HBOs Gilded Age has so many Broadway stars its like being at the Tonys
On her first day on set in late 2020 for “The Gilded Age,” Celia Keenan-Bolger walked into a gorgeous mansion in Newport, R.I., and immediately felt at home. And not because of the opulent surroundings.
“The very first day we were there, our director Michael Engler brought us all down to the basement and said, ‘This is the kitchen, you need to get acquainted with your posts,’ ” said the actress, who plays Mrs. Bruce, a housekeeper for the nouveau riche Russells on the new HBO high-end soap about New York in the 1880s. “I thought, ‘This is like a theater rehearsal!’ ”
The show recalls that art form in even more ways. Anyone with a dominant theater gene who has watched the first two episodes of “The Gilded Age” will know what I mean when I exclaim, “Oh, the Broadway humanity!” Most of the humans who cross the screen in bustles and corsets and cutaways in Julian Fellowes’s 10-part series seem to have arrived on horseback (or Lyft) from one big musical or play of the 2000s.
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Indeed, I went through the cast list and did some instant tabulating. The regular and recurring actors in “The Gilded Age” account for 56 individual Tony nominations — and 22 wins. (The Tonys, for the three of you non-theater lovers still reading, are the annual awards for Broadway.) The stage-savvy cast, which includes Keenan-Bolger, a Tony winner in 2019 for her portrayal of Scout in Aaron Sorkin’s hit adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” would fill a cup-runneth-over season in Times Square: Audra McDonald. Kelli O’Hara. Donna Murphy. Douglas Sills. Michael Cerveris. John Douglas Thompson. Denée Benton. Carrie Coon. Bill Irwin. Linda Emond. Katie Finneran. Kelley Curran. Kristine Nielsen. Debra Monk.
That’s not even counting Nathan Lane, who arrives in Episode 5.
“It feels like a repertory company,” said McDonald, the six-time Tony winner who plays Dorothy Scott, mother of Benton’s Peggy and wife to Thompson’s Arthur, a Brooklyn pharmacist. Some theatrical habits — like running lines between scenes any time a castmate asks — transferred readily, McDonald said, to the “Gilded Age” set. “I think if you were to take a shot every time you see a theater actor, you’re going to be real drunk by the end of it,” she added with a laugh.
While watching the first episode on Jan. 24, I tweeted: “So many Broadway actors in The Gilded Age you can almost hear the entrance applause.” The sheer volume of performers known primarily for their theater work was stunning. And the entrances went on and on: Claybourne Elder, now in the Broadway revival of “Company.” Patrick Page, now appearing as Hades in “Hadestown.” Simon Jones, who just ended in the run of the play “Trouble in Mind.”
Why was I getting so emotional? Stage actors shuffle off to movies and television all the time. The Law and Order franchise has been a guest-star pipeline of pretend offenders, victims and lawyers from off-Broadway and on for decades. And yet, the magnitude of recurring “Gilded Age” characters upstairs and downstairs by familiar faces from the stage seems unique. I haven’t even mentioned the pivotal presence of Christine Baranski (two Tonys) and Cynthia Nixon (four Tony nominations, two wins) as the wealthy Brook sisters; both have achieved far more attention for their work in movies and TV.
In a joint Zoom interview, Murphy and O’Hara — who both won Tonys for playing Anna Leonowens in separate Broadway revivals of “The King and I” — talked about the advantages of having a stage background for playing period drama.
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“The training for the show was really well served by having a lot of people who came from the theater and theater training,” said Murphy, who portrays New York society doyenne Caroline Astor. “Just in terms of dexterity with language and in dealing with a period and absorbing the etiquette of that period.”
O’Hara, who plays Aurora Fane, a member of Manhattan’s upper crust — and stars in the streaming series “The Accidental Wolf” — likes the change-up from musicals, even if fans try to put her in a box.
“You have to stretch and some people don’t want to see it,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many times there has been a tweet or Instagram message that just said, ‘When is there going to be a musical number?’ I love that, but at the same time, we as artists, we’re going to be stretching until someone literally tries to stop us. And even then we’ll push harder, because it’s making us grow every time we do something different.”
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The critical reception for “The Gilded Age” has been mixed. The Washington Post’s Inkoo Kang observed that “the sprawling cast is chockablock with beloved actors, nearly all saddled with frustratingly underwritten characters.” True. My response, I confess, is more visceral, springing from the recognition the series confers on performers who don’t ordinarily receive this level of exposure. I get a kick out of the elaborately detailed costumes and popping up of this army of fine actors. And let us please recall that “Downton Abbey” wasn’t Shakespeare, either.
Because so much film casting is done out of Los Angeles, actors based in New York tend to have a harder time being seen and considered. (Such East Coast shows as “Law and Order” and “The Good Fight,” starring Baranski and McDonald, are far more conducive conduits.) Fellowes — the creator of “Downton Abbey” and the screenwriter of Robert Altman’s 2001 luxe murder mystery “Gosford Park” — has long appreciated recruiting top-flight theater actors for his projects. British stars of the caliber of Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Alan Bates, Penelope Wilton, Michael Gambon, Michelle Dockery and Lily James attest to that.
There are an astonishing number of actors in “The Gilded Age” with musical-theater credentials; an ingrained show-business practice has made it hard for such actors to cross over to dramatic roles. (An Oscar-winning actor once told me he left musicals off his résumé to get movie parts.) So even just the convergence of McDonald, O’Hara and Murphy amounts to a Broadway coup. Their performances alone in the original productions of “Ragtime,” “The Light in the Piazza” and “Passion,” respectively, have cemented their places in theater history.
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“That’s long been my goal: to get as many musical theater actors on TV as possible. They’re the best-kept secret,” said Bernard Telsey, the Broadway casting director whose projects over the years have included “Rent” and “Hamilton,” and who cast “The Gilded Age.” “I feel like they just have never been given the opportunity.” It was with the encouragement of Telsey and colleague Adam Caldwell that series directors Engler and Salli Richardson-Whitfield recommended so many theater actors to Fellowes.
One of them was Keenan-Bolger (also Tony-nominated in 2005 for her performance in the musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”). Being hired for the HBO series, she said, was a godsend, especially after the pandemic theater shutdown threw much of her entire industry out of work.
“There’s this sense of belonging, but also, nobody took that job for granted,” she said. “It was the hardest audition for drama club that you could ever imagine.”
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