Photograph by Alex Hoerner
About
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.
Over the years, Young has sung selections from Jersey Boys several times at the White House, in the halls of Congress, and to Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, Bidens, Trumps, Pences, the Prime Minister and First Lady, Shinzo and Akie Abe, of Japan and the President and First Lady of Finland, Sauli Niinistö and Jenni Haukio.
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, the Macy’s Thanksgiving 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 and has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union since 1995.