Welly Yang

Wellington "Welly" Yang (Traditional Chinese: 楊呈偉, Pinyin: Yáng Chéngwěi) is a Taiwanese actor, singer, writer and producer.

Yang was born in New York City. His parents emigrated from Taiwan in 1969. His mother returned to Taipei in 1991 to direct foreign affairs for the Democratic Progressive Party. Yang grew up in Great Neck, New York and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1990. He then attended Columbia University, graduating in 1994. . Yang graduated with honors in political science/international relations from Columbia University.

In 1993, while a senior at Columbia, Yang was picked to star in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, where he went on to play the lead role of Thuy. He left the Miss Saigon company in 1995 to tour Asia in the title role of Aladdin inCole Porter's Aladdin. That same year, Yang was cast by the American opera director Peter Sellars' to play one of the leading roles in John Adams (composer) world premiere of I Was Looking At the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky. The opera's world tour included stops at Lincoln Center, Cal Arts in Berkeley, the Edinburgh International Festival, Hamburg's Thalia Theater, the Helsinki Festival, and the Paris Festival. These performances were called "dynamic" by Time Magazine, "passionate" by The New York Times, and "one of the most remarkable moments in recent operatic times" by the Scotland Times. Yang returned to the New York stage in 1998 as Whizzer in NAATCO's non-traditional casting of William Finn's Falsettoland. The production was lauded for its universal appeal and The New York Times added that "it's Mr. Yang as the cocky, athletic Whizzer who delivers the most smashing performance. He's persuasive from start to finish as the boy toy who becomes a man in the arms of Marvin and the hospital bed he's confined to after developing AIDS. His angry anthem You Gotta Die Sometime is equal parts fire and frustration and further confirmation that Mr. Finn's ethnically specific work can in fact be a moving, multicultural experience."

Yang has also appeared in numerous television shows such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, As the World Turns, National Geographic Explorer and Ghostwriter. In 2001, Yang also co-hosted the talk show Studio Y on MSG Metro Channels, where he interviewed celebrities that included Tina Fey, Ed McMahon, Leslie Bibb, and many others.

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