INTERVIEW: Ladies and gentlemen, Annie Golden, the Broadway bounty hunter
Photo: The cast and creative team of Broadway Bounty Hunter will have their show live on with Ghostlight Records’ new cast recording. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by Fortune Creative with permission.
The life and work of Annie Golden feel ripe for a killer dramatization. The singer-actress-multi-hyphenate has amassed a dedicated following over the course of her career’s many projects — whether it’s her trailblazing fronting of the Shirts rock band in the 1970s, her roles in the original Hair company and movie, her time on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black or her more recent concert and theater work.
Golden is golden. And now her fans can take some of her musical skills home with them thanks to the release of the new cast album for her off-Broadway show Broadway Bounty Hunter, from Ghostlight Records, which played Barrington Stage Company and off-Broadway’s Greenwich House Theatre. That Big Apple production was unfortunately cut short, so this cast album, also featuring the singing of Alan H. Green, Brad Oscar, Emily Borromeo and Badia Farha, is a special delight indeed.
“Totally it was a special project,” Golden said recently during a phone interview. “It was written for me, so, of course, it was a special project. But also when we did the production, and it was short-lived, the cast album is a dream come true for all involved.”
[Click here for Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with Broadway Bounty Hunter’s Badia Farha.]
Broadway Bounty Hunter is another bullet point in the growing résumé of musical-theater “it” man Joe Iconis, responsible for Broadway’s Be More Chill. He took care of the music and lyrics for BBH (writing the main role of Annie for Golden herself), and was helped by Lance Rubin and Jason SweetTooth Williams with the book.
“I met Joe Iconis when he wrote The Black Suits for his black-box thesis presentation, and we’ve been friends ever since,” she said. “Years later, he was contacted by … the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, and she said, ‘Is there a project you’d like to work on? We’d love to give you a place to go and write and work.’ And so he and Lance and Jason said, ‘We want to write something for Annie Golden.’ And she was like, ‘Yes, please.’”
As Golden summarized it, all the stars aligned, and what the creative team produced was a wild, humorous idea that Golden was impressed by and instantly loved. Broadway Bounty Hunter follows a down-on-her-luck actress “who has just about had it with showbiz, when along comes a gig no one could have predicted: the opportunity to become a real-life, kung fu-fighting bounty hunter,” according to press notes.
“They wrote this piece for me, which I thought was hysterical: Annie Golden as a bounty hunter in a kung-fu, blaxploitation setting,” Golden said with a laugh. “It was so wonderful, what a great concept. He’s just such a great composer, so I was involved from the very beginning. They presented it to me. They had two songs. They had the opening number, ‘Woman of a Certain Age,’ and Joe had ‘Spin Those Records,’ which he actually wrote for me. I mean it applies as a purposeful lament for any dinosaur diva, as I call myself, with lots of credits on her résumé, lots of cast albums, lots of opportunities, lots of milestones, and then it gets quiet. So he wrote it for this down-and-out actress.”
[Click here for Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with Broadway Bounty Hunter’s Brad Oscar.]
Interestingly (and fortuitously), Iconis wrote the show before Golden landed what is arguably one of her most popular and lauded roles: Norma Romano on Orange Is the New Black. Her schedule grew much busier after getting that gig, but she always kept Broadway Bounty Hunter at the top of her priority list. Most of all, Golden respected Iconis’ ability to clearly outline certain truths about life, about love and about women — particularly women of a certain age.
“He speaks some truths about women of a certain age in this industry, theater and television and film, and so that was kind of wonderful,” she said. “He also spoke some truths about the new way that theater is run. You’re not hired to play a role; you’re hired to run a track. So you can play an old person at the top of the show, which is what I did with Violet. I wore a gray wig, and no one had ever really seen me like that. I loved doing that because that’s a character actress, to totally transform the way you look and then play your age-appropriate role later in the show.”
Iconis also kept reshaping the role for Golden’s many talents and skills, which are routinely on display during her concerts in and around the New York City area. She and her band have shredded stages at the Cutting Room, Feinstein’s / 54 Below and Joe’s Pub, among other venues.
For example, her appearance during an evening of Pink covers at Feinstein’s / 54 Below is now on YouTube, and Golden is a marvel singing “Just Like a Pill.” She taps into her rock sensibility, which has been there ever since her time in the Shirts and Hair, and she reaches powerful, anthemic, full-throated notes during the chorus. Although the tight space relegates her to a small circle on stage, she imbues her body with theatricality and stage presence, emphasizing the lyrics by pointedly acknowledging the mesmerized crowd, summoning inspiration from her inner-strength and full confidence.
It was one of these types of concerts — with her band at the Cutting Room — that actually changed the trajectory of Broadway Bounty Hunter.
[Click here for Hollywood Soapbox’s interview with Joe Iconis.]
“I did a gig with my band at the Cutting Room on Father’s Day during the run because it was the only time I could fit singing a 60-minute set of my own songs in the schedule,” Golden said. “So I did the Cutting Room with my band, and Joe always comes. And he came, and he heard me do a new song that was a new song in the set. And then when I got back to rehearsal on Monday, he was working on a duet for me and Brad Oscar called ‘Little Red Fox’ where he was using that color of my voice that he had never heard before. … So that was kind of great, too, that he’s really listening. He thought he wrote for every trick in my bag of tricks, and he heard a new one, a new color. And he put it in his score, so it was wonderful.”
The many cinematic and musical references throughout Broadway Bounty Hunter were known to Golden, who counts herself as a dedicated cinephile. In fact, during the coronavirus pandemic she has resigned herself to staying in her Brooklyn apartment and watching plenty of old movies.
“It’s by memory that I remember stuff that I’ve seen, and I remember stuff that I’ve heard,” Golden said. “And so when we would discuss stuff like that, I didn’t really have to reference it; it rolled off my tongue. Actually when I was doing Violet, we did a rehearsal on a two-show day at [Iconis’] apartment because we were going to do a presentation of Broadway Bounty Hunter, so we did a brush-up. We had just lost Nick Ashford of Ashford & Simpson … and I said to him, ‘This is an homage to Ashford & Simpson. I mean ‘Ain’t No Thing,’ the duet that I do with Alan H. Green, I said this is so in the pocket of what they do. It just so honors their legacy.’”
Iconis was apparently quite taken aback by Golden’s bounty of knowledge on these cinematic and musical references. “He was like Annie Golden knows all the references,” she said with a laugh. “She doesn’t have to look them up. She just knows them, so, yeah, all of that stuff I had in my wheelhouse just from growing up and loving movies.”
She added: “I love singing these songs because, as I said, Joe knows me really well, so he was writing for me. And I felt like every color in my box of crayons was being implemented.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Broadway Bounty Hunter — Original Cast Recording, featuring Annie Golden, is now available from Ghostlight Records. Click here for more information.
