John Lloyd Young: Broadway's Jersey Boy
Saturday, November 2, 2024 at 8pm
This performance will include a 15-minute intermission.
Gerald Sternbach: Music Director, Piano
Craig Pilo: Drums
Benny Lipson: Bass
Film, stage, and concert artist, John Lloyd Young, is a Tony and Grammy winner, multi-platinum recording artist and presidential appointee. As the original Frankie Valli in Broadway’s Tony Award-winning Best Musical, Jersey Boys, Young garnered unprecedented accolades from the New York and national media, going on to become the only American actor to date to win all four major Broadway Leading Actor in a Musical honors for a Broadway debut: the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World Award. Young starred in Jersey Boys on London’s West End and was hand-picked by director Clint Eastwood to reprise his role in the Warner Bros. film adaptation, becoming one of only a select few actors in entertainment history to take his Tony-winning role to the big screen.
As a concert artist, Young has taken his expertly-curated repertoire of classic pop and R&B to filled-to-capacity rooms, thrilling his audiences with a “disciplined one-in-a-million high tenor shading into falsetto that he can direct through the stratosphere” (The New York Times). He has played The White House, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Hollywood Bowl, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the U.S. Embassy in Finland, Mar-a-Lago, Clint Eastwood’s Tehama Country Club, New York’s Café Carlyle, Feinstein’s in NY and San Francisco, Radio City Music Hall, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and New Year’s Eve in Times Square.
Young has appeared on Live with Kelly and Michael, The Today Show, Extra, Entertainment Tonight, NPR’s All Things Considered and Here and Now, Access Hollywood, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, and more.
John Lloyd Young’s five-star-rated solo album of classic R&B, My Turn..., debuted as a best-seller on Amazon. It remains a fan-favorite with several songs from the album requested at each of his live performances.
Appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities by Barack Obama, Young was sworn in at the Supreme Court of the United States by Justice Elena Kagan. As a member of the Committee, Young represented the United States on the first U.S. Cultural Mission to the Republic of Cuba, along with fellow Committee members Kal Penn and Alfre Woodard, guest artists Usher, Smokey Robinson, Dave Matthews, violinist Joshua Bell, playwright John Guare, U.S. arts officials, including the Chairs of the NEA and the Smithsonian Institution, and members of Congress.
A resident of Los Angeles, Young was educated at Brown University and in Spain at the University of Salamanca. He knows fluent Spanish, conversational and written Mandarin, and sings in several languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Hebrew, and Italian. Trained by world championship title holders and Chinese Shaolin monks, Young holds a brown belt in Shaolin Temple-style kung fu and is a student and practitioner of Chinese Chan Buddhism. Young ardently supports charities including the USO, amFAR, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Gerald Sternbach is a versatile bi-coastal music director with an impressive career, including thirteen Ovation nominations (winning in 2006) and seven Los Angeles Drama Critic Circle nominations (honored in 2007, 2008, and 2012). In 2015, he made his West End debut with One Night Only with Mel Brooks, performed in LA and filmed for HBO. Sternbach has worked with the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl and played for Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking at the Geffen Theater.
His extensive Southern California credits include conducting 21 shows for Reprise! Broadway’s Best in Concert, such as Sweet Charity, Sunday in the Park with George, Follies, and more. He has worked as an associate conductor on Broadway for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Merlin, The Tap Dance Kid, and Les Misérables (LA premiere). Sternbach continues to collaborate with Frank Ferrante on An Evening With Groucho (PBS).
He has worked with a host of renowned artists, including Carol Burnett, Jennifer Hudson, and Josh Groban. As a songwriter, his collaborations include Club Mom, A Very Cherry Christmas, and Witnesses. Gerald also serves as the musical director for the Valley Outreach Synagogue in Calabasas, California.