Preview of John Lloyd Young’s Interview with Art Works!
May 27th, 2013Art Works, the official blog of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently posted a terrific interview with Tony Award-winner John Lloyd Young! Check out a preview of below by blogger Paulette Beete:
NEA: What do you remember as your earliest experience with the arts?
JOHN LLOYD YOUNG: My first experience with the arts was as a preschooler, gluing alphabet letters, alphabet pasta, onto construction paper to learn the alphabet. And, sort of, happily, as an adult, I also do visual art besides acting. I have art works in gallery on the East coast and the West coast and it is an assemblage-style art. So now as an adult I am gluing things onto things again.
NEA: What was your journey to becoming an artist?
YOUNG: My first experience was making things with construction paper. But it took me until after I succeeded as an actor to get back into physical visual art-making. But my experience as an artist or a creative person was, most of my life, as an actor and performer. My first experiences were through being a kid in plays at the community theater or musicals [and] school plays. When I was very little, in the early 1980s, there were two movies that came out that I never could forget and both movies have prototypical characters in them that I’ve modeled myself, for better or worse, after as an artist and a performer my whole life. Those movies were Tootsie, with Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie, and Amadeus, with Tom Hulce as Amadeus. Anyone who knows those movies well knows that is a huge blessing but also a very huge curse to identify with those two characters throughout a life. So those two movies really gave me a very strong, passionate desire to be an artist, or involved in the arts, to be a creative person… When I ended up at college, at Brown University, I decided to really focus on [acting] and graduated out of the theater program at Brown.
Click HERE to read the entire interview.
Hi John,
The interview is great. You are such a talented and wonderful young man. As you know I met you on October 11, 2005 during previews of Jersey Boys at the August Wilson Theater and have seen you flourish in so many ways.When I met you in 2005 I knew then that you were so special and it is so exciting for me to see how you and your career have flourished.
Your interest in the arts is such a wonderful part of your life.
I will be coming to “Jersey Boys” to see you before the end of June. You are the best “Frankie” and I just love watching you in the role.I will miss you when you end your time in Jersey Boys but I know there will be new things in the future to look forward to, that you will be involved in.
See you soon,
XOXOXO
Viv
Comment by viv — May 29, 2013 @ 6:53 am