American stage and film actor and singer Anthony Crivello (b. Milwaukee, WI, 2 August 1955) has starred in five Broadway musicals and acted in over fifty plays across the United States in regional theatres. He won the 1993 Tony Award® for Best Featured Actor as Valentin in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Crivello grew up in an opera-loving Italian family, in a neighborhood of Milwaukee where, during the riots of the 1960s, Molotov cocktails were being thrown near his home, and once a bullet came through his bedroom window. He went to Saint Thomas More High School, graduating in 1973, and appeared in theatrical productions at Sunset Playhouse under Alan Furlan, and at other venues near Milwaukee.
Moving on to Chicago, and shortly thereafter to New York, he broke into television on the daytime series One Life to Live. His Broadway debut was as a replacement in the role of Che in the original production of Evita in 1983. He appeared in the short-lived musical The News in November 1985, then in 1987 began a long association with Les Misérables, beginning as the understudy to the villain Javert while taking on a number of lesser roles, then assuming the role of Javert permanently.
In 1993, in the role of Valentin in the Kander and Ebb musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, Anthony Crivello won the Tony Award® for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. He starred opposite Audra McDonald in Michael John LaChiusa’s 1999 musical Marie Christine at Lincoln Center and on Broadway, but since that time he has spent most of his time in other U.S. cities, and in films.
In 1996 in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre, starring in The House of Martin Guerre, a new musical intended for Broadway, Crivello was awarded the Joseph Jefferson Award for an Actor in a Principal Role in a Musical. He was nominated for another Joseph Jefferson Award ten years later, when he appeared in A Flea in Her Ear at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
At the Pasadena Playhouse, in the musical Do I Hear a Waltz? (2001), he received nominations for an LA Ovation Award, a Garland Award, a Robby Award, and an LA Drama Critics Award, for Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actor. In August 2005, he appeared at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse in in a workshop production of Zhivago, a new musical by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon, based on the Boris Pasternak novel.
For the past five years and more, Anthony Crivello has been leading the cast of Phantom – The Las Vegas Spectacular at The Venetian, a specially constructed theatre for this show, which is expected to run through September 2012.
Crivello has appeared in over two dozen movies since Crocodile Dundee II in 1988, including The Lost Capone (1990), Monster Mash: The Movie (1995), Alien Avengers (1996), Independence Day (1996), The Glass Cage (1996), Twisted (with the late William Hickey, 1997), Jim Abrahams’s comedy Jane Austen’s Mafia! (1998), The Glass Jar (on the soundtrack of which Crivello sings Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” 1999), Texas Rangers (2001), Will Wallace’s independent experimental comedy Spanish Fly (2003), Alien Hunter (with James Spader, 2003), and Trade (2006).
In movies for television, Crivello has co-starred with Martin Sheen and F. Murray Abraham in Dillinger and Capone (1995), and with Drew Carey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and René Auberjonois in ABC/Disney’s Geppetto (2000), and was also seen in 919 Fifth Avenue (2000) and Crossing Jordan (2003). He has guest-starred on Huckabee, CSI: NY, Frasier, In-Laws, Seinfeld, Normal, Ohio, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, Miami Vice and Law and Order.
Anthony Crivello’s voice can be heard on recordings of at least seven musicals: Do I Hear a Waltz? (Pasadena Playhouse), Les Misérables (Original Broadway Cast), Les Misérables – The Dream Cast in Concert (London’s Albert Hall), Jane Eyre (Toronto Cast), Marie Christine (Original Cast Album), Kiss of the Spider Woman (Original Cast Album), and Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular.
Crivello is a writer and composer as well as a performer: he has written news articles, a screen comedy, written and directed segments for television, and composed at least twenty songs. He is working on a musical – or an opera – called 2B Caesar.
Other awards on Anthony Crivello’s mantelpiece are two Dora Mavor Moore Nominations (Canada), for Kiss of the Spider Woman and for the pre-Broadway production of Jane Eyre, and a 1985 Carbonell Award for Best Supporting Actor in the Broadway musical, The News.
He married actress Dori Rosenthal on May 14, 2005; they have two children.
– Lucy E. Cross
