Jose Llana will be returning to Siam as the leading man in the Lincoln Center Theater production of The King and I from April 19 to May 1. But that’s not all that’s keeping him busy this spring, on May 13 he will also release his American debut solo album called Altitude. The album features tracks he’s performed throughout his career, pieces from composers like Adam Guettel and his grandfather Richard Rodgers, modern masters like William Finn and David Byrne, and even a couple of pop songs from the likes of Ed Sheeran and Billy Joel. The title of the album comes from one of the songs from Guettel’s Saturn Returns, a song cycle which saw him visit the Greek gods through original musical compositions. Even though in “Icarus” Llana sings cautiously about how “altitude will heat up your wings and they'll come unglued”, sky seems to be the limit for the artist. We spoke to him about his album and the new perspectives he’s found having played the two most important male roles in The King and I.
Is it easy to slip back into the King again?
It’s fantastic, I’ve been there for one week in rehearsals and over the weekend we had a very emotional time saying goodbye to Kelli [O'Hara] and Ken [Watanabe]. It’ll be a fun two week run for me.
I attended Kelli’s last performance and it was so terrific.
It was electric backstage.
I had no idea Rodgers and Hammerstein could be sexy until I saw Bartlett’s Sher production of The King and I.
(Laughs) That’s awesome. I’m sure he’d love to hear you say that.
Did he give you and Kelli any special indications in order to achieve that? This production is all very much about the subtlety.
Very much so, I think as actors we’ve all been fortunate in how Bart’s always wanted us to bring up very specific qualities of ourselves. Especially with the four Kings who have been in this production, it’s all about playing the text and the Anna we have. The constant for all of the Kings has been Ruthie Ann Miles, she adds such an awesome grounding layer to everything on that stage.
You played Lun Tha in the revival with Donna Murphy, now that you’ve played the King have you developed new empathy for him that you didn’t have in 1996?
Of course, twenty years ago I purposefully tried to see the show only from Lun Tha’s perspective. It was a very limited three scene perspective. Now as the King I have the wider breadth of the political scheme of where Siam and Burma and England were, so it’s been enlightening to see the whole picture from the King’s perspective.
Your album is wonderful and I’m curious about something I realized while listening to it. At one point you have “Lonely Town” from On the Town which is all about wanting love, then you have “Chip’s Lament” from Spelling Bee which is well about boners, and then we have “Marry Me a Little” from Company which is about marriage. It’s as if all these songs are in conversation with each other and it made me think of the King’s constant battles with himself. When you were putting together the songs did you intend them to be in dialogue with each other?
That’s a really observant point, when I was selecting the songs obviously the first reason I included them was because they’re all songs I’ve sung in my career, so the fact that all the songs are in conversation with each other is testament to the songs I click with, that I have the most connection with. The question of love is always the constant of almost all songs written by anybody, what’s great about the progression of songs in the album is they approach love from all these different angles. One is finding love, one is horny love or adolescent love, and since I’m an LGBT person “Marry Me a Little” over the past twenty years has completely changed meaning to me. I’ve been singing it for two decades, so the song used to be about what would happen if I got married, and now that it is legal to be married as a gay person, the song is about the choice of marriage, as opposed to not having a choice before. It’s become very profound to me. I love that you pointed that out, it makes me very proud.
I can’t wait for them to do that gay male version of Company they were rumored to do a while back.
I was a part of that reading, it wasn’t all men though, Bobby is gay in it but it had gay and straight couples.
Since we’re in Sondheim mode, what other characters by Stephen would you like to play?
The Sondheim pieces that come to mind right away are Company, Sunday in the Park with George and Sweeney Todd, which to me are the most perfect shows on the planet. I’m the perfect age to play Bobby now, I might be a little too young for Sweeney now but one day I’d love to tackle him. And George Seurat is a part you want to be ready for and at the right time in your life for. I think any real Sondheim lover’s actor’s dream roles would be those three roles.
You mentioned that the meaning of marriage has changed but also as someone who is always excited to see he shares a name with a Broadway star, in these past decades we have also seen how on stage actors aren’t always limited by the ethnicity of the character anymore. How have you seen this change?
I’ve been very lucky to see that change in the past twenty years since I first started auditioning in New York. I was very naive, I was raised in a very diverse community in Northern Virginia, even though I was born in the Philippines, my parents and my high school never taught me that my ethnicity would be something that would limit me, so it was quite startling when I moved to New York and started auditioning as a young actor and people would say “we are not looking for people like you, thank you”. Obviously that still happens today, but what’s important to understand is that conceptions are changing, the community is changing, the world is becoming more diverse because of the media and the internet. You can’t say now that you only know one black person or one Asian person or one gay person. The world is becoming more connected, so what we see as a community on stage now represents a more diverse reflection of that. It’s exciting to be a person of color now, with Hamilton and their casting has made it part of a conversation now in a way it wasn’t before. As happy as I am that there are shows like The King and I and Miss Saigon for people like me to audition for, I’m also excited there are new plays being written where ethnicity isn’t written for the character and a casting director will just go “how about Jose Llana? He’d be a great fit for this”. I’m actually going to work on a new play at the Williamstown Festival this summer, the script is a very contemporary story and the character I’m playing has no ethnicity written for him, so that to me is really exciting, that the playwrights don’t have to explain why a person’s Asian or black.
How did the Ed Sheeran cover end up in the album?
A lot of the reasons why some songs are in the album is because I did them at my American Songbook Series concert at Lincoln Center. When I was putting together that concert my music director and I decided it should be an autobiographical journey down the memory lane of my career. So mixed in with the theatre music I felt we needed pop music, so the two pop songs are dedicated to two special people in my life. “Lullaby” the Billy Joel song is dedicated to my niece and nephew, I’m their godfather. “Thinking Out Loud” the Ed Sheeran song is dedicated to my partner of ten years.
The very, very first time I saw you was in “The Real Me” in Sex and the City, which is arguably the greatest episode in the iconic series. Did you imagine how big this would be?
No! It’s funny, the audition process for that episode was kinda hilarious, I had long hair as you can remember. If you remember, Alan Cumming was in that episode, he played the designer O, and there was character called “O’s long haired assistant”, who was a gentleman with long hair who spoke Italian and that was the part I auditioned for. It didn’t work out too well, so I was leaving the room and the casting agent ran to bring me back into the room and Michael Patrick King said “we think you’re funny so we wanna try something out with you, I’m gonna say things to you and I don’t want you to say anything, I just want you to react”, so he started throwing insults at me about my shirt, my hair, all these snarky responses. So the next day my agent called and said “they’re gonna write a part for you, you’re gonna play Margaret Cho’s assistant and you’re just gonna stand there while she talks at you and give her bitchy looks”. And that was my TV debut, that’s how I became friends with Margaret, we spent three days walking around, it was great.
The way some people can recite musicals I can recite “The Real Me”.
(Laughs) That’s fantastic! The message in that episode is all about how when real people fall down they get back up, and I love the message of that.
Altitude will be available in stores and online on May 13. You can pre-order the album here.
