“If I was 6’ 3” and muscular. I’d have to make peace with playing romantic leads,” wisecracks toothy-grinned, Cyranosed, 5” 7’ actor/singer Will Roland. “We are all stuck within our types a little bit.”
For most of his own career, Roland— who will make his San Francisco debut with his cabaret show, Loser Songs, at the Venetian Room next Sunday afternoon—has been associated with a particular type: Socially outcast, brainy, sarcastic, sexually awkward, and ultimately adorable.
Of course, Roland, 28, has spent nearly half of that career developing and playing a single character: Jared Kleinman, best frenemy of the title character in the phenomenally successful musical Dear Evan Hansen.
In 2015, five years after graduating from the music theater department at NYU—and shortly after the only prior performances of Loser Songs, at New York cabaret space Don’t Tell Mama—Roland was cast in the first production of Hansen, at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.
“I love being a part of new work,” he says. “It’s really something special to have had a writer create something around me, with my input.”
The Hansen script describes Jared—who peppers Evan with sophomoric homophobic putdowns—as behaving with “the kind of practiced swagger only the deeply insecure can truly pull off.”
Though Roland comes off as genuine and confident in conversation, its not hard see how he’s leveraged his own hyper-verbal charm and Cyranosed appearance in crafting the Jared’s persona.
After the DC run of Hansen, Roland remained with the show through additional development, a buzz-building Off-Broadway engagement and the Broadway production which opened in late 2016, going on to win multiple Tony awards, including best musical, score (Pasek & Paul), book (Steven Levenson), and lead actor (Ben Platt).
Roland will continue to geek out as Jared for eight shows a week in New York through sometime this summer; his San Francisco performance marks the last day of a week’s vacation.
“Loser Songs isn’t like most of the cabarets I’ve seen Broadway actors do,” Roland says. “I don’t think my life is so interesting that I can tell autobiographical anecdotes and do songs from shows I’ve been in.”
“I don’t like to vamp. I always want to have a script and to be playing a character. So it’s a narrative show. It’s very lyrically driven, with a book that stitches together different songs to tell the story of ‘Loser’, who is a sort of Everynerd.”
Roland has written that the show is “a geek epic” about “a guy who just can’t seem to get anything right…his relationships are best described as cringeworthy…he tries (and mostly fails) to be “normal” and find acceptance among his peers.”
So, is he typecasting himself?
“I idolize Steve Buscemi,” says the toothy-grinned, bespectacled, 5’ 7” 28-year-old. “At the beginning of his career he was always cast in a certain sort of quirky, geeky role, but eventually people started to realize ‘Oh, he’s really a good actor’ and give him a chance to do different things. Look at the difference between Con Air and Boardwalk Empire.”
