Interview: Ben Jones Debuts Solo Show LOVE SONGS at Feinstein's/54 Below February 12th

There is a famous song from a famous musical in which a character declares this to be his moment. Ben Jones has been working as a singing actor for a long time. He has done the plays, he has done the concerts, he has done the group shows, he has even done some choral work. After all those years and all those performances, it is fair to say that this is his moment. Coming off of a win for a Broadway World Cabaret Award for Best Ensemble Soloist, Mr. Jones will present his New York City solo show debut at Feinstein's/54 Below on February 12th. This will not be the virtuoso's 54 Below debut - the stage has practically become a second home to the regular Scott Siegel cast member. And although Mr. Jones has enough experience on the stage in Broadway's Living Room, when he gets up there to perform some LOVE SONGS for Valentine's Day, what he is really looking forward to is sharing with his audience the man that is Ben Jones.

As the days wind down toward opening night, Ben Jones joined Broadway World Cabaret for a quick chat about the program, how his wife gave him the adventure of a lifetime, and how much the act of collaboration means to him.

This interview has been edited for space and content.

Ben Jones, welcome to Broadway World! How are you today?

I'm fine, thanks so much.

You just won the audience award for the Broadway World Cabaret Awards. How was that experience for you?

I mean, it was amazing, you know? It's so funny... since I came to New York, Scott Siegel's been putting me on stage more than anybody else in town. And when I saw that I was nominated, I mentioned it to him, I was asking him, and kind of everybody that I knew, "Did you nominate me for this?" cause I didn't see it coming... and Scott kind of talked it down a little bit. And what I found out later was... when I won, he said, "I talked it down and I shouldn't have, but the reason I talked it down is I didn't think you would win, and I didn't want you to feel bad." He said, "Oh, don't worry about that," when I was nominated, but then I told him later that I won, he said, "Yeah, I know, and I apologize for talking it down. I shouldn't have, but the reason I did is I really didn't think you would win." So anyway, it was a thrill, it's been a lot of really good attention and press, which is awesome, it has allowed me to have a little bit more leeway with having to move my show around, and getting a little bit more cooperation out of Feinstein's with moving dates around. So it's just been really great timing to have that happen and it's been great.

I'm glad that the experience was a good one for you, and it was very gracious of Mr. Siegel to try and protect you in that way and then to tell you the truth afterward.

Absolutely. I think he's had other folks who've been nominated for it and have not won - in fact, I know that's the case, and so he had seen that happen enough times that he was - yeah, protect is the right word. He was being very protective in telling me to not think too much of it.

I troll the 54 Below website to see what shows are coming up, and you have appeared in so many of his shows. How did Scott and you come to form your alliance?

Scott and Barb really deserve a lot of credit here. They have a small family of performers - and family really is the right word here - people that they hold very dear and that they care a lot about, and I've been incredibly fortunate to join that family. My introduction to Scott came through Marcus Lovett, who has also appeared in a lot of Scott's shows, we're friends. He introduced me to Scott, and I'll never forget it - Scott kind of looked me up and down and said, "What do you sing?" and I said, "I think I could do something from Les Mis for you." And he put me in the next show, and he took a real vested interest in making sure that anytime I wanted some time on stage, he would give it to me. And Barb has been a really great sounding board. She's incredibly honest with me. She has pulled me aside after performances and said, "That's not your song," or "You need a haircut," and they're just incredibly caring producers. Like I said, they have this family of performers around them and I've been so lucky to be a part of that.

You are an in-demand singer on the symphony concert circuit around the world, but your time in New York has been surprisingly brief. Tell me about the journey that brought you to New York City.

I was all but settled in San Francisco - I did grad school there and then performed with shows and ensembles in San Francisco - that kind of helped me to put roots down there, and I became a frequent collaborator and friends with Michael Tilson Thomas, who was the artistic director at San Francisco Symphony. So I had no reason to leave San Francisco really, but my wife got the job of a lifetime in New York, came home one day and said, "I'm sorry, but we're moving to New York and it's not even a conversation." So we were very suddenly in New York. I had lived in New York for a year in the middle of college - I took some time off from college to do a production of Cats, a regional production, and afterward moved to New York, so it wasn't brand new to me but it was definitely different circumstances. When I lived in New York at 21 or 22, I was young, broke, single, and now I was coming to New York married and, I guess, still young. This was three years ago, and I was starting to get some traction and some attention, just auditioning for folks. Every time I would walk into an audition room and sing, the folks at the table would say something along the lines of, "Wow, do the Phantom people know you're in town?" you know, I sang for those folks a number of times. But the pandemic came along right at the point that I was getting attention in New York and it changed everything, as it did for everybody else. I think what I've been really fortunate to find is that those nightclubs in New York, like Feinstein's/54 Below, were deemed essential during the pandemic when the theater and everything else was closed. When there was no auditioning happening, (they) became the place where I spent most of my performing energy over the last two years, and I guess the fruits of that labor are this Broadway World Award, and a new solo show, and being able to take this show to a bunch of nightclubs in the U.S. So I've been really fortunate to find this new venue; most of my career was with symphony orchestras, and operas, and some theater - it's just been great to find this new performance avenue, this cabaret angle which has been really fun for me.

Put a picture in my head of the life of a symphony orchestra soloist. How do you find bookings? How does that all come to you?

The people that are hiring the singers for most symphony orchestras are the conductors. And there are exceptions to that rule - at major symphonies or orchestras there are big artistic teams with long Rolodexes of singers that they like to work with... but really it comes down to knowing conductors. So I was lucky, early in my career, to meet conductors that were either rising stars in the global world of conducting, or already well-established, and Michael Tilson Thomas is a great example. I sort of came onto his radar in San Francisco and as soon as that happened, he was hiring me at least once a season with the San Francisco Symphony. And I was working with certain orchestras regularly enough because of those relationships that I formed with conductors; I would meet them, and then sing for them once, or they would see some other concert or production that I was involved with. And you just continue to get hired by those folks. I was pretty lucky. And what's great about that kind of work is, whereas theatrical productions can take you away for three or six months or even a year of rehearsals and performing and touring, a lot of this concert work can happen in less than a week. You might do a small handful of rehearsals and then one - or a handful of performances - and it pays well, and it's really high profile and it's really enjoyable, but it's a lot shorter than some of the theatrical work.

I'm not a singer, so you'll have to put me in the picture: there has to be a difference between performing on an enormous concert hall stage with a big band behind you, and then going into someplace smaller and intimate like 54 Below with nothing but a piano. How do you, as a technician and as an actor adjust to the difference there?

The way that I think about it, first and foremost, is there's a lot more freedom at 54 Below, musically: when you're performing with an enormous symphony orchestra, it's 150 players behind you - you have to really set, the rehearsal process, what it is that you're going to do. There's not a lot of freedom, once you get to the performances, to, in the moment, decide that you want to interpret something slightly differently because the audience is reacting in a different way. But at 54 Below, when you're in the moment, with the audience kind of in the palm of your hand and reacting in a certain way, you can speed up or you can slow down or you can emote or interpret something in an entirely new way that you've never even rehearsed. And you're able to pull that off cause the band is so much smaller and because you're on that small stage and you're right on top of each other, you're much more connected and able to react in the moment, musically, and collaborate, in real-time. That freedom is something that I've really enjoyed over the last couple of years, it's been a big silver lining due to this whole pandemic, which has brought me into this new venue. It's one of my favorite things about performing and collaborating with Ron Abel - it's really rare to find a musician that you collaborate in the moment really well with - that chemistry is hard to find sometimes. And Ron is just somebody that either does exactly what I expect he's going to do, when he's crafting in the moment, or if he does something that's different than what I'm expecting, it's better than what I even expected. It's a delight. When we found each other, when we performed together for the first time, we both immediately said we need to do more. We both recognized that chemistry right off the bat, and it's been a joy to collaborate with him on the show.

You are about to do your New York city solo club debut, and you're working with Ron Abel on this. How are you feeling about it all?

It's thrilling to be able to piece together enough songs to put a show together. A lot of the people that do this or that have done this for the first time will tell you that one of the hardest things about it - and it's one of the things that we, as actors, really never have to do - one of the hardest things about it is being yourself on stage. When you have to say something in between the songs, to the audience, to take them on a journey and tell a story - it's something that, for a lot of us, is somewhat foreign. I've done theatrical productions, done long runs of musical theater: you never have to be yourself. That's one of the reasons that I love to do this: you get to play other characters. But in a cabaret show, you are asked to be yourself and to take the audience on a really personal journey. It's been such a rewarding experience, coming to understand how that works and getting comfortable with the show that we've created, through the rehearsal process. I'm really looking forward to debuting it in New York and then taking to it on the road. It's been really exciting.

Tell me about your writing process.

It's really fun. I have been a huge fan of this show, Mortified, which plays in a whole bunch of cities throughout the U.S. - it's a show where people read really embarrassing diary entries from their teenage years, only much later. So you're talking about a 30-year-old finding their old diary and going on stage and actually reading a real diary entry. There's a house band for all of these shows, and the Mortified crew that I'm familiar with is the one in Oakland, and their house band is called The Freeze - some of the creators of Freestyle Love Supreme and Hamilton came out of that group, The Freeze. This is all to say, my show sort of mimics some of that structure. Love Songs, as a title, is a little bit tongue in cheek because what I'm doing in the show is telling some embarrassing stories of my own, sort of taking the audience on a journey through the stumbles and fumbles of the long road to happiness. So this sort of tongue-in-cheek title, Love Songs, doesn't really tell the whole story of what the show actually is. It's a really funny and very fun Valentine's Day show that we've put together, and it does - as I kind of look back at what we've created - kind of look a little bit like the structure that you see in those Mortified shows, which is an embarrassing story and then a song.

Do you have any trepidation about sharing something so personal as a mortifying love story?

No, it's really fun. We started with way more material than we needed, and I think the stuff that I was really scared to share might have ended up on the cutting room floor. So what we've ended up with is a really tight and really fun show. I wouldn't say I'm too nervous. The only thing that is scary is, like I said, just being yourself on stage, which is new for me, but I think it's going to be fun.

I am sure that you will be a natural at it.

At various stages in my career, I have done things like this. I'm more excited than anything about the opportunity to be myself on stage and to craft that arc of this show for the audience.

I don't want to give our readers a false impression that you are strictly a concert performer because you're quite an accomplished actor as well. You've done quite a lot of theater, haven't you?

Yes. My first job out of grad school was with Beach Blanket Babylon, which was a musical revue - throughout the course of one evening in that 90-minute show, I was playing twenty to thirty different characters. I would do all those costume changes and come out for small scenes where I was playing Michael Jackson or Michael Phelps or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, or some sort of pop culture icons and famous figures from the time. What that allowed me to do was to really hone those skills from my youth on, to nail down a character in a really quick moment, and to get the most laughs out of an audience - to really get the essence of a character, almost in the way that Saturday Night Live actors do: you have to get to what's funny about somebody and present that thing in a really short amount of time

Tell me about your work with Chanticleer.

Chanticleer is an all-men's group on the West Coast that tours globally, and when I was growing up my perception of that group was that it was perfection in choral singing. It wasn't even really on my radar, that I considered a potential job, but I met the guys in the group when I moved out to San Francisco for grad school, and I stayed in touch with those guys. At a certain point when I was performing in Beach Blanket Babylon, they called and let me know that there was a position opening up, and I joined shortly after. We toured all over Europe and Asia a number of times, not to mention the United States. I did about 750 performances with them over the year that I was with them. It's an amazing musical experience. It's twelve incredible virtuosic singers, all American singers, all men, it was founded more than forty years ago. It was formative in a lot of ways for me as a musician, and as a quick study of new music and interpretation of various texts and languages, because we would be called on to sing in Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, you name it, basically.

Is that easy?

It's not. No, it's really fun, but no, it's not easy. I'd be the first to tell you, I'm not the person who was the best at it. We had linguists in the group who spoke six or ten languages, and I'm not one of those folks. But it's a blast to have access to texts from other languages and cultures to interpret as an artist, as an actor, as a singer, and to be paid to do that full time and to present your interpretations of those works to audiences all of all over the world was just an amazing job for a guy in his twenties. It was really fun.

You sing in both Broadway musicals and operas. Will you be showcasing any aria action on the twelfth?

Actually, Ron asked me if I would, and I think we're going to stick with musical theater and popular music. But there is certainly legit musical theater music from classic Broadway musicals and contemporary Broadway musicals, and some popular music as well.

As someone who can sing in so many different styles, do you have a favorite type of music to sing?

You know, I just love to collaborate. And whether it's with folks like Ron, music directors who are playing in the band, or great conductors, when folks ask me what do I want to do more of, or what is it that I really love to do the most? It's to share the stage with folks who are looking at me in the same way that I'm looking at them, when we're in the moment, and when we're crafting something for an audience in real-time. I think for me, what's been hardest about the pandemic has been that a lot of the opportunities that have come along have been in zoom shows where you don't get to collaborate in real-time. That's been really hard because I think my favorite thing to do - if you ask me musical theater, or concert work, or opera - any of that... as long as it's collaborating with people that are as interested in that moment, that magic that happens in the moment in front of the audience in real-time.

Ben Jones. Thank you for talking with us today - it has been a real treat.

Oh, what a pleasure. Thank you, Stephen.

Ben Jones LOVE SONGS plays Feinstein's/54 Below on February 12th at 9:45 pm. For information and tickets visit the 54 Below website HERE.

THIS is the Ben Jones website.

To post a comment, you must register and login.