Terrence Mann

Two weeks after his 1980 arrival in NYC, Terrence Mann landed his first Broadway play, "Barnum," thanks to his ability to juggle and ride a unicycle, and has seldom been far from the Great White Way since. He donned fur for his next outing as Rum Tum Tugger, the Jaggeresque rock'n'roll feline of "Cats" (1982), and showed his true penchant for villainy as the fearsome Javert in "Les Miserables" (1987), garnering his first Tony nomination as Actor in a Musical. Perhaps his greatest triumph came as the Beast in "Disney's Beauty and the Beast" (1994), which brought him a second Tony nod as Actor in a Musical and praise from The New York Times: "Somehow, despite the masses of matted fur, the padding and the protruding incisors, he actually manages to convey the delicacy of awakening love." He appeared among Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's critically-acclaimed (but commercially-spurned) "Assassins" (1990, as Leon Czolgosz, the murderer of William McKinley) and also got to revel in his dark side as Scrooge in Madison Square Garden's "A Christmas Carol" (1995) and as the Javert-like Chauvelin in Broadway's "The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1997). Unfortunately, his second collaboration with Sondheim, the non-musical "Getting Away with Murder" (1996), failed to please even the critics.