“I always used to freestyle at my lunch table in high school,” says Jay C. Ellis, a featured vocalist in the company of Freestyle Love Supreme, the improvised hip-hop poetry jam of a musical beginning its national tour at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco this week.
“But I went to a Jesuit private school,” said the queer Toledo, Ohio native in a recent phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter. “So I was clever, but a little inhibited.”
“Then in college I discovered beer,” Ellis jokes. “And then marijuana! I started to make really good raps.”
While attending the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory for musical theater, says Ellis, what truly enriched his rapping was a fuller embrace of his own identity as a gay black man.
“Let me tell you something,” he says, promising San Francisco audiences an ample dose of queer in his Freestyle Love Supreme performances, “I speak what I know and I speak what I love. I don’t shy away from my truth in this show, and nobody has ever asked me to. Telling my own story is what I do best.”
The youngest sibling of five brothers and one sister, Ellis says that his “toxic masculine rust belt Dad” pushed them all towards athletics as children despite his personal preference for “watching Flowers in the Attic on Lifetime with my mom.”
Nonetheless, it was not until an injury sidelined him from team sports as a high school sophomore that Ellis began to pursue the performing arts. Smitten with musicals since first seeing The Wizard of Oz on TV, Ellis had long sung in his church choir and made his secondary school stage debut as Old Deuteronomy in Cats.
After graduating conservatory with a degree in musical theater in 2015, Ellis moved to New York where he won several off-Broadway and touring roles over the next few years. He also met Kyle, his partner of six years, a train engineer. But in 2018, the same injury that had allowed him to chase his Broadway dream came back and bit hard.
“I had developed really bad arthritis and had to have a total knee replacement,” he recalled.
Among Ellis’ post-surgery pursuits was to sign up for classes at the Freestyle Love Supreme Academy, a project of Anthony Veneziale, who, along with Lin-Manuel Miranda was part of the original Off-Broadway and Broadway incarnations of the improvisational rap show.
“I went in there as a student to learn and hone a craft,” Ellis said, “I aspired to be around people who were at the apex of this craft.”
In relatively short order, Veneziale recognized Ellis’ talents and invited him to become an instructor and a performer in the Academy’s custom presentations for corporate clients. During the pandemic, Ellis continued to teach Academy students on Zoom. This past fall, he auditioned for Thomas Kail, director of Freestyle Love Supreme on Broadway (also the director of Hamilton) and made his Broadway debut as a stand-in before being selected for the national tour that begins here and runs through August 20.
“Its going to be a long time missing my man and our dog,” says Ellis. “But we’ll make time to see each other at points when there are short breaks in the tour. And Kyle is coming out for the San Francisco opening. We only have a queen size bed at home, so I’m looking forward to that hotel king.”
