Cole Escola’s hysterical historical comedy Oh, Mary! has been a critical and commercial hit since arriving on Broadway. It won Tony Awards last year for both director Sam Pinkleton and Escola, who introduced the starring role of Mary Todd Lincoln. A number of noted performers have since stepped into that former First Lady’s shoes, — but the production earned its highest grosses to date only recently, when Maya Rudolph assumed the role.
Rudolph — a Saturday Night Live alum also known for her work in various other TV series, from Netflix’s animated Big Mouth, which earned her four Emmy Awards, to the more recent Loop — is actually one of several SNL alumnae successfully treading the boards at the moment. Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer are both contenders for this year’s Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical. Dratch is up for her droll take on The Narrator in the new revival of The Rocky Horror Show (up for Best Revival). Gasteyer earned her nomination for playing the delectable villain Mildred Layton, a character inspired by the Music Man mayor’s wife, Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn, in the parody/homage Schmigadoon!, which earned a whopping 12 nominations in total, including Best Musical.
These and other artists provide the latest examples of how a show can benefit from the presence of performers known for television work, particularly as network, cable, and streaming series continue to take on the cachet traditionally associated with feature films. It’s worth remembering that some of the biggest movie stars to appear on New York stages in recent seasons — among them Denzel Washington, George Clooney, and Tom Hanks — rose to fame on TV before gaining prominence in films and then embarking, or in some cases returning to (as Washington has repeatedly), theater projects.
Before making her Broadway debut in the current revival of David Auburn’s Proof, Ayo Edebiri was perhaps most widely known for her Emmy Award–winning portrayal of sous chef Sydney Adamu in FX on Hulu’s dramedy series The Bear, though she has also gained attention in movies such as Theater Camp, Bottoms, and After the Hunt. Playing Catherine, a brilliant, troubled young mathematician in Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Edebiri recently won a Theatre World Award, an honor bestowed on actors appearing for the first time on or Off-Broadway.
Two other Bear stars, both Broadway newbies as well, can be seen in Dog Day Afternoon, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s adaptation of the beloved 1975 film that depicted an attempted bank heist a few years before in Brooklyn. Jon Bernthal, an Emmy recipient for playing The Bear’s late but central character of Mikey Berzatto, portrays would-be criminal mastermind Sonny, played on screen by Al Pacino; Ebon Moss-Bachrach, The Bear’s Richie Jerimovich, Mikey’s close friend and colleague, is cast as Sonny’s accomplice Sal — a relatively quiet figure played by John Cazale in the movie, but made more aggressively menacing by Guirgis.
The hit musical Just In Time is one of two ongoing productions featuring cast members of The Pitt, HBO Max’s Emmy-winning medical drama following a hospital’s emergency staff. Isa Briones, a young musical theater veteran who plays Dr. Trinity Santos — her credits also include CBS/Paramount+’s Star Trek: Picard and Disney+/Hulu’s Goosebumps — is now appearing as the singer Connie Francis, Bobby Darin’s first great love. She’ll be replaced May 30 by yet another actress familiar to TV fans: Olivia Holt, known for her work as a very young performer in Disney XD’s Kickin’ It and later in Freeform’s Cloak & Dagger and Cruel Summer.
Briones’s Pitt costar Patrick Ball, who plays Dr. Frank Langdon, is featured in the Broadway premiere of Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw as Andrew Porter, which also marks the actor’s first time on stage in Times Square. Another newbie, Ben Ahlers, who is known for his work as clockmaker Jack Trotter HBO Max’s The Gilded Age and Burton, a postapocalyptic resistance soldier on The Last of Us, is appearing as tragic protagonist Willy Loman’s younger son, Happy, in a starry staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman that, like Shaw, is up for Best Revival of a Play.
Aya Cash, who came to prominence playing publicist Gretchen Cutler on FX and later FXX’s dark rom-com You’re the Worst and has also been seen in Fox’s Welcome to Flatch, HBO Max’s The Franchise, and most recently in Amazon Prime’s The Boys (and the upcoming prequel, Vought Rising), collected a nomination for featured actress in his play for her role as Jessie Stone, a sales director who confronts beloved author Roald Dahl about his antisemitism, in Mark Rosenblatt’s Olivier Award–winning Giant, now also a Tony nominee for Best Play.
Fans of morning television can catch Mark Consuelos of ABC’s Live With Kelly and Mark — cohosted with Kelly Ripa, his wife and fellow former soap opera star — making his Broadway debut in the blithe, boisterous Noël Coward comedy Fallen Angels. And if you’ve been gobbling up HBO Max’s Hacks, you can catch Carl Clemons-Hopkins — cast on that acclaimed series as Marcus Vaughan, long-suffering colleague and friend of Jean Smart’s seasoned comedian, Deborah Vance — as Brooks Duncan, a wry but passionate member of a fractious community board in The Balusters, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Tony-nominated contemporary comedy of manners.
As it turns out, another Hacks regular, Meg Stalter — she plays Kayla, sassy assistant to Deborah’s agent — will sashay onto Broadway for the first time July 6, when she succeeds Rudolph in Oh, Mary! Before that, on May 26, longtime Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Mariska Hargitay — whose character on that NBC crime series, Captain Olivia Benson, is so widely loved that Taylor Swift named a cat after her — will replace another current Tony nominee, Daniel Radcliffe, in the immersive solo play Every Brilliant Thing, up for best revival. And to top it off, it was just announced that Tracee Ellis Ross (Black-ish) will take over in July following Hargitay’s run.
More names are sure to follow soon, so as they say on television, stay tuned.
