‘Dear Evan Hansen’ star Ben Platt will sing at Met Philadelphia (and his UPenn brother will be cheering him on)

Ben Platt is a huge name on Broadway for his role as the title character in Dear Evan Hansen, the blockbuster musical by Justin Paul and Ardmore’s Benj Pasek about an anxious teen whose lies spiral out of control. A capella fans may also recognize Platt as the nerdy magician Benji from Pitch Perfect.

Now Platt, 25, is also testing the waters as a singer-songwriter. On his solo debut album, Sing to Me Instead (released in March on Atlantic Records), he tells stories of love and heartbreak in a style that blends the soul-meets-pop sound of Adele or Sam Smith with what he describes as the “vocal fullness” of show tunes.

This month, he’ll tour the album around 12 cities in the United States and Canada, including a local stop on May 12, when he plays the Met Philadelphia.

This will be his first time performing in Philly, but he’s a frequent visitor. His parents, Marc and Julie Beren Platt (both class of 1979), are active alumni at the University of Pennsylvania — she’s a trustee — and all four of his siblings attended the school. His dad is a prominent producer on Broadway (Wicked, The Band’s Visit) and in Hollywood (Bridge of Spies, Legally Blonde, La La Land).

Ben Platt spoke with The Inquirer by phone from New York recently about the famous collaborators he’s come to call friends — Pasek and Paul, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Met Gala breakout star Ryan Murphy among them — and how Sing to Me Instead came to be. The interview has been edited and condensed.

It’s working really well so far. It’s really exciting. It’s kind of boundaryless in a way because it’s my own show and I get to decide how I want the evening to be and the way that I want to deliver the songs and the way I want the experience to feel.

That’s a first for me, to be my own creative team in that way. There’s definitely an anxiety, but it’s like a very exciting, butterfly-type anxiety, which I’m happy to have found again.

There’s a lot less structure to it in the sense that my primary goal is not to get someone else’s point across or to communicate any other story than my own, or to make myself very recognizable as someone else, or to communicate my character in the short amount of time I have on stage.

The only real goal I have is singing the music the way I want to sing it and to present the songs the way I want to, which is super-freeing and very different, but obviously pretty scary and a little bit more exposing than performing in a piece that has a more structured narrative.

I’m just getting comfortable with how that manifests without any character as far as, ‘How do I move as Ben?’ and, ‘How do I like to sing as Ben?’ and, ‘What do I want to communicate between songs?’ And just trying to listen to my gut in a way that I don’t necessarily get to when I’m playing a character. It’s been a nice change.

This will be my first time [performing here]. I’ve seen a million performances in Philly, most of which were Off the Beat or Counterparts a cappella performances [at Penn].

All of my siblings and both my parents attended Penn. So I spent a significant amount of time in Philadelphia and watched a lot of singing there.

Three older who all went and graduated and one younger who is currently a sophomore, so he’ll be bringing a lot of his Penn friends to the show.

I think coming off of the Evan Hansen experience, I felt that I had been stretched in every possible way as far as musical theater is concerned. As far as great composing and performance and vulnerability, the sort of regimens that I needed to take on vocally and physically, and the character I was creating, all those things were as far down that road as I could possibly go.

So I wanted to do something that I felt was going to stretch me in a completely different way, that was going to allow me to communicate who I am free of that experience — because of all the million blessings I’ve taken from Evan Hansen, the one challenge has always been trying to divest myself from that character because I don’t want to purport to be that kid.

That’s not necessarily who I am. I certainly have connections to him, but he isn’t Ben.

I really wanted to have the opportunity free from anyone else’s narratives to express my own sound, my own thoughts, and my own experiences, and sort of go that one extra step in connection. It’s certainly one step more frightening, but also one step more rewarding, as well.

I was hoping for a bit of a crossroads between the emotionality and confessional nakedness of my favorite singer-songwriters, like Carole King and Sara Bareilles and Adele and Sam Smith, in that lane, kind of sprinkled with a bit more of a vocal sound from the world of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway.

I hope to be an intersection of those two things, sprinkled with some of the emotionality and vocal fullness that I’ve grown up with in the theater.

I’m hoping primarily that people will have a moment where they feel totally present and just enjoy the two or so hours of hearing the music and forget their troubles and not be looking forward or looking backward but just being where they are. Creating that kind of a moment with people is something I’m looking forward to.

And then I hope that also people will leave having a better sense of me and who I am. I’m hoping to be both in the speaking element of the evening and in the performance as transparent and as myself as I can be.

I think that they recognized when I came in [to audition for the 2012 Off-Broadway musical] Dogfight that I had something particular and that they really responded to my sound and my persona and they thought it would be a really beautiful match to their sensibility musically. And I sensed that, too, from the first time I ever heard the music.

Obviously, I was dying to work with them. It just was a really beautiful, kind of meant-to-be predestined thing that what they happened to be working on at the time was this story of a kid that became Evan Hansen.

I came in for the first reading and they brought me in because they had known me from the audition and also from [playing Elder Cunningham in the Chicago and Broadway productions of] The Book of Mormon. They gave me a crack at reading it cold and immediately felt how well I jelled with the character and how my voice lent itself really well musically and character-wise to that story.

It was a really wonderful learning experience to watch them craft the musical. That’s obviously a very different skill than writing music for an album or writing pop music in my own voice. I certainly would love to write for theater at some point in my life, so it was a masterclass to see them create that.

Not at the moment. They obviously have a million plates in the air, and I’m very much focused on establishing my own voice as a writer, but I think certainly down the line I would love to meet up again in a different arena, maybe for film or something, because it was a wonderful experience.

So, basically, Lin called me and said, 'I do these Hamildrops every month. I don’t know if you’ve been following the story of these kids in Parkland, but they’re going to do this incredible march.” And I said, ‘Of course. I was planning to go.’

And he said, ‘I think we should utilize this month’s Hamildrop and do a mashup of Evan Hansen and Hamilton.’ And I said, “Of course. As soon as I saw your name on my phone, I was interested in whatever you wanted to do. I’ll play a tree in a musical. I don’t really care as long as you’re involved.'"

It ended up being a really, really moving and life-affirming experience to go and sing it at the march, and just to be there generally.

Ryan is a creative genius on all levels. He came to see Evan Hansen and came to me with this project shortly thereafter and had an incredibly clear idea and a beautiful vision for what it was going to be.

It ended up being a cast not only of monumental talent, both new and legendary, but also really nice human beings who wanted to make a family of it, which is always my favorite part of any experience, particularly coming from the theater.

That’s what I look forward to the most, creating little families everywhere.

Ben Platt

7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Met Philadelphia, 858 N. Broad St. Tickets: $35-$95. Information: 800-653-8000, themetphilly.com