As a Broadway actor, Leslie Odom Jr. is familiar with the extra effort required as the winter holidays ramp up.
“There’s something about it that feels like service,” Odom says on a recent call to talk about The Christmas Tour that brings him to Los Angeles on Sunday, Dec. 1. “Those of us that come from the theater, around Thanksgiving and Christmas in New York City, we’re like theme park performers, you know what I mean?
“We do more shows,” he says. “More days that you’re working, not less. And you kind of know that you are part of the attraction to the city at that time of the year.”
A year ago, Odom did his holiday service in the Broadway revival of “Purlie Victorious,” for which he was nominated for best actor in a play and, as producer, best revival of a play.
A few years before, his Tony Award-winning run as Aaron Burr in the original off-Broadway and Broadway productions of “Hamilton,” spanned the holidays in 2015 and 2016.
But this year is different.
“I think it’s just part of my DNA,” he says of working through the holidays, this year with a concert tour that plays Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sunday, Dec. 1. “I’ve put out the two albums” – 2016’s “Simply Christmas” and 2020’s “The Christmas Album” – “but this is the first Christmas tour.
“I’m proud of the fact that when I’m working in New York, and when I’m in a show in New York, I know that we’re part of people’s sort of holiday tradition,” Odom says. “We’re helping to make them a memory, richer and brighter around the holiday time.
“So anyway, it makes me proud that we’re going to take this tour around the country, me and the band, and a little crew that travels with us,” he says. “And we’re going to do something similar.
“I’ll just try to really make special moments and special memories for people around the country.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Odom talked about missing part of the holidays with his family, becoming known as a performer of Christmas music, and more.
Q: What will this Christmas tour away from your wife [actress Nicolette Robinson] and children during the holidays be like?
A: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s going to be tricky. It’s sort of a sacrifice, but we’ve been talking about this tour for years. You know, the first Christmas album was really a fan-prompted thing. All my other albums, I went into the studio and made, and then brought them back to people and hoped that people would be interested.
But the very first Christmas album was something that I went to my manager, and I said, ‘People keep saying to me on Twitter, ‘You should make a Christmas album, your voice is perfect for Christmas albums,’ you know. It was something that I really heard so much that I was like, ‘Should we explore this?
So yeah, we’ve been talking about touring for years, but the timing has never been right. It’s never materialized. So what’s it gonna be like? I don’t know. It’s tricky, and Nicolette, as you said, my wife’s got two films out right now. So it’s a wonderful time but we’re trying to balance a lot.
Q: So tell me about growing up in Philadelphia, and your early Christmas music memories as a boy.
A: I guess the one that has stayed with me the longest, besides, of course, the Bing Crosby and the Nat King Cole – those songs have been part of Americana for years – is the Boyz II Men album [“Christmas Interpretations”]. They were Philadelphians like I was. They went to the same high school that I went to. Not at the same time. That album meant a lot to us as kids.
I think there is something they did with that album that I hoped I could do with mine. They made something classic, both modern and classic. It sounded true to them and their sound, but it also is wonderfully undated. Maybe not totally undated, and it’s not music that sounds like it could have come from the ’50s, right? It came out in the ’90s and it still sounds good to me today.
So anyway, when we went in to record the very first album, and the second one too, we hoped that we could make music that would sound good today and forevermore.
Q: Your first album was all Christmas standards, but there are also some newer songs, non-standards on the second one, like ‘Winter Song,’ the one Cynthia Erivo sings on that was written by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson. How did you pick the songs?
A: We really go all out in the studio. We’re usually recording those songs in July, so we decorate the studio, where we put ourselves in the Christmas mood. We try to make music that touches us, that means something to us. Music that sounds and feels good to us, and then we trust and hope that it will sound and feel good to other people, too. So it starts from a really personal place.
The first album, ‘Simply Christmas,’ we love that record and our budget was so small. So part of the simplicity of ‘Simply Christmas’ was a lack of a lot of dough [laughs]. We tried to make something elegant with the sort of limited resources that we had. We went for elegance and we went for sincerity. We couldn’t dress it up very much.
Q: On ‘The Christmas Album’ you pick a more varied selection. There’s the Hawaiian “Mele Kalikamaka” and the Hebrew “Ma’oz Tzur” your wife sings on: How did this record change from the first one?
A: Thank you for asking. There was something – I didn’t mean for it to happen – but there was something coming out of the center of that first one. I don’t know, I couldn’t get it out of there. There was something that was a little, I’ll say this, it was not overtly joyful. There’s certainly tenderness in there. Sincerity in it. People connected to it for that. It was able to stand out in that way. But I think there’s a sound to that record that’s not a whole lot like other Christmas albums.
The second one coming out, especially coming out in 2020, with all that we were facing then, we didn’t plan on recording another Christmas album. But, you know, being home and looking to be creative, and looking to offer something, make an offering that people might find helpful. So we certainly wanted that second one to be more joyful, right from the top.
So there was a real effort there. Something simple. Now there are tender moments and sincere moments on that record too, as you know. The real goal was, we didn’t want to make a part two to the first album. We wanted to add additional color to the palette.
Q: Before I let you go I want to ask you a little about your non-Christmas work. I know last year this time you were doing ‘Purlie Victorious (A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch).’ How did you pick this project?
A: The thing I had done before ‘Purlie Victorious’ was ‘Hamilton,’ which is quite the challenge, as you know. Lin really, thank goodness, asked a lot of us, demanded a lot of us. So when I got out after 500 performances or so of that, it’s like, well, how do I keep growing? I need something that was harder than that. It’s a tall order. And ‘Purlie Victorious,’ I’m so grateful, it came to mind in the way that inspiration does.
I think of inspiration as a divine thing, and so I follow it. I try to follow it in a monk-like way, and try to persevere and make those dreams into a reality. And yet, ‘Purlie Victorious’ – thank you for asking about it – was just the most satisfying experience. Because it was in every way for me personally the greatest challenge professionally that I’ve had. And for us that were part of it on the inside it was successful in every way we imagined.
Q: This was its first Broadway revival since Ossie Davis wrote and starred in it in 1962. How did you know of it?
A: High school. As a young actor, you know, Ossie writes lots of words, so when you’re looking for monologues as a young actor it’s one of the plays that was given to me. Like, ‘Hey, this play has some monologues in it that might be right for you.’
I was aware of it, but I tell you, I don’t even think I knew what the show really meant then. I thought I did, but we picked it up again, and we started digging into that text. We just realized how hip and subversive and radical and brilliant it was. Thank God for the mind of Ossie Davis.
Q: You’ve got The Christmas Tour now. In the last few years you had ‘Purlie,’ and before that ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ and the Sam Cooke movie, ‘One Night In Miami.’ What’s ahead in 2025 and beyond?
A: More writing and producing. We’ve been, for the last few months, putting things together. With ‘Purlie’ I learned that it’s slower, you know. A play can be six or seven years. It’s a slower kind of output. But in the end, the rewards can be so tremendous. So I hope it doesn’t, they don’t take me six or seven years. I hope we just continue to surprise people, entertain and delight them alternately.
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