Patrick Page

Patrick Page, born John Patrick Page on April 27, 1962, in Spokane, Washington, is an American actor, low bass singer, and playwright whose career spans classical theatre, Broadway, and regional stages across the United States. Raised primarily in Monmouth, Oregon, he is the son of Robert Page, a theatre educator at Western Oregon University, and Geri Page, an administrator at Oregon State University. His father's involvement with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland during 1964 and 1965 planted an early interest in Shakespeare that would shape the course of his professional life.

During his teenage years, Page pursued both magic and competitive speech alongside theatre. He won the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians Stage Competition in 1978 and was named the International Brotherhood of Magicians' Outstanding Teenage Magician in the stage-magic category in 1979. A graduate of Central High School in Independence, Oregon, in 1980, he became the first competitor to win the National Forensics League's Speaker of the Year title twice, claiming the national championship in both 1979 and 1980. He subsequently studied at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts at Allan Hancock College before earning a cum laude degree from Whitman College in 1985, where he served as valedictory speaker and was twice named the Outstanding Competitive Speaker in the Nation by the American Forensics Association.

Page's early professional career was rooted in classical theatre in Utah and Oregon. He spent six seasons with the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, where he became a Resident Artist and Director of Development and helped oversee the construction of the Randall L. Jones Theatre. During off-seasons he performed regularly with the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City. He later spent several seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland before relocating to New York. His Broadway career began in 1993 and has continued through 2019, encompassing productions including The Kentucky Cycle, Casa Valentina, Spring Awakening, An Act of God, Saint Joan, and Hadestown, among others.

Among his Broadway credits, Page originated the role of the Grinch in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical, which ran from 2006 to 2007. He had previously played Scar in the national tour of The Lion King and Lumière in the national tour of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, both roles he later reprised on Broadway. Additional Broadway work includes Decius Brutus in Julius Caesar opposite Denzel Washington, King Henry VIII opposite Frank Langella in the 2008 revival of A Man for All Seasons — a performance nominated for the Outer Critics Award and cited by The Wall Street Journal as one of the outstanding theatre performances of that year — and Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol at Madison Square Garden.

From 2011 to 2012, Page originated the dual role of Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin in Julie Taymor's Broadway rock musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which featured music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and played at the Foxwoods Theatre until January 2014. He departed the production on August 5, 2012, to star in a limited Broadway engagement of Cyrano de Bergerac, which ran from September to November of that year. His work in Spider-Man earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical in 2012. He appeared in the Broadway production of A Time to Kill, which opened on October 20, 2013, and in Casa Valentina, which opened on Broadway in April 2014. In fall 2015 he played Adult Men in the Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening, directed by Michael Arden. He also originated the role of Frollo in the U.S. premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and made his Shakespeare in the Park debut in Cymbeline.

Page's most celebrated Broadway role to date is Hades in Hadestown. Before the show's Broadway opening, he played the character at New York Theatre Workshop, at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, and at London's Royal National Theatre. The production transferred to the Walter Kerr Theatre in March 2019, and Page's performance earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. The role requires him to sing as low as a G1, one of the lowest notes on a piano. The Broadway cast recording of Hadestown earned Page a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.

Off Broadway, Page has appeared in Richard II, Rex, and The Duchess of Malfi. He is an Affiliate Artist of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where his classical roles have included Iago in Michael Kahn's production of Othello, the title roles in Macbeth and Coriolanus, Claudius in Hamlet, and King Lear, which he performed through April 2023. His portrayal of Iago earned him the 2006 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Leading Performance by an Actor, and Washington Post critic Peter Marks named it one of five outstanding American Shakespeare performances of his lifetime. As a member of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Page was among the company members who received the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre in 2007. He is also an Artist in Residence at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where his title performance in Cyrano de Bergerac won the Craig Noel, San Diego Critics, and Patte Awards for Outstanding Leading Actor in a Play, and where additional credits include Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Geoffrey Cordova in Dancing in the Dark, the latter earning him a second Craig Noel Award.

As a playwright, Page's work includes Swansong, which debuted at the Lucille Lortel White Barn Theatre in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 2004 and was named one of the top ten plays of the year by the American Theatre Critics Association before going on to play at the Kennedy Center, the Seattle Shakespeare Company, and off-Broadway on Theatre Row. He is also the author of the one-man shows Passion's Slaves and Love Will, and co-author, with Doug Christensen and Larry Baker, of Nothing Like the Sun, as well as a stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Page has taught acting at NYU's Tisch Graduate School of the Arts, the Old Globe's MFA program, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's MFA program, and Southern Utah University, and currently teaches privately in New York City.