Michael Cavanaugh

Michael Cavanaugh is an American actor and musician born in 1972 and originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He is best known for playing piano and singing lead vocals in the band for the Broadway musical Movin' Out, a role for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 2003, as well as a Grammy nomination that same year.

The youngest of four brothers who all played instruments, Cavanaugh began playing piano at age seven, shortly after his parents purchased one for the family. By twelve he was performing at club shows, and at thirteen his aunt took him from Cleveland to New York City to attend his first Broadway musical. Within a year he was playing keyboard with bands at weddings and other events several nights a week. His first full-time professional engagement as a musician was at Blazing Pianos, a piano bar on International Drive in Orlando, Florida. In January 1999 he moved to a residency at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where Billy Joel noticed him in February 2001.

Joel handpicked Cavanaugh to serve as the musical center of Movin' Out, the Broadway production he developed with choreographer Twyla Tharp. Cavanaugh relocated to New York City to work with both Joel and Tharp on the show, which opened on Broadway in 2002. He remained with the production for three years and more than 1,300 performances, living during that period with his family in Glen Rock, New Jersey. Billboard magazine described him as "the new voice of the American Rock and Roll Songbook." The 2003 Tony Award in his category went to Dick Latessa for Hairspray.

After Movin' Out closed at the end of 2005, Cavanaugh began touring independently with a show built around his own interpretations of pop and rock material. Symphony orchestras subsequently began engaging him as a featured performer. His first orchestral program, titled "Michael Cavanaugh — The Songs of Billy Joel and more," debuted with the Indianapolis Symphony in April 2008. Later that year, in October 2008, he signed with ADA/Warner to release his debut CD, In Color. He made his Boston Pops Orchestra debut on May 8 and 9, 2009, with Steven Reineke conducting, and returned to the Boston Pops in 2015 for a program featuring music by Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, and James Taylor.

In 2010 Cavanaugh introduced a second orchestral production called "Generations of Rock," in which he performs music by Elton John and other artists. Two years later he performed with the Florida Orchestra in a program mixing classical and contemporary works by composers including Billy Joel, Elton John, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, and that same year he created a third symphony show titled "Singers and Songwriters: The Music of Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and James Taylor," which he continued touring through at least July 2014. In 2014 he also performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra as part of its Pops! series and with the Houston Symphony. Beyond concert halls, Cavanaugh performs at corporate and charity events and at sporting occasions including the Indy 500, the PGA Tour, and the US Open.

Cavanaugh has synesthesia, a condition in which he perceives musical notes as specific colors. He told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the note C appears to him as red, A as blue, and F as gray, and he attributes part of his ability to learn songs quickly to this trait. He and his wife Karin have a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Mikayla. When not performing or recording, the family resides in Las Vegas.