An Evening with 
Ben Jones
and Special Guest Allison Semmes

Ben Jones is one the most versatile and talented artists working in the theater and cabaret scene. Broadway World wrote that Ben had “one of the most unbelievable vocal instruments in the industry today.”

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He is a fixture at New York’s 54 Below where he performs to sellout crowds.  Last year he took on the role of  Sid Sorokin in The Pajama Game in San Francisco, for which he received the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Best Performance in a Musical. And in 2022, his solo shows — I Think I'm in Love and I Think We Should See Other People — were featured in Broadway World's "Best of 2022."

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Not only can he sing the American Songbook, but Ben has worked as a musical artist in Classical music and sung with opera greats Isabel Leonard, Nathan Gunn, Frederica von Stade and many others. He has also appeared with great American symphony orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the San Diego Symphony, to name a few.  The renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas said this of Ben, “We’re still trying to figure out what it is that Ben can’t do”.

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Ben made his Carnegie Hall debut virtually in 2021, performing a song from the new musical A Most Dangerous Man on Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope series.  He has also been featured on A Prairie Home Companion, and with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Ben has been featured on recordings on the Albany, Naxos, and Delos labels.

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Art Song, Jazz, Soul, Broadway, Experimental New Music—these are a few of the music genres Allison Semmes is fluent in. After studying opera at the University of Illinois, she continued her studies at NYU receiving her Master's of Music in musical theatre. After being selected as a “Broadway Rising Star” at NYC’s Town Hall, her musical theatre journey began! Since then, she has graced hundreds of theaters in America with shows Bubbling Brown Sugar, DreamGirls, The Wiz, Book of Mormon, OOBLADEE: A Bebop Musical, The Color Purple National Tour and the 1st and 2nd National of Broadway’s Motown the Musical, where she played the role of living icon, Diana Ross. Her latest Broadway role was Josephine Baker in Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s Harmony. 

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Outside of musical theatre, she enjoys performing and collaborating with artists. A few of her favorite collaborations have been with composer Ted Hearne in his You're Causing Quite a Disturbance at BAM with Erykah Badu and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and The Big Blind: A Jazz Noir Radio Drama with Kurt Elling and Dee Dee Bridgewater at Jazz at the Lincoln Center. He has also written and performed with Stevie Wonder and can be heard in his song Can’t Put it in the Hands of Fate. Allison believes that there is great healing and unifying power in music.

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Special guest Allison Semmes was Josephine Baker in Barry Manilow’s Broadway show, Harmony, and Diana Ross in Motown: The Musical.