Sure you’re a big star. But have you been on Broadway?
Actors who’ve made their careers in TV and movies are migrating to the stage, where roles are challenging and reputations are burnished
NEW YORK — Not many traces of Midge Maisel were evident in Rachel Brosnahan’s performance last Saturday night in the Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”
That presumably was the point for the star of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and for other TV and movie stars who venture to the stage. By taking on roles as dissimilar as possible from the ones that made them famous, they signal their determination to elude the dreaded straitjacket of typecasting and to expand their career horizons.
Sarah Snook, a.k.a. Shiv Roy of “Succession,” is taking an exceptionally audacious step toward that end.
Starting in January, Snook will portray 26(!) characters in a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in London, with an eye on a possible transfer to Broadway. On “Succession,” Snook was part of a very crowded and talented ensemble; in “Dorian Gray,” a solo play, the spotlight will be on her and her alone.
Two of her “Succession” colleagues are also heading for the stage. Jeremy Strong, a.k.a. Kendall Roy, has signed on to play the title character in a Broadway revival early next year of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People." And Brian Cox, a.k.a. Logan Roy, the paterfamilias from hell, will star with Patricia Clarkson in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in London next March.
In moving — or, in some cases, returning — to the stage from the screen, actors challenge themselves by embarking on a high-wire act without a net. They’re required to deliver hefty chunks of dialogue every night in front of a live audience. No scene reshoots are possible, and in theater, there’s no way to “fix it in post.”
These actors are challenging us, too, by scrambling any assumptions we may hold about them, especially when they are closely identified — as Snook, Strong, and even the
veteran Cox now are — with a particular role.
They want us to see them from a different angle and in a different light. Comic actors want us to know they also have the chops of a tragedian, and vice versa.
At the Tony Awards three weeks ago, the prizes for best actor in a play and best actress in a play went to a pair of performers primarily known for their TV work.
Sean Hayes, who played the manic, flamboyant Jack on “Will & Grace,” won the Tony for his portrayal of the brooding, troubled pianist, composer, and wit Oscar Levant in “Good Night, Oscar.”
Adding an extra you-don’t-really-know-me layer to his persona, Hayes sits down at a piano near the end of the performance each night and plays Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with jawdropping virtuosity.
Jodie Comer, who played the assassin Villanelle in the BBC’s “Killing Eve,” won for her solo performance in “Prima Facie” as a criminal defense attorney whose specialty is representing men accused of rape, who then becomes a victim of sexual assault herself.
A number of other TV and movie stars were nominated for Tonys but didn’t win, except perhaps in reputational terms: Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed (Stewy on “Succession”) for Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” Wendell Pierce (”The Wire”) for “Death of a Salesman,” Samuel L. Jackson for August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.”
Then there is “Glee” star Lea Michele, whose performance as Fanny Brice, replacing Beanie Feldstein in the first-ever Broadway revival of “Funny Girl,” has won over-the-top raves.
Might film and TV actors be drawn to the stage by the chance to deliver a sustained performance, an uninterrupted whole in which scene flows into scene, rather than one that is assembled from bits and pieces in the editing room, having often been shot out of sequence?
No less an expert than Laurence Olivier, who made more than 60 movies while building a legendary career on the stage, once told the eminent British critic Kenneth Tynan: “In films, there is no performance! You just shoot a lot of rehearsals and pick the best."
That’s an arguable assertion, to say the least. But, rightly or wrongly, the theater retains a certain if-you-canmake-it-here-you’ll-make-it-anywhere cachet.
Plenty of great films are still being made, but the cineplexes are overrun with comic-book adaptations. Television is in the middle of what has been called, with justification, a Second Golden Age, but might there still be some residue of the disdain for the medium that long held sway in the loftier precincts of culture? Might a stint onstage still be seen as a necessary badge of Intellectual Seriousness?
That’s not a good reason to do theater. But there’s no question it can burnish an actor’s reputation for versatility, which never hurts. Consider the likes of Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose theater resumes contributed to their image as protean performers.
Sometimes, the two worlds collide. I recall sitting in Cambridge’s Loeb Drama Center in 2013 for a matinee performance of the American Repertory Theater production of “All the Way," with Bryan Cranston storming across the stage as President Lyndon B. Johnson, then going home and watching him as Walter White in one of the final episodes of “Breaking Bad."
For theater producers, the upside of splashing big names across their marquees is obvious: It often delivers a jolt of adrenaline to the box office. That has led to some gimmicky casting. The longrunning “Chicago," for instance, has featured the likes of Pamela Anderson, Brooke Shields, and Christie Brinkley as the merry murderess Roxie Hart.
But it can also yield artistic dividends. Last year, the Tony Awards for best featured actor and actress went to performers primarily known for their TV work: Jesse Tyler Ferguson (”Modern Family") for “Take Me Out," and Phylicia Rashad (”The Cosby Show”) for “Skeleton Crew."
Uzo Aduba, who grew up in Medfield and broke out in Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” was nominated last year for her performance as the fiery title character in Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s.” Also earning Tony noms last year were Hugh Jackman, Billy Crystal, and Sam Rockwell, hardly strangers to the screen.
A journey to the stage can represent an exciting trip to terra incognita for an actor, or a return to their stage roots.
Jackson, for example, was in the cast of the original 1990 production of “The Piano Lesson," so his appearance in the recent revival of the Wilson play (portraying a different, older character) was something of a homecoming.
Cox, a seasoned stage veteran, even found time for a stint on Broadway early in the “Succession” run, starring as LBJ in a 2019 production of “The Great Society." While playing more than two dozen characters in “Dorian Gray" will be a daunting challenge for Snook any way you slice it, it could help that she had performed in works by Ibsen and Shaw onstage before landing the role of Shiv Roy.
For theatergoers, the downside is that having big names in the cast helps to drive steep theater ticket prices even higher, however thrilled they might be to see their favorite actor in the flesh.
On Saturday night, a large crowd, intent on getting an autograph or a photo, waited for Brosnahan and costar Oscar Isaac at the stage door of the James Earl Jones Theatre after their performance of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window."
While walking through Times Square one night last winter, I saw a huge throng gathered outside the Winter Garden Theatre. A guy in the crowd was yelling “Wolverine!" Sure enough, as I passed a black SUV, there was Hugh Jackman, waving while he climbed in, having just completed his performance in “The Music Man."
Some actors — Audra McDonald, Al Pacino, and Nathan Lane come to mind — manage to maintain a fairly regular presence on both screen and stage. For
Laurie Metcalf (”Roseanne,” “The Conners,” “Lady Bird”), who is currently starring on Broadway in “Grey House,” the stage is clearly her true home.
One of Metcalf ’s costars is Tatiana Maslany, who stumbled in an earlier foray onto the stage. In an attempt to follow up her success in Netflix’s “Orphan Black,” Maslany played scruple-free TV programmer Diana Christensen opposite Cranston on Broadway in the 2018-2019 production of “Network." But Maslany was miscast in the role (played by Faye Dunaway in the 1976 movie) and gave such a tentative performance you wondered about her stage-acting chops.
Of course, acting onstage often involves a massive pay cut for TV and film stars, which is why so many stars sign up only for “limited engagements.”
The difference between stage and screen when it comes to paychecks was spoofed by James Corden — whose star turn in Broadway’s “One Man, Two Guvnors” paved the way for his gig as host of CBS’s “The Late Late Show with James Corden” — in an episode of “Carpool Karaoke” a few years ago.
With a carload of passengers who included McDonald, Ferguson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Jane Krakowski, Corden asked, with an utterly straight face: “Jane and you, Jesse, you both have TV shows, but you’re both appearing on Broadway now. Which do you prefer, theater or money?” All four passengers cracked up.
Indeed, it’s useful to remember that theater’s hold on big-name actors is usually only temporary. On Tuesday it was reported that Brosnahan has been chosen to play Lois Lane in “Superman: Legacy,” described by The Hollywood Reporter as “the film that will launch DC’s new universe.”
From the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the Marvelous Ms. Lane. Should Brosnahan decide that she needs audiences to take her seriously again after her lucrative turn as a comic book character, there’s always Broadway.