SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Aug. 27, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — Trevor James has been in the smash-hit musical “Jersey Boys” not once, not twice, not three times, but, counting this current production, four times… and three of those times he’s played the legend that is Frankie Valli.
This time around, he will take on the role for Pioneer Theatre Company, in its premiere of the show from Sept. 13 to Sept. 28.
The four-time Tony Award-winning musical features a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, music by Bob Gaudio, who was an original member of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, and lyrics by Bob Crewe.
The electrifying show tells the story of the rise of four blue-collar kids who became one of the best-selling pop groups in history. Spanning the second half of the 20th century, “Jersey Boys” takes audiences on a nostalgic journey from the group’s humble beginnings in 1950s New Jersey all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This widely beloved musical is filled with chart-topping hits like “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Sherry,” “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night),” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Stay,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” “Walk Like A Man,” “Who Loves You,” “Working My Way Back to You,” “Rag Doll,” and many more.
“Jersey Boys” ran on Broadway for 12 years and more than 4,600 performances, closing in 2017.
PTC artistic director and the production’s director and choreographer Karen Azenberg said she’s delighted to be staging the piece.
“I’m so pleased that the stars finally aligned and we’re among the first in Utah to bring this ‘jukebox juggernaut’ to the Beehive State,” she said. “However, with the incredible popularity of ‘Jersey Boys’ touring across the country, we have had to be patient. We also have the distinction of being the first production in Utah that presents the material as it was originally written for the Broadway stage.”
And James, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, has quite the command of that material. He played the role of Valli to rave reviews most recently at the Riverside Theatre in Veno Beach, Florida, in January of this year, as well as at Theatre Aspen in August 2022. He was also understudy for Valli and vocal double in “Jersey Boys” at Stages St. Louis in October 2021.
James earned his BFA in Musical Theatre from Texas State University, graduating in 2018, and has since appeared on stages and screens across the globe. Fresh out of college in 2019, he starred as Tony in “West Side Story” in Japan at the brand-new IHI Stage Around Tokyo, which features a 360-degree stage that surrounds a 1,400-seat audience section that rotates on a turntable to follow the action (yes, you read that right.)
He has also been seen in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” at the Cape Playhouse in Massachusetts, “Sunday in the Park with George” at the Pasadena Playhouse, “Into the Woods” at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, “Disney’s Newsies” at Red Mountain Theatre Company in Alabama, and “The Karate Kid: The Musical” pre-Broadway at Stages St. Louis. In TV and film, he’s been featured in “Prodigal Son” on Fox, “WeCrashed” on AppleTV+, and in the feature film “Et Tu.” He made his writing debut with the short film “The God Can,” in which he also starred.
James, who told us he has never been to Utah before now, is embarking on the second week of rehearsals. We chatted with him over the phone about subjects including his four turns in “Jersey Boys,” how he keeps his performances fresh, and what’s still on his bucket list.
We asked him what made him want to be a professional performer.
“It’s funny because I started in community theater when I was in first grade; a teacher came to my parents and was like, ‘He can’t sit still, so maybe let’s try this,'” James said. “And I was a big sports kid as well, but my parents asked if I wanted to do ‘Annie.’ It was part of the after-school program, and I auditioned for it, and I played the role of Rooster. And I walked out and I said my first line, and I vividly remember getting a laugh and being bit by the bug, right there. And then it was still a hobby. I did commercials as a kid; I’m from LA, so I kind of got plugged into the entertainment industry after I started community theater. Some people saw me in that and were like, you should get him an agent, for commercials.
“But fast forward to when I was 16 years old, at my community theater, I was in a teen production of ‘Parade,’ with music and lyrics by Robert Brown, about Leo Frank, and I got to play Leo Frank, and it’s a pretty heavy show. And I just remember that as being the period of time that I knew, ‘Oh, acting and performing is much more than just singing and dancing, or it can be.’ And that’s kind of when in my head, my brain switched to, you know, I think I want to do this with my life, and I want to pursue it in college and study and learn and get better. But yeah, it was just funny, that transition from it being a hobby that I loved dearly to feeling that ‘I’m here on this earth meant to do this.'”
James also talked about his journey with “Jersey Boys.”
“I first did it in 2021 at Stages St. Louis. That was one of the first regional shows in the country back after the pandemic. I remember sending in a tape, and I actually didn’t play Frankie Valli just yet, I played Joe Pesci, and I covered Frankie in the production,” he said. “And I was so lucky because I got to cover this guy named Chris Kale Jones, who actually played Frankie Valli in the first national tour of the show. So talk about a wealth of knowledge on just the history of the show and the character. And so it was really, really special to get to watch him and get to learn the role without having to do it every night; it’s such a monster of a role. And then, also, we do a thing in the show where we have vocal doubling offstage, to get that Frankie Valli effect, which he used to do in the recording studio with double his voice. But since we’re doing live theater, there’s usually a live double happening offstage. And so I got to basically get all the material in my body without playing the role just yet. So that was really great to just gain that confidence in the role and watch someone go through their process before having to step into it myself.
“And then after that, I got to play it in Aspen at Theatre Aspen. It’s one of those shows where you’re forced every time to kind of reinvest in the material, because everyone brings something slightly different every time. I’ve never done it with the same group of four guys, and so investing in those relationships again, and just stepping back and refreshing myself with the material, trying to look at it with a fresh lens every time.
“And that also is helpful when you’re working with directors like Karen here, who have a fresh, kind of different take on the show as a whole, and also little different choices in the role. And so different subtleties kind of emerge. And it’s really nice now that I know the role kind of back and front, because then I feel like I can have more freedom to just kind of let it take me where it wants to, versus me fishing for a line or thinking of how I need to play this scene. I feel like it’s kind of embedded in me at this point that I can now be a vessel for the director’s vision.”
We also asked him what he loves about this musical and specifically the character of Frankie Valli.
“As a musical, if you take out the jukebox aspect of it, as a musical, as constructed, it is a fantastic show up there with other great musicals in the musical theater canon, just as a whole,” he said. “And so when you’re working with material that’s just inherently great to start, that’s always a privilege, because not all musicals are created equal that way sometimes. You know, you take all those songs, that catalog of amazing music, and put it with this incredible story and this amazing book writing that this script has, that’s what kind of keeps bringing me back. The songs, as I’m sure you can imagine, are also relatively challenging to sing, very high, such an iconic sound, and I’m just trying to pay honor to that. But if this character wasn’t so rich and so complicated and multifaceted, it would give me pause to put my voice and my body through all I have to do with the singing — if there wasn’t such a great payoff with just the character itself being one of the best I’ve ever played.”
We also asked James to tell us more about playing Tony in the state-of-the-art theater in Tokyo, which he did for four months in 2019.
“Of course, I love talking about this,” he said. “And again, talk about another amazing show. It was a gift to do, because Tony was always one of my dream roles. It was technically called an international tour, but it didn’t tour. We rehearsed it in New York, and it was a tour because we rehearsed it in the U.S. and then toured it to Japan. But this space, so picture, if you will, a 1,400-seat audience section surrounded by eight stages making a circle around the audience, creating 360 degrees. And the audience section sat on top of a turntable and would rotate to whichever stage was being utilized at the time.
“It was my first job out of college, and that was back when we were all still non-union, and we were all so happy to be there, but the designers involved with that show were all like Broadway Tony Award-winning designers,” he said. “The space was so huge and so innovative and new that they had the best of the best working on it, and all of them kind of came to us, like, you guys just need to realize you’re young and just got out of college; you’ll never do anything like this again. Everything was built to scale. There were two-story buildings that were literally to scale. Our set designer said, ‘I’m not designing a set, I’m city planning.’ The director for that was this guy named David Saint.”
James explained that Saint was mentored for 30 years by Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of “West Side Story” and other iconic Broadway shows, and this production was the first time he was able to present the show the way Laurents had always dreamed it.
“So he was, again, just a wealth of knowledge on all things ‘West Side Story,'” James said. “So I’ve been very lucky to work with really, really good directors that just bring such a specific vision, and it’s always nice when you have someone with a like-minded vision. We did that for four months, and that was the second one of those buildings made. There’s another one that started in Amsterdam, that has a show that’s specific to Amsterdam history there, but their goal was to build these spaces, kind of all over the world, and open them with a production of ‘West Side Story.’ So we did four months, and then there were two other full Japanese casts ready to come in after and just keep the show going. Then of course COVID happened, so I think they got through like one other cast, then had to set it down for a while.”
We also asked him about his time with “Karate Kid: The Musical.”
“Honestly, my journey with the ‘Karate Kid’ is kind of a greater representation of just how this business works,” he said. “The lead producer of ‘Karate Kid: The Musical,’ Kumiko Yoshii, was our lead producer for ‘West Side Story’ in Japan. People aren’t lying when they say this business is all about connections. So right after ‘West Side Story,’ I kind of got a bit attached to the ‘Karate Kid,’ just helping them out with some performances of some of the material, where they were presenting it to other investors and producers. And then they ended up doing their out-of-town tryout at Stages St. Louis, where I’d also worked before. And, you know, I was in LA at the time when they were having auditions, so I ended up having to audition on Zoom, and Zoom was not the most friendly of performance mediums.
“So they ended up having someone else that was gonna be playing Daniel, the karate kid, that was coming from New York. And then they found out that during the run, he needed to go away for a weekend. And so they called me up and asked if I would want to come play it for a weekend. And I said yeah, of course I would. And then they said, you know what, no, we want you in the show. So they ended up basically building me an ensemble track. And then I understudied Daniel LaRusso and got to go on at some guaranteed performances. And oh, my gosh, that show, I can’t wait to see where that show goes next.”
James explained that the musical might still go to Broadway.
“I think that is the goal and the dream,” he said. “It’s just all a matter of the right time and the right theater; like Broadway, there’s only 16 Broadway houses, some of them have plays, some of them are maybe too big to put the ‘Karate Kid’ in, or too small,” he said. “Yeah, I have great hope that that show will have a very bright future, and it’s so fun. We did a karate presentation where we had one of our Olympic karate kata performers come in and do like a karate demonstration, and kind of put us through a basics course of karate. So again, it’s so cool, in no other profession do you become like a tradesman of things you’d never thought you’d do.”
We also asked him what’s next up for him.
“Right after this, the day after we close this, I fly to Rochester, New York, to do a production of ‘West Side Story,'” he said. “I’m going to get to reprise my role as Tony, which I’m very excited about, at this new theater up in Rochester that’s getting off the ground, and this is kind of the inaugural season, so I’m getting to play the role again, and play it in America, which is fun. So I’m doing that, and then slated way off into the spring, I have a contract where I’m going to be doing ‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.’ I’ve done that already, and then it’s back to auditioning, looking for something new. It seems funny, how quickly things just pop up that can either derail something else or be perfect timing for another thing.”
We asked him if any specific roles are on his bucket list right now.
“I’m a big Sondheim fanatic, and I’ve got to do a few Sondheim shows in the last couple of years,” he said. “I got to do ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ at Pasadena Playhouse, and I got to do ‘Into the Woods’ at the Guthrie, and I’m a believer that good theater can be made anywhere as long as the material is great. So I just, I mostly want to keep making great theater. I’m also interested in TV and film, but yeah, I want to continue to do work that is good and fulfilling, wherever that may be. I think wherever that is is where I’m meant to be at the time. I try not to look too far ahead, but I’d like to do the show ‘Assassins’ by Sondheim, ‘A Little Night Music’ by Sondheim, ‘Light in the Piazza,’ that’s another one — there’s a few bucket list shows in the back of my mind.”
He also added specifically about “Jersey Boys”: “Let me just say, about the show, everyone knows the songs, everyone loves the songs. But anyone who thinks that they know what these guys have gone through probably doesn’t actually know. So come see the show, you’ll be surprised in so many ways.”
For more information on James, click here, and for more information and tickets for “Jersey Boys,” click here.
