This is a weekly feature on BroadwayLiving.com. It’s just like the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. You know how it goes…someone throws out an actor’s name and you have to try to connect them to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less.
I thought it might be fun to do the same thing with the theater’s luminaries. I will be trying to connect them to the longest running show in Broadway history, The Phantom of the Opera and its very first “Phantom”, Michael Crawford.
26 years ago on this day, Liz Callaway made her Broadway debut in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. She played the roll of the nightclub waitress and understudied the role of Mary Flynn.
Only two years later Liz garnered a Tony Award nomination for the role with which she is perhaps most associated, that of Lizzie Fields in the musical Baby (1983). Fans will also remember her for the five years she spent playing Grizabella in Cats (1982).
In 1991 she played Ellen in the original cast of Miss Saigon. Other Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include: The Look of Love (2003), The Spitfire Grill (2001), and Brownstone (1986).
Liz is the sister of Ann Hampton Callaway and their award winning cabaret show Sibling Revelry is available on the DRG Records label.
1) Liz Callaway did Merrily We Roll Along with Jason Alexander
2) Jason Alexander was in Jerome Robbins Broadway with Luis Perez.
3) Luis Perez was the original “Slave Master in Hannibal” in The Phantom of the Opera with Michael Crawford.
So that’s the game. Join me each week as I try to come up with new ways of connecting Michael Crawford to the entire theater community.
