Actor hopes dream role as Frankie Valli will set the stage for more breakthroughs.
For Will Stephan Connell C’13, the sixth time was the charm.
A Jersey boy himself, Connell grew up steeped in the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. At 14, blessed with the requisite high tenor, he sang Valli’s hit, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” in a solo showcase at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. In 2018, he performed a Four Seasons tribute concert at New Hampshire’s Interlakes Theatre.
But when Connell tried out for Jersey Boys, the sleek jukebox musical dramatizing the band’s triumphs and travails, he kept hitting dead ends. He never landed even an ensemble part. It was only after vainly auditioning for the Broadway national tour (twice), an off-Broadway revival (where he was one of two finalists to understudy the lead), and two regional productions that the 33-year-old Connell finally got the chance to play his dream role.
At Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre this past fall, under the direction of Richard Stafford, Connell’s Valli evolved from shy Italian American street kid to confident, charismatic star, with a voice to match. Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, one critic noted approvingly that Connell “nails the famous falsetto every time.”
The songs in Jersey Boys were never the problem, Connell says. But Valli’s life arc, with its tragic reversals, would have been more of a challenge for his younger self. “Emotionally, as an actor, I would not have been ready any sooner to do the part,” he says.
An enthusiast of both Sondheim and Shakespeare, Connell majored in theatre arts at Penn, where he was president of Penn Singers. He has been performing professionally ever since, toggling between Philadelphia and other East Coast venues. Over the years, his roles have included Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance,Laurie in Little Women, Jack in Into the Woods, Bobby in Company, and Harry Houdini in Ragtime.
From April 25 to May 18, Connell will appear in the chamber musical Forever Plaid, a bittersweet comedy about the afterlife of a 1950s boy band, at the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. One of his costars is his husband, Sam Nagel, whom he met about 12 years ago in a production of Legally Blondeat a Delaware dinner theater and married in 2019.
Connell, who lives in South Philadelphia, also plays a “neurotic, superstitious” Italian chef in the new nautical musical The Chequerboard Watch, which had a December workshop at New York’s off-Broadway AMT Theater and is looking for backers. “The music is so exciting—it’s a combination of sea chanties, folk songs from different backgrounds, contemporary musical theater,” he says. “Right up my alley.”
Connell, whose family relocated from Brooklyn to Plainfield, New Jersey, when he was about seven, can’t remember not wanting to be onstage. He told inquiring grown-ups that his career ambition was to be “an actor—the kind who sings and dances.” (He’s still working on “the dancing part,” he says.)
At 13, Connell saw Jersey Boys on Broadway, and “realized I could try to sing like that. It didn’t feel like something so daunting.” After being chosen for the Paper Mill solo, he and his mother returned to the show, and waited for its Tony Award–winning star, John Lloyd Young, at the stage door. (Jersey Boys had debuted at Paper Mill, a laboratory for new musicals that recently launched The Great Gatsby to Broadway.) Young generously offered the teenager vocal advice on breath support and phrasing, “things I still remembered every night doing it 20 years later,” Connell says.
At Penn, Connell plunged into the vibrant, student-run theater community. Along with Penn Singers, he performed with Penn Players, Quadramics Theatre Company, and Front Row Theatre Company, appearing in some 20 shows. He also sang with the a cappella group Counterparts, which specializes in jazz and pop, an experience he says enabled him to “learn complicated harmonies on the fly.”
During his junior year, he directed a production of King Lear, a “real highlight,” he says. “I’m such a complete nerd for Shakespeare. There is such a musicality and theatricality to it.”
Penn “planted so many of the seeds for me,” Connell says, including leadership and intellectual exploration—“always wanting to understand the why.” At the University, that meant taking courses in English and religious studies. Now, he says, “I ask a lot of questions in the rehearsal process,” a tendency that not every director appreciates. Still, he says, “that’s been a major thing for me as an artist.”
Since graduation, “I’ve gone where the job has been,” Connell says. While he loves “actor-driven” musicals—specifically Sondheim’s work—he also enjoys “standing centerstage and singing your heart out” in pieces such as Les Misérables and Jesus Christ Superstar. “The idea of storytelling is so important to me,” he says. “You can have someone who sounds beautiful, but if there’s nothing going on behind the eyes, it’s not so exciting to watch.”
Connell serves as a camp and special projects director for the Wolf Performing Arts Center in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, a full-time job that allows him the flexibility to pursue his stage career. Besides running programs for students of all ages, he has abridged, written, and directed plays for the center. “It’s so nice to be in charge of something,” Connell says. “It’s not a bad thing to want to have your cake and eat it too, and I’ve been able to. I couldn’t do it without them, and I now don’t want to.”
Will Connell’s breakout role as Frankie Valli lead to the next big thing? The theater is a fickle god, but Connell is optimistic. “I spent a long time trying to carve out a place for myself in the Philadelphia theater community,” he says. With the success of Jersey Boys, it “finally feels like a lot of the seeds that I have planted in different ways are coming to fruition.”
—Julia M. Klein
