but it was detached from my [Italian-American] roots. This show allows me to connect to what I always yearned for — my own history.”

Six shows a week

After winning the Tony last June, Young went back to that old neighborhood to see the house his Italian immigrant great-grandparents built.

“This is the hokiest thing that I’ll probably ever say in this interview, but they’re still there, because they’re here, inside,” he says, patting his chest. “And that history really infused me with the right kind of heart to play this part.”

Young now does six shows a week — a more manageable schedule, thanks to a renegotiation after his Tony win. On the day of this interview, Young’s first contract extension was about to expire, but his agents were working on another one. At deadline, word was that he’ll remain with the show for quite a while.

Young also has a one-year talent-holding deal with ABC but says, “I am only interested in leaving the role of a lifetime for something that I’ve either always wanted to do or for the elusive other role of a lifetime, which would render the saying ‘role of a lifetime’ null and void.”


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