Today's guest shares their name with a famous recently departed Hollywood icon and also a renowned female jazz vocalist. The relations of which we actually were unaware of until the time of this interview.

With a career spanning decades in opera, straight plays and musicals all over the world, some of his performance credits include Titanic, Ragtime, She Loves Me, The Full Monty, and Catch Me If You Can at the Marriott, the first National tours of The Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Come From Away and Company, Five Guys Named Moe, Satchmo at the Waldorf, and Porgy and Bess at Court Theater, and as the title character of Carlyle at the Goodman Theater.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Chicago's own James Earl Jones II. Now let's go to the top of the show.