Annie Golden Graduates to Leading Lady
Songwriters
Performers
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Even though Annie Golden is a woman of a certain age, she has no plans to retire. Why would she when writers are penning parts just for her? The 67 year old is currently starring in the exuberant meta-musical comedy as Annie Golden, a down-on-her-luck showbiz vet who’s recruited to go after a murderous theatre producer-turned-drug lord. And she just wrapped up her multi-season arc as the mostly mute Norma Romano on Orange Is the New Black, a role crafted specifically for Golden by the show’s creator Jenji Kohan.
With her red mane, pixie vibe and throbbing belt, there’s no other performer quite like her. In fact, she’s so singular, Iconis actually described a character as “an Annie Golden type” in the script for his NYU thesis project The Black Suits, which is how the two met in 2006. “I had just done a musical called Mimi le Duck and one of our producers, Marie Costanza, worked at NYU,” Golden recalls. “She read his synopsis and said to Joe, ‘Would you like me to ask Annie if she would be interested in doing this?’ He couldn’t believe his luck, as it were. I can’t believe my luck either!”
The Black Suits — about a high school garage band whose members are growing up and apart — had multiple incarnations over the years, and Golden was in every one. “I’ve done it with so many people,” she says, citing Will Roland, Jason Tam and Ben Platt. “The band always ages out, but the nosy neighbor lady who knows Lou Reed and David Bowie and Mick Jagger, that demographic doesn’t change so I’m the only one who’s ever played the role.”
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On the surface, the show is unabashedly campy, with a plot inspired by ’70s-era blaxploitation and kung fu flicks, a soul-heavy score and tons of inside theatre jokes — Golden wears an Assassins T-shirt, and there are punch lines about the Alexander Technique and Mandy Patinkin. But Golden says underneath the action and cracks is a sobering message about what it takes to stick it out in an unforgiving business.
Yet Golden is adamant that she’s playing a character, not herself: “It’s really not my life story.” However, she acknowledges that the narrative nods to her personal as well as her professional life. “Joe knows that every time I seem to get a wonderful opportunity in my career, some tragedy befalls me,” she says. “I lost my brother, who was my drummer, right after I got Orange is the New Black. Two summers ago I was in Boston doing a play when my brother-in-law, an ironworker, fell on the Verrazzano Bridge and I couldn’t get back because we were in previews. Joe put all that in there in a way by making me this lonely widowed lady. All the humor has some kind of basis in reality, and I think he knows that I can handle that kind of comedy with pathos “
Asked who else she’d like to see take on the part, Golden admits, “I’m loving doing it myself. You know, I was the last Audrey that went into [the original production of] Little Shop of Horrors at the Orpheum Theatre on Second Avenue, and this kind of reminds me of it. It’s a little downtown show with a big heart.” And what will she do once it closes? “They’re always going to need a nosy neighbor, a spinster aunt or a pixelated grandma somewhere.”
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