Jenn Colella
Jennifer Lin Colella is an American actress and singer. She is best known for her work in musical theatre.
She received a Tony Award nomination and won the Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and three regional theater awards for her portrayal of Annette/Beverley Bass in Come from Away. She reprised her roles in the 2021 filmed recording of the musical.
Colella was in the original Broadway casts of Urban Cowboy, High Fidelity, Chaplin: The Musical, If/Then and Suffs, and Off-Broadway original productions of Slut and Lucky Guy. Her Off-Broadway work includes the title character in the Beebo Brinker Chronicles, Closer Than Ever, and a staged reading of Twelve Angry Men with an all-female cast.
In 2008, Colella performed in abridged versions of Girl Crazy and Side Show, two of the parts of Broadway: Three Generations at the Kennedy Center. The production celebrated the reopening of the renovated Eisenhower Theater. She also appeared in The Full Monty at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, and the American premiere of Take Flight, her first pilot role, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.
Colella has performed in over a half-dozen world premiere musicals in the United States, including three at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. She has appeared in four productions of Peter Pan. Additionally, she has been in multiple productions at the New York Musical Theatre Festival.
Colella has also done some television work; she appeared on the game show Can You Tell? in 2003 and An Evening with Lerner and Loewe, the initial Broadway in Concert Series installment on PBS in 2022.
Early life
Colella was born to Lindy Crawford and Mick Colella, and grew up in Summerville, South Carolina. Starting at eight, she sang in church and school concert and show choirs, which were where she learned to harmonize. In church, she also played handbells. She refers to herself as a choir nerd. Her mother has said of the eight year old, singing as an auctioneer in a school play, "She took the microphone in her hand, looked right at the audience, and this voice came out." People wondered where all the sound came from.A local woman gave theatre lessons in her garage, and to earn money to take the classes, Colella did odd jobs about the woman's house, including painting the exterior. Her first role was Gertie in Oklahoma!. In seventh grade, she had a hunter education class, which she says helped make it comfortable to handle guns when she performed in Annie Get Your Gun. When, as part of a school group, she saw Phantom of the Opera in New York, she decided that she was going to be on stage.
While an undergraduate at Columbia College, she played basketball, tennis and flag football. During her senior year, she quarterbacked. She graduated in 1996 with a dual degree in speech and drama. Her family had moved to Hilton Head Island and had a golf store there. While working at the shop one summer during college, she taught herself to juggle. She stayed in the area for three years and worked at an insurance company call center. In April 1997, she attended a Comet Carnival in Aiken, SC to observe Comet Hale–Bopp through a telescope. From 1997 to 1999 she was a member of The Sol Divers rock 'n' roll band.
Colella served as a company member of the Trustus Theatre beginning in her senior year. At Trustus, starting in the fall of 1995 and running through the spring of 1999, she played Kitty in Taking Steps, The Angel in Angels in America, the title role in Sylvia, Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Amy in Company, Marta in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Teenage Greek Chorus in How I Learned to Drive, and Vivian in Free Will and Wanton Lust.
Colella went on to attend the University of California, Irvine, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Acting in 2002. While at UCI, she played Miss Jane in Floyd Collins, Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, Princess Ninetta in The Love of Three Oranges, and Victoria Grant in Victor/Victoria at the Barclay Theatre. In 2000 and 2001, she did summer stock at the Santa Rosa Summer Repertory Theatre, playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Peter in Peter Pan, and Val in A Chorus Line.
Career
Theatre
As a UCI graduate, Colella participated in a showcase in New York, along with NYU and Yale, and auditioned for a part. After going back to California for a few months, she got a call to come back to New York to audition for Sissy in the original production of Urban Cowboy, and was cast in her Broadway debut role. She had not yet gotten her Equity card. The world premiere was at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida. Then it moved to the Broadhurst Theatre for its seven and a half week New York run. When the show closed, she returned to California and co-hosted a game show.Her Off-Broadway original cast credits include a six-week run as Delia in Slut in 2005, two weeks in 2011 as Chicky Lay in Lucky Guy at the Little Shubert Theater, and a seven week long engagement in the 2022 world premiere of Suffs at the Public Theater. Colella's Off-Broadway work also includes the butch title character in the Beebo Brinker Chronicles for seven weeks in early 2008, a four-week review, Closer Than Ever, during the summer of 2012, and a single performance, all-female cast staged reading of Twelve Angry Men in September 2018.
After being in the original staged reading in Connecticut in 2006, she appeared in Kiki Baby, as an "utterly believable" four year old singer "you will fall in love with," who becomes a celebrity—and a spoiled brat. This titular characterization won Colella a 2011 NYMF Award for Outstanding Individual Performance. Other New York Musical Theatre Festival appearances include The Great American Trailer Park Musical in 2004 and 2009's All Fall Down. In 2006 she starred in the world premiere of Twyla Tharp's The Times They Are A-Changin'
For her New York debut in Urban Cowboy, she earned a 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award nomination.
In Fall 2010, she also originated the role of Hedda Hopper in the world premiere of Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin at the La Jolla Playhouse. It was renamed Chaplin: The Musical and she performed the role on Broadway from September 2012 to January 2013.
After the December 2013 world premiere run at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., in March 2014, she started a year-long appearance in If/Then at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Colella played Anne, a woman in a same-sex relationship with Kate. She had worked with the Kate role through development, but it was decided to cast LaChanze for the part. The role of Anne was then written in for her.
Among original Broadway productions, her longest run, starting in March 2017, was two and a half years in Come from Away. In the summer of 2015 Colella originated the role of Annette/Beverley Bass in the La Jolla Playhouse's world premiere production, which transferred later in the year to the Seattle Repertory Theatre. It then played Washington D.C. at Ford's Theatre, a concert presentation in Gander, Newfoundland, and at the Royal Alex in Toronto in 2016 before transferring to Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. The show received positive reviews and she was nominated for a Tony Award, along with winning both a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for her performance. After three years of performing the role over a year span, she left the production on November 10, 2019. During the summer of 2022, she returned as a replacement for seven weeks. She also returned for the final weeks of the production, in late September 2022, and performed in the last Broadway showing on October 2, 2022, to a sold out crowd.
Regional theatre
Colella has had multiple regional theater appearances. In addition to those listed above that moved on to New York, they have included her favorite role, Peter Pan, which she has done four times. Along with the 2001 California summer stock appearance, she has been cast in 2008 at the Sondheim Center in Fairfield, IA, the Music Circus in Sacramento, CA in 2015, and a 2019 Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera in Pennsylvania.Also in Pittsburgh, she played Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun in 2008. In 2009 she appeared, along with Elaine Stritch, in Paper Mill Playhouse's The Full Monty in Millburn, NJ. 2010 found her in Princeton, NJ at the McCarter Theatre in the American premiere of Take Flight as aviator Amelia Earhart. Another world premiere occurred in December 2003 for Madison Repertory in Wisconsin as Jenny in Heartland: The Musical, followed by a January 2004 appearance in the show for the Broadway Contemporary Series in Dallas, TX.
Comedy, film, and television
In the hopes of breaking into television, Colella began her career as a comedian as a way to get noticed. That, as well as the rock band, helped build her on stage confidence. She started doing observational humor stand-up in Southern California while pursuing her MFA. During that time, she performed in places such as the Laugh Factory and The Comedy Store in Hollywood. She has said that success and failure are equally valuable instructors.She had her television debut in 2003 co-hosting the game show Can You Tell? with Tony Rock on Oxygen. Her next appearance was on the ABC series Cashmere Mafia, where she was in a same-sex relationship and discussed their starting a family. That show aired January 2008, six weeks before she opened in Beebo Brinker. Since then she has guest starred in several other television shows. In 2019, the year she left Come From Away, there were three for CBS, The Code, Madam Secretary, and Evil. Colella was also part of the PBS ''Tribute to Stephen Sondheim with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2010, and the initial Broadway in Concert: An Evening with Lerner and Loewe, again for PBS, in March 2022.
Her film credits are found in Uncertainty, Lay It Down for Good, the live filmed version of Come From Away, and Chocolate Milk''.