Judy Kaye (Born October 11, 1948) is a Tony-award-winning American singer and actress. She has appeared with the Santa Fe Opera (1985 and 1990), the New York City Opera (1989), the New York Philharmonic (1990), the Boston Pops Orchestra (1990), and the London Symphony Orchestra (1990). Her Broadway debut, as a replacement Rizzo in the original company of Grease!, could barely have suggested the range of her remarkable singing voice (from low "belt" to high soprano). However, her next show, On the Twentieth Century, changed that. While on opening night found her playing only the small role of the maid Agnes, she was also the understudy for leading lady Madeline Kahn, who missed so many performances that it wasn't long before producer/director Harold Prince fired her and gave the part to Kaye full-time. Kaye had no trouble sustaining the part ("like doing La traviata eight times a week", said Julia McKenzie, the British performer who premiered the show in London) for the rest of the Broadway run and in at least two touring companies.
Her next two Broadway ventures were flops. The Moony Shapiro Songbook, a campy spoof of songwriter-based revues like Side by Side by Sondheim and Ain't Misbehavin', closed after fifteen previews and one official performance (May 3, 1981), despite the presence of Kaye and co-stars Jeff Goldblum and future Tony-winner Gary Beach. Later that year, Oh, Brother!, which transplanted William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors to the Middle East, similarly folded after thirteen previews and three official performances.
Seven years later, however, Kaye returned to Broadway in a Tony-winning role as Carlotta Giudicelli in The Phantom of the Opera, singing coloratura Ds and Es eight shows a week.
It was nearly a decade before her next Broadway appearance, as Emma Goldman in Ragtime. (She was the only principal to remain with that show for its entire two-year run.) Both this and her 2002 performance in Mamma Mia! won her Tony nominations as Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
Kaye has performed extensively in various theatrical venues, in roles as widely varied as both Julie Jordan and Nettie Fowler in Carousel, Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, Meg in Brigadoon, Hildy in On the Town, Lalume in Kismet, Lili Vanessi in Kiss Me, Kate, Pistache in Can-Can, Babe Williams in The Pajama Game, the Old Lady in Candide, Maria in The Sound of Music, Rose in Gypsy, Anna in The Anastasia Game, Aldonza in Man of La Mancha, Lucy in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Sally in Follies, Mary Magdelene in Jesus Christ Superstar, Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.
She has performed frequently in opera and operetta, including leading roles in: The Beggar’s Opera; Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld; Puccini's La bohème; Lehár's The Merry Widow; Victor Herbert’s Eileen; Kern's Leave It to Jane, Sweet Adeline, Oh, Lady! Lady!! and The Cat and the Fiddle; Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti; and Abbie in the New York premiere of Edward Thomas' Desire under the Elms.
Kaye's stage ventures have included several "straight" (i.e., non-singing) assignments, among them the classic comedies The Man Who Came to Dinner, You Can’t Take It with You, and The Royal Family.
Recently Kaye appeared to great acclaim in Stephen Temperley's Souvenir, a "fantasia on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins". The play originally ran Off-Broadway with great success; after a summer run in the Berkshires, it ran for two months on Broadway. She received rave reviews for her impersonation of this legendarily frightful singer.
She has made many recordings, including Where, Oh, Where? and Diva to Diva, which focus on musical theater. Two other CDs partner her with the baritone William Sharp, one an all-George Gershwin program, the other all-Leonard Bernstein; the latter includes the world-premiere recording of his Arias and Barcarolles. She is also featured on six tracks of John McGlinn's EMI disc Broadway Showstoppers, four of them numbers from Jerome Kern's Sweet Adeline (including the classic ballad "Why Was I Born?") and one a first-ever recording of the eleven-minute "Duet for One (The First Lady of the Land)" from the second act of Bernstein's legendary disaster 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
