Joel Grey will be in Pittsburgh Monday to talk about “The Art of Aging.” Last week, the 85-year-old actor was talking about a specific age — when he was 9.
It was 1941 when the Oscar and Tony winner found his calling on the Cleveland Play House stage as the faithful grandson Pud in the play “On Borrowed Time.”
“It was my first role, so I have tremendous affection for it, because it’s the thing that let me know that I am and always will be an actor. It’s just what I do, and I got to know who I was at 9,” Mr. Grey said by phone.
On Monday, he will be speaking to a sold-out gathering presented by the Jewish Association on Aging at the Heinz History Center in the Strip District. No song and dance — “more like a conversation,” he said.
The original Emcee in “Cabaret,” which also earned him a spot in the Grammy Hall of Fame for original soundtrack, has rarely been away from a stage or screen since the musical splashed onto Broadway in 1966.
The actor with the impish grin found a new generation of musical theater fans as the Wizard of Oz in “Wicked,” while television viewers may know him for characters such as Lemuel Idzik on the HBO prison series “Oz.”
His characters tend to lean more than a little bit toward the dark side.
“I think I’m always interested in people on the edge, because they are not easy to put in an exact place,” he said. “I’m more interested in the mysterious parts of human behavior than situation comedy.”
The Emcee in “Cabaret,” set in Berlin as the Nazis were rising to power, certainly fits the mold. The Broadway role launched his career and was followed quickly by “George M.,” his tour-de-force as George M. Cohan, and he was on a roll.
Besides Broadway and screen roles, he hit the road and stopped here on several occasions, including a Pittsburgh Symphony Pops concert with Marvin Hamlisch in 1996.
“We were best friends,” he said of the late great composer/conductor. “It was a great loss. He wrote a lot of my orchestrations when I was on the nightclub circuit, and he helped put together the act Liza Minnelli and I did in Las Vegas. So we had a long history.”
The Cleveland native is the son of entertainer, musician and comedian Mickey Katz, who was known for his Jewish-themed parodies.
“He was a musician, essentially. He didn’t have anything to do with the theater, but he was a comedian and a marvelous satirist,” said Mr. Grey, who at 19 first performed on Broadway with his father in the 1951 revue “Borscht Capades.”
The theater back home in Ohio had been “a different world” for an impressionable youngster. “I entered into a unique, elegant, marvelous world of classical theater at the Cleveland Play House — at 9!”
It wasn’t a direct march from Cleveland to a Broadway hot streak.
Before “Cabaret,” “There was so much not working, no one ever would believe it,” he recalled. “It seemed like there were times I really could not find enough work to be certain to take care of my family. So I would go out and do whatever I had to do, whether I wanted to or not, to pay the piper.
“That all kind of changed when ‘Cabaret’ happened. It all kind of flipped, but that wasn’t until 1966. It’s 50 years this year,” he said with a laugh. “But that has no reality to me — I don’t know what that means.”
At 85, he has a second book in the works and has returned to his roots with that first play, “On Borrowed Time” by Paul Osborn, which was a Broadway hit in 1938 and a year later a movie vehicle for Lionel Barrymore.
Mr. Grey directed a 2013 revival at New Jersey’s Two River Theater and in March was director again for a reading by “great New York actors” for the Roundabout Theater, where he was seen last year in “The Cherry Orchard.”
Mr. Grey, who earned a Drama Desk Award as the director of Broadway’s “The Normal Heart,” recounted his life in and out of the entertainment world in the memoir “Master of Ceremonies.”
The revelation that he is gay made a few headlines and was spotlighted at the 2015 Tony Awards, when he and his daughter, actress Jennifer Grey, introduced a scene from “Fun Home” — about a woman trying to understand her gay father — and were called the night’s “most meta choice of presenters” by The Advocate.
Mr. Grey’s 24-year marriage to Jo Wilder — “the happiest years of my life,” he has said — produced two children, Jennifer Grey and James Katz, and ended in divorce in 1982.
Speaking publicly about being gay had been “a nonstarter” until he decided it was a necessity.
“I was living my life and it was not necessary to talk about it until it became necessary, thinking about younger people and the importance of role models,” he said. “And with the marriage equality vote, that made the big difference to say, ‘Well, this is something I should share with more people than my closest friends.’ ”
When he faces the gathering of 500 fans on Monday evening, he will be speaking to an audience he described as “smart” from his previous visits to Pittsburgh.
He will have plenty of stories and experiences to share in a career spanning eight decades, going back to that stagestruck 9-year-old in Cleveland.
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.
First Published: May 14, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
