Malcolm Gets

Malcolm Gets is an American actor, singer, dancer, composer, choreographer, and classically trained pianist born on December 28, 1963, in Waukegan, Illinois. His Broadway career spans from 1995 to 2013, encompassing productions including The Story of My Life, Amour, Dreamgirls, Passion, and The School for Husbands. He is also widely recognized for his television work as Richard in the sitcom Caroline in the City.

Gets was raised in a family with English roots — both his parents grew up in London. His father, Terence, worked as a college textbook salesman, and his mother, Lispbeth, was an educator. After living briefly in New Jersey, the family relocated to Gainesville, Florida, where Gets spent much of his childhood. He has two older siblings, Erik and Alison, and a younger sister, Adrienne. Gets demonstrated an early aptitude for the performing arts, beginning piano studies at age nine — a skill he later used to help finance his college education — and taking up singing lessons at fourteen. As a teenager he also studied dance at a studio in Gainesville.

Having skipped two years of K-12 schooling, Gets graduated from Buchholz High School in Gainesville at age sixteen. He went on to the University of Florida, where he received a Best Newcomer's Award in acting and earned a BFA in Theatre in 1988 at age twenty-four. He subsequently completed an MFA at the Yale Drama School.

Gets received the Obie Award in 1995 for his off-Broadway work in Merrily We Roll Along, in which he played Franklin Shepard at the York Theatre, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which he portrayed Proteus at the Delacorte Theatre, both in 1994. His off-Broadway credits are extensive and include Johnny Boyle in Juno at the Vineyard Theatre in 1992, The Writer in Hello Again at Lincoln Center in 1994, Gordon Michael Schwinn in A New Brain at Lincoln Center in 1998, Jake in Boys and Girls at The Duke on 42nd Street in 2002, Jasiu Sadlowski in Polish Joke at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2003, and Og in Finian's Rainbow at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2004. Later off-Broadway work includes Kemp in Vigil at the DR2 Theatre in 2009, Stephen Collins Foster in Banished Children of Eve at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2010, Joseph Taylor Sr. in Allegro at Classic Stage Company in 2014, and Stephen in Steve at Pershing Square Signature Center in 2015.

On Broadway, Gets earned both a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Musical in 2003 for his starring role in Amour. He also starred in The Story of My Life and appeared as Colonel Ricci in a special events production of Passion in 2004 and as a Film Executive in a special events production of Dreamgirls in 2001. Among his other stage appearances outside of Broadway and off-Broadway, Gets played Antipholus of Ephesus in The Boys from Syracuse at City Center in 1997, performed in Edward II at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 2000, portrayed Mordred in Camelot at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, and appeared in The Lisbon Traviata at the Kennedy Center in 2010. He performed the role of Og in Finian's Rainbow on multiple additional occasions, including at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA in 1997 and at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut in 2005.

Gets released his first solo album in 2009 through PS Classics. His recorded work also includes contributions to the celebrity concert album The S.T.A.G.E. Series: Adler, Bock, Coleman in 1999, duets with Barbara Cook on Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim in 2001, and two duets with Jessica Lange on the Grey Gardens recording in 2009. Gets came out as gay in the late 1990s.