First off, I’ve never been to a Broadway show, and stage dramas don’t normally go on tour with the original cast.
So when theater fans tell me I should have seen Jerry Orbach as a song and dance man, or that Angela Lansbury and Kristin Chenowith dominated the stage in a way that their TV roles never did justice to, I have to take their word for it.
Not to mention the army of actors, singers and dancers who, for whatever reason, never jumped to movies or TV.
Who lights up Broadway that we in flyover country have never heard of? Also, who might we recorgnize, but wouldn’t believe how dazzling they were on stage?
Brian Stokes Mitchell, “one of the central leading men of the Broadway theatre since the early 1990s” according to Wikipedia.
As a huge fan of the 80’s T.V. show Trapper John, M.D., I was familiar with an actor named Brian Mitchell, who played the wisecracking black resident, “Jackpot” Jackson. I was shocked when I turned on the T.V. one day to see a brilliant singer and actor named Brian Stokes Mitchell, then appearing in Ragtime on Broadway. He was nominated for a Tony for that role, one of four nominations (he won once).
Donna Murphy and Audra McDonald are two actresses who have appeared occasionally on television and are also leading lights of Broadway, with six Tony awards between them.
Too late to edit, but I was going to add this year’s Tony winner for Best Actress in a Musical, Sutton Foster, who is about to appear in a new T.V. drama.
There’s alsoPatti Lupone (who was on a hit TV series, but few remember it) and Elaine Stritch. All three are older stars, but they still are appearing in major roles.
I have recently seen amazing, should-be-star-making (but won’t be) performances by Elizabeth Stanley (in Merrily We Roll Along), Rob McClure (Where’s Charley?) and Tari Kelly (standing in for Sutton Foster in Anything Goes). Oh, and V**arla Jean Merman **and Leslie Jordan were hilarious in Lucky Guy, which opened and closed like a camera shutter.
There are so many insanely talented people in the theater and so few roles and vehicles, it is heart-breaking. I am *so *glad I am not an actress.
Didn’t age well (Lansbury, who forgot some of her lines, or the play itself, which seemed more dated than I’d expected.) The play centers around the rumor that one candidate had mental health issues and another was plagued by rumors of a gay affair, neither as scandalous as in 1960. James Earl Jones played, in essence, Harry Truman, without explaining how a black man came to be an ex-President in the mid-20th century U.S.