Annie Golden
Annie
Golden has fronted a New Wave band, starred in stage and screen
versions of “Hair” and is now, after decades as a quirky actress and
singer, discovering new audiences as Norma Romano in “Orange Is the New
Black.”
But
little in her long career prepared her for the day when a young writer
she knew named Joe Iconis asked her to meet him for a drink at the West
Bank Cafe, a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant with a theater in the basement.
Mr. Iconis told Ms. Golden he wanted to play her a few songs he’d been
working on, and then sat down at the piano.
He began to sing. Songs. All about her.
Flash forward to this summer. Annie Golden will star as Annie Golden, at Barrington Stage Company
in Pittsfield, Mass., in “Broadway Bounty Hunter,” the first fully
staged production of the hall-of-mirrors musical that resulted from
those songs.
The
64-year-old actress, whose career has had ups and downs, is playing a
60-something actress whose career has had ups and downs. But the
character, unlike the actress, has a surprising sideline: she has become
a bounty hunter, hot on the trail of a drug lord. (Think blaxploitation
meets “Kung Fu,” but with song and dance.)
“I
have always thought that Annie deserved a musical — a musical that was a
star vehicle for her,” said Mr. Iconis, a longtime fan of Ms. Golden
(especially in “Assassins” and “Leader of the Pack”) who, while working
on his graduate school thesis at New York University, wrote that he
wanted an Annie Golden-type actress on a fantasy casting list for his
student play, and wound up with her in his show. They have been friends
and collaborators since.
“She’s
always the best friend or the kooky neighbor or the mom or the
grandmom,” Mr. Iconis said. “And, thinking about all the reasons why
Annie hasn’t had this starring vehicle yet, and how Annie is perceived
in the world of musical theater, we got excited about having the star be
a woman who is allowed to be in her 60s and to not be a mom and to kick
ass.”
Ms.
Golden was unfazed when she first heard the music, as if every day some
new songwriters showed up with a show inspired by her, and she still
shrugs. “I don’t have any training, and 40 years ago I was plucked from a
rock band at CBGBs by Milos Forman,” she said, referring to the
director of the film version of “Hair.” “ This is heady stuff.”
Mr.
Iconis has bigger hopes. “My dream of dreams is for this to be a
legendary performance, and she should win the Tony, do the movie
version, win an Oscar, win a Pulitzer, and they should name buildings
after her,” he said. “She should be Lin-Manuel famous.” — MICHAEL PAULSON
Brandon Rubendall
An
actor’s lucky break ought not include an actual fracture, but that’s
the case for Brandon Rubendall. He made his Broadway debut in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”
— and was one of its several performers who got hurt. Mr. Rubendall
broke his right toe, fractured another bone in his foot and sprained all
his other toes, too. He’s even got a tattoo of a spider on his foot, to
serve as a reminder of his painful experience.
He
has healed, but there were repercussions. “I never really got my
danceability back,” Mr. Rubendall said in a telephone interview. “Yes, I
could still dance and move and I went on to do other shows but I wasn’t
dancing like I was before and I thought, ‘Wait a second, I don’t think I
can do this as long as I thought I could.’”
Though
he went from “Spider-Man” to “Anything Goes” and, then, “Disaster!,”
Mr. Rubendall has been an ensemble player (his impressive turn as a
scantily clad Elvis in “Broadway Bares” a couple of years ago
notwithstanding), and that broken toe had him thinking he needed to seek
principal roles if he wanted career longevity.
Now, Mr. Rubendall has his chance, playing the magnetic and provocative Che in “Evita,” part of the Summerfest at Opera North, in Lebanon, N.H. “I’m really excited to attack this,” he said. “It’s a beast of a role; the hardest one I’ve played yet.”
And, as befits a role originated on Broadway by Mandy Patinkin, it asks Mr. Rubendall to do more than dance.
“What a lot of people don’t realize about Brandon is that he’s a fantastic singer,” said Evans Haile, the general director of Opera North, where “Evita” runs through Aug. 13. “It’s so easy to pigeonhole people and I’ve made a conscious effort not to do that.”
Mr.
Rubendall, 31, grew up in Reading, Pa., and started dancing at 5,
because he “just truly loved to dance,” he said, not because of any
family pressure. When he finished high school and wanted to skip college
and get onstage, his mother was reluctant. “But I was so set in my ways
she just said ‘I’m going to let you do what you want to do but if you
don’t book anything you have to go to school; you have a year,” Mr.
Rubendall recalled. “I’ve been working ever since.” — STEVEN McELROY
A Helicopter
The star of the Serenbe Playhouse’s
revival of “Miss Saigon” is a diva. She’s got two handlers. She gets
flown to and from the theater every night. It’s costing about $30,000
for her to appear. And she’s a heavy lift: about 6,000 pounds and 41
feet long.
She
is a helicopter, and at every performance she will be landing — weather
permitting — during the number “The Fall of Saigon,” in which the
American soldier Chris evacuates from the city, leaving his Vietnamese
girlfriend, Kim, behind.
Continue reading the main story
“We
are doing ‘Miss Saigon’ in a field and recreating Vietnam in a field,”
said Brian Clowdus, the executive and artistic director of the company,
which has an outdoor stage in a meadow in Chattahoochee Hills, Ga., a
suburb of Atlanta. “There’s no excuse why you can’t land a helicopter.”
Set
during and after the Vietnam War, “Miss Saigon” ran on Broadway from
1991 to 2001, and is set to be revived there in the spring of 2017. A
helicopter effect was its splashy signature moment. Audiences cheered
but critics were more dismissive.
Serenbe will be using a UH-1 Iroquois, also known as the Huey. This one is normally housed in a hangar at the Army Aviation Heritage Foundation,
a nonprofit organization about a 20-minute helicopter ride away in
Hampton, Ga. It was “the icon of Vietnam,” said Fred Edwards, the
group’s director of operations and one of five pilots who will rotate
flying. It’s a single-pilot helicopter, but there will be two crewmen
aboard, one as a pilot and one as a safety.
Although
Serenbe is renting the helicopter at a reduced hourly rate, it’s an
expensive budget item, so the theater began a $30,000 fund-raising
campaign to make it happen, with about $5,000 to go. The helicopter will
circle above the audience and the actors, but will land some 250 feet
away.
“The force of the landing and taking off and the kickback is the dangerous part,” Mr. Clowdus said.
Music
cues, fog and special effects will make it seem the actors are
boarding, but none will. “Equity would have to sign off on that and we
don’t want to be liable for a huge accident,” Mr. Clowdus said.
He
added that Music Theater International, which licenses the show, was
“super-excited” about the use of a working helicopter, which he said had
never been done before. He’s keeping his fingers crossed that weather
cooperates and the aircraft won’t be grounded before the run ends on
Aug. 14. “We hope we don’t have to announce that at the top of the
show,” he said. — ERIK PIEPENBURG
Kim David Smith
The cabaret performer Kim David Smith
approaches each audition as if it were a show. So last April, when his
managers sent him to Midtown to try out for the starring role of the
M.C. in Hunter Foster’s coming production of “Cabaret,” he went in
chatting, his mischievous tendencies on display.
“I
didn’t know anybody in the room,” Mr. Smith, a 33-year-old Australian
New Yorker, said earlier this month. “I sort of walked in as myself and
announced that the subway smelled especially of urine, which I took as a
good omen that the city was being herself completely. They didn’t ask
me to leave, so, you know.”
As
it happened, they gave him the part, and about time, too: Mr. Smith has
spent the past decade mining Germany’s Weimar period for his own
cabaret shows, which he describes as “full of glitter and doom.” If he
sees himself, only half-jokingly, as more of a Sally Bowles, Kander and
Ebb’s hedonistic Weimar heroine, colleagues and civilians alike have
long envisioned him in the role played by Joel Grey and Alan Cumming.
“The
feedback I’ve been getting my entire career is ‘How many times have you
played the M.C.?’ ‘When are you playing the M.C.?’” he said. “It is not
unusual for people to just bring it up.”
Mr. Foster’s production, which runs Aug. 9 to 20 at the Cape Playhouse
in Dennis, Mass., will be Mr. Smith’s “Cabaret” debut — and his first
performance in a musical in he can’t remember how long. As a 16-year-old
in Traralgon, Victoria, he became smitten with Weimar culture when his
father gave him a biography of Marlene Dietrich. Later, doing a project
on cabaret as a music-theater undergraduate at Federation University Australia’s Arts Academy, he knew he’d found his “first port of call.”
Warmly reviewing his latest show at the East Village club Pangea, Stephen Holden of The New York Times likened Mr. Smith to “a male Marlene Dietrich,” albeit one with “the haughty attitude of a beautiful young man.”
Accustomed
to overseeing every detail of his own shows, Mr. Smith said he looked
forward to being part of the larger machine of “Cabaret,” where his job
is to focus solely on his performance. And he pronounced himself
thrilled at the amount of ad-libbing that the M.C. gets to do.
“The
fact that there is absolutely zero fourth wall for him is completely my
cup of tea,” he said, laughing as he imagined mingling with Cape Cod
crowds. “I can’t wait to tell people how terrible their clothes look in the audience. In Dennis. In August! So much linen.” — LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES