NEW YORK, NY.- The Tony Awards are on Sunday at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, and will be broadcast on CBS starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Each year we photograph nominated actors and talk to them about their craft. This time we asked the nominees to share early theater memories, and their answers are reminders of the joys, and importance, of those formative experiences.
Sarah Paulson
APPROPRIATE
“Janet McTeer in ‘A Doll’s House’ — that was a very early, if not the first, Broadway show that my mother took me to see. I was in the first row of the mezzanine, and I’ll never forget the energy with which she came onstage. It was like watching a lightning bolt.”
Bebe Neuwirth
CABARET
“It wasn’t until I saw ‘Pippin,’ when I was 13, that I decided that I was going to be a dancer on Broadway and do that guy’s choreography. I didn’t know I was talking about god [Bob Fosse]. I didn’t know anything. It just resonated so deeply for me — I could feel that movement in my body and I knew that I was watching an aspect of myself when I saw that.”
Jim Parsons
MOTHER PLAY
“I was very taken with everything Dustin Hoffman did when I was very young. ‘Tootsie’ is one of my favorite movies of all time. I was 10 years old when it came out, and I remember seeing it in the theater. I was older when I realized that what I connected to at that time was his playfulness.”
Roger Bart
BACK TO THE FUTURE
“My very first show was when I was in fifth grade, in an abridged version of ‘Oliver’ in which I made a dazzling entrance, with a top hat and tails, through the cafeteria. I was [the Artful] Dodger. So my script was much smaller than Oliver’s, and it was devastating. And weirdly, it’s the role I’ve gotten all my career. It’s always the Dodger. It’s never Oliver.”
Jeremy Strong
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
“One of the real formative experiences for me was seeing Ian Holm do ‘Lear’ at the National in the ’90s. He was a little man with tremendous, immense power and vulnerability. And I remember him on the heath at the end — he was naked in front of the well-heeled audience, and I remember being very affected by a human being willing to be that open and unprotected in front of people. It changed my life.”
Leslie Odom Jr.
PURLIE VICTORIOUS
“I played Martin Luther King in our Black history show in kindergarten. The pictures that I hold the dearest are of my grandmother and my father clapping in the front row. My dad looks like I just won the Nobel. He’s so proud that I’ve memorized my little four lines as Martin Luther King.”
Gayle Rankin
CABARET
“The thing that drew me to theater was I was always fascinated by people. I was really quiet as a kid, and so people watching was like my TV. I remember sitting at a Starbucks in Glasgow when I was like 12 watching people for hours on end.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
