(Photo by Vince Aung)
Ben Platt is hitting the road.
After more than three years of not playing live due to the ongoing COIVD-19 pandemic and then having to postpone his tour earlier this year, Platt will finally get to the take the stage in support of his 2021 album, “Reverie.”
“The Reverie Tour,” Platt’s 20-city tour with special guest opener Aly & AJ, will kick off in Seattle Sept. 3 and conclude in Florida with two performances — one at the Amway Center in Orlando Oct. 6 and then at the Hard Rock Live in Miami Oct. 7.
While he hasn’t played a full concert in a few years, Platt has been keeping himself busy during the pandemic. He starred in the theatrical version of his hit Broadway musical, “Dear Evan Hanson.” The stage version landed him a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and an Emmy Award for performing “You Will Be Found” from “Dear Evan Hanson” on “The Today Show.”
He was also named the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year in 2020 by the Hasty Pudding Theatricals society at Harvard University, joining an illustrious group whose recent additions have included Ryan Reynolds, Paul Rudd and Neil Patrick Harris.
Platt also spent the pandemic writing songs that would become his second studio album, “Reverie.” Platt was gracious enough to chat with Watermark ahead of his tour’s start.
WATERMARK: Your tour is finally kicking off Sept. 3 in Seattle after having to postpone earlier this year. How are you feeling about it this close to the tour starting?
I’m very excited, there’s still a lot of work to do but I’m excited. It’s been like three years since I’ve gotten to perform live and it’s such a part of my identity, since I was very young, and it feels strange not to have done it for so long, so I’m very hungry to do it again. So much was ruined and affected by the pandemic and one thing that is unchanging is the experience of singing live in a room with people, so I’m just excited to get back to that.
The tour is for your second album, “Reverie,” which released a year ago. The album has an ‘80s/’90s vibe to it. Is that the direction you had planned to take it?
Absolutely. I was inspired by Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, George Michael, even Springsteen and James Taylor, so certainly that kind of nostalgic, kind of classic beat was a big inspiration to me during the pandemic. It was a lot of what I was listening to when I wrote the record. To that end, it really is music that begs to be performed live.
The title of this album means to be lost in thought or to daydream. Were you a big daydreamer growing up?
Totally, one of my favorite songs is “Finishing the Hat” from “Sunday in the Park with George” which is kind of all about fitting somewhat into your head as an artist and having difficulty being totally present because you’re always dreaming what might happen in the future, you know your passion is very distracting. I’ve certainly always felt that way. Then I think the pandemic, like many people, I felt really in need of an escape, you know, from the anxiety of those early months so the album really afforded me that place to go in my mind. Something to be really creative with and view it as one big daydream.
Your first album, “Sing to Me Instead,” is such a personal album. Up until that point, most people only knew you from your film and stage roles, so they didn’t know too much about your personal life. So the video for “Ease My Mind” was really your public coming out, other than being out to family and friends privately many didn’t know you were gay. Why did you decide to come out in that way?
It was a very unconscious decision in the sense that the main goal with the first album was to be as transparent as I could because, as you said, I had been playing lots of other characters and hadn’t had the opportunity to express my own perspective and my own experiences. So if I’m going to go down this path of recording my own music the only thing that would set me apart from those other mediums would be for me to be completely transparent about who I am, be my authentic self, and obviously my queerness is a really big part of that. There was never really a point where I considered not including that in the album and in the video because the stories I was writing about were queer stories and it never occurred to me to go in and edit those things.
The fact that it became this “official coming out” wasn’t something that I thought deeply about before it happened, I was just more concerned with being entirely authentic to myself, so it was just one of the more wonderful surprises of the experience of putting the album out, that it resonated so much with so many queer couples and queer people, it’s all I can ask for.
I certainly looked up to a lot of other queer artists myself and any time you can see yourself represented or hear the right pronouns or hear details in a song that you can resonate with, especially ones that don’t make the song exclusive or exclude people whose experiences aren’t exactly the same but can have little Bat Signals if you will to queer people, I loved coming upon those things and now to be that for some young people is really, really special.
I love to be performing on stage, when I have the opportunity to tour, and there’s such a large section of the audience that is filled with queer people, it feels very special in a time when it feels a little bit frightening and sometimes despairing, it’s a really nice beacon of hope to be somewhere where queer people can congregate freely and have a good time.
You have been in a relationship with actor Noah Galvin for nearly three years. How has the relationship been while navigating the pandemic?
Things are wonderful. I was friends with Noah for many years before we started dating so it’s really just the latest chapter in our relationship but they are great. He works in Vancouver for much of the year on “The Good Doctor” so with the long distance we wish we could spend more time together but we’ve gotten pretty good at it and he’ll be able to come out and see me on tour a few times which will be very lovely. He’s just the best and he puts a lot of other things into a really positive perspective for me which I’m very grateful for.
Like a lot of us during the pandemic, you joined TikTok in early 2021. You used it to announce your opening act, Aly & AJ. Are you enjoying the whole TikTok experience?
I think the internet in general is really frightening but I do think that TikTok is very content forward and very easy to get from it what you want. I really apricate the user friendliness of it and that you can be creative and authentic, and it’s not as much about the discourse as it is about the content itself. That and it has become unrefutably synonymous with the music business so it’s really become a tool there.
AJ & Aly are really lovely, lovely wonderful ladies. I did a show with Aly back when we were kids at a children’s theater called the Falcon Theater in L.A. that Gary Marshall used to run when we were both working as kid actors in theater. Then I got to watch her rise with AJ. So it was a no-brainer to have them come on tour with me. We are going to get to do a duet as well which will be really fun. I’m excited to have them around, I think our audiences will really mesh nicely.
You are so entwined with your character Evan Hansen. What’s been one of the best things for you being wrapped so closely to that character and is there a negative to having that?
I think the most beautiful thing will always be the way that piece affected people’s lives and hearing stories still to this day of people who would see the show or the film and are inspired to start conversations with their parents or parents with their children and to open up and be honest about their mental health issues. It seems to open the flood gates, that piece, so I’m first and foremost really, really grateful to be synonymous with something like that.
I think as someone who has had spiels with my own anxiety, I’m sure almost everybody does now these days, it’s just really nice to connect with people over that and to have that be the subject matter that comes up when people are talking about “Dear Evan Hanson,” so I’m very grateful that’s the character that I am synonymous with and that I got to develop it myself for so many years.
There really isn’t any negative with it. It’s more just now that I’ve become an adult just taking the space and separation from that and investing more into who I am separate from that and moving forward from it. I got everything I could possibly hope for from that experience and I’m in a very different stage of life now then I was really in high school and then in my 20’s playing a high schooler I feel further and further from it but in a really positive way.
Speaking of the stage, did I read that you are coming back to Broadway?
Yeah, sort of. There’s this theater called City Center in New York that is theoretically a Broadway theater but it’s a typically nonprofit, limited run place and they do a season full of shows that have a short run. It’s somewhere between a stage concert and a full production. So we’re doing “Parade” which is about the Leo and Lucille Frank trail at the turn of the century in Georgia. It’s really, really beautiful and I’m very excited to get back on stage to do a musical. It’s just a week-long run but we’ll see after that.
Ben Platt, with special guest Aly & AJ, will perform at the Amway Center in Orlando Oct. 6. Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased at BenPlattMusic.com.
