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Published Sunday February 5, 2006 From roles in Omaha to a hit on Broadway BY BOB FISCHBACH
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Bellevue Boy Hits Broadway Big Time.

John Lloyd Young Who: Star of smash-hit Broadway musical "Jersey Boys," story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons Area ties: Lived in Bellevue from 1985 to 1990 when his father, Karl, was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base. Attended Birchcrest Elementary School and Mission Junior High in Bellevue. Favorite singer: Young may be in the hip-hop generation, but Frank Sinatra has always been his favorite. Sinatra influenced Valli's style. Both grew up in Jersey, dreaming of the big time. Foreign fluency: He's lived abroad in Venezuela and Spain and is fluent in Spanish.

It's a clichéd headline. But sometimes oversize dreams come true.

John Lloyd Young says his acting ambitions began in the late 1980s when he appeared in "The Wizard of Oz" at the Emmy Gifford Children's Theatre (now the Rose) and in "A Christmas Carol" at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

He watched. He worked hard. He kept trying his wings.

"I was flying in a holding pattern, circling Broadway for years, and finally I got clearance to land," he said in a recent phone interview from his home in Jersey City, N.J.

What Young landed was the lead in Broadway's megahit new musical, "Jersey Boys." The gritty, blue-collar tale of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons drew unanimous raves when it opened in New York in November. So did Young, playing Valli.

"The great thing about this character is that he's close to being a version of myself as a struggling actor for seven years," said Young, who admits to being in his late 20s and who shares Valli's Italian-American heritage. "Frankie Valli is a fighter. He started with nothing. He had no resources, no foothold. He had to have persistence and grit."

The grueling role requires serious acting and dancing skills. It also calls for a killer three-and-a-half-octave singing range that stretches seemlessly from baritone to falsetto for famous Valli hits like "Sherry," "Walk Like a Man" and "Big Girls Don't Cry."

"This is a great part," said "Jersey Boys" director Des McAnuff. The double Tony winner spoke by phone from La Jolla, Calif.

"It's the Hamlet of musical theater roles," McAnuff said. "It gives an actor a lot of peaks and valleys to work through, both in songs and dramatic scenes. Thank God John Lloyd worked as hard as he did developing his craft. We needed that sort of depth and commitment."

Young began appearing in plays at age 6. Born in Sacramento, Calif., he also lived in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Montgomery, Ala., as the family followed his Air Force father's career.

"We never lived in entertainment capitals like New York, Los Angeles or Chicago," Young recalled. "Omaha was the closest I got to being able to fully realize my ambitions as a kid. It had lots of opportunity, acting-wise."

It was in Omaha, Young said, that he decided showbiz would be his life. He earned cash doing commercials and a parenting video for Boys Town. At the Playhouse, he soaked up acting at the feet of Dick Boyd, Mary Peckham and Tom Wees.

"My biggest influence was (former Playhouse artistic director) Charles Jones," Young said. "He was very warm, very good with kids. He had a special touch that preserved actors' egos while gently coaxing them in a better direction."

James Larson, now artistic director at the Rose, remembered Young.

"He was like a lot of the kids who audition to be in our shows," Larson said, "kids who just want to get in front of an audience. Really, in that way, he was no different than a thousand other kids I've seen."

Maybe, Larson said, tenacity made the difference.

But Young felt different, caught up in makeup and make-believe.

"While other kids were playing Little League, I was at Mangelsen's all the time buying liquid latex to make prosthetic gashes."

After earning a liberal arts degree at Brown University in Rhode Island, he immediately headed for New York.

In fall 2004, Young was one of four finalists to play Valli in "Jersey Boys." But McAnuff cast television actor David Norona to originate the role at the La Jolla Playhouse. Young went back to work on his craft.

An immediate smash, "Jersey Boys" saw its San Diego-area run extended three times. When it transferred to Broadway, Norona bowed out for personal reasons. Young got a callback.

"John had improved vastly over that year," McAnuff said. "He had clearly worked on not only his singing but his dialect, and he came in looking like Valli."

Ninety seconds into the audition, McAnuff said, he glanced at the show's co-author, Oscar winner Marshall Brickman, and smiled. "We knew we'd found our boy."

From the moment he was cast, Young trained every day for four months before starting rehearsals. He swam daily to build his lungs and breath support. He listened to Four Seasons songs on a loop for three months straight.

He watched footage of Valli performing. He went to Las Vegas and saw him live.

Having no dance training, he worked with a choreographer for a month.

He also maxed out his credit cards, having quit his job to prepare full time.

"I'm still working my way out of that hole, but this show has changed my life. I have no regrets."

No kidding. Thanks to "Jersey Boys," which has racked up millions of dollars in advance ticket sales stretching into next August, Young now can dream about choosing new projects instead of struggling to find a job - any job.

From the first time he read "Jersey Boys," Young said, he believed it would be a hit. The story sold him.

"There were no inane scenes to suffer through from song to song," he said. "It's almost like a sports fan knowing the outcome of a historical game, and then there's a movie made about that season. The pleasure is the back story, watching it all unfold. To come into the theater and meet these guys when they're flirting with petty crime, being put in jail, struggling for a club date - but knowing they're gonna break, it's fascinating."

Minus the crime, it's sort of like Young's story.

"The person playing Frankie Valli now is very different from the person who first saw that script," Young said of himself. "It took me six months to find that character, like a private effort to scale Mount Everest. Nobody saw that."

Welcome to the top, John Lloyd Young. Anything you want to say to the folks who knew you when?

"I miss Omaha. That was the best years of my childhood. I still remember raking cornhusks from our yard in the Falcon Forest neighborhood (in Bellevue). Thanks for taking me back there."

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