There Are No Small Parts for Finian's Rainbow Star Christopher Fitzgerald
About the author:
What a long, strange trip it’s been for Finian’s Rainbow star Christopher Fitzgerald. The actor garnered a Tony nomination for playing Igor in Young Frankenstein and acclaim for his performances in a wide variety of shows, including Wicked, Amour, Gutenberg! The Musical!, Babes in Arms, Observe the Sons of Ulster…, Fully Committed, Saturday Night, Wise Guys, Corpus Christi, The Cripple of Inishmaan and the recent Los Angeles premiere of Minsky’s. What his long list of credits does not necessarily reveal is that this talented father of two young boys has a knack for being cast in unusual roles. Here, Fitzgerald muses about why he gets the call for off-center parts—and why he embraces that fact as something sort of grandish.
I have played a munchkin, a hunchback and now a leprechaun. In order, that’s Boq in Wicked, Igor in Young Frankenstein and Og in Finian’s Rainbow. I have played other roles, too, of course—even leading men. But I am best known for these three. There are probably many reasons why I get cast in oddball roles, but one stands out as obvious: I’m small.
I am five-foot five, so it’s not like I am freakishly short. Let’s just say I am short enough. In fact, I have lost jobs because I was too tall. It happens—not often, though. The trick to getting the weird yet enormously fun parts is not just to be small; it’s about being ready for anything. I get to call upon all of my training, from clowning to vaudeville to magic to singing. Playing these roles lets me be creative in a way I only dreamed about in drama school. Plus, I do all kinds of physical work while trying to keep an emotional truth to the characters I play. This is not an easy task. As you may have noticed, I’m always being shot out of the floor or hung from the ceiling on stage. That’s what they like to do on Broadway with the characters I play: They like to shoot you up out of the stage.
If you want to be an actor, you have certain choices to make. I think the best advice I can give is to embrace who you are. When I first moved to New York City, I could play somebody who was still a teenager, even though I was in my mid-20s. But you can only play a kid for so long. Sooner or later you are going to have to grow up into a real character actor. Well, maybe “grow up” is a little strong. After all, the characters I play generally have a kind of youthful exuberance, or maybe that’s just my energy. You can do a lot if you look like me, but here’s what you just can’t do: You can’t get heavy! That’ll ruin everything—then you’re the little fat guy, and that’s a totally different type.
There used to be more characters on Broadway—character-y people that could lead a show. There were actors that might not be considered standard leading men or women. There was nothing traditional about them, but they were wonderful performers. I’m thinking of Barbara Harris, Robert Morse, even Jimmy Cagney. These were people who had skills and were of the world and had a certain energy. It’s something I have studied my whole life: the energy of those kinds of performers. And a lot of comedians—like the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello—were unconventional looking. You get very good at honing your sense of humor when you don’t look like Brian Stokes Mitchell. (The devastating truth for me is that Brian Stokes Mitchell is funny, charming…and still looks like Brian Stokes Mitchell.)
Quirky or not, all of the characters I’ve played are extensions of me, and they have qualities in them that emanate from me. Boq had his anxiety. Igor was incredibly mischievous and playful—torturing his master but acting like he wasn't—that’s definitely me. I don’t mean to spoil the plot, but what’s sweet about my role in Finian’s Rainbow is that I become a man at the end. I become human and not a leprechaun anymore. It’s like my journey is complete. Maybe I’ve graduated to playing actual human beings!
