The mysterious Observer from Fringe is also a two-time Tony winner and rock guitarist
Television viewers know Michael Cerveris as September, the enigmatic stranger who kept appearing in Fringe, even turning up at real football games as part of a marketing stunt. On Broadway he has played Sweeney Todd, Hedwig, Tommy and John Wilkes Booth, and he has toured as a guitarist in Bob Mould's band.
Music ran in the family. Born on November 6, 1960, in Bethesda, Maryland, and brought up in Huntington, West Virginia, Cerveris is the son of a dancer and an Italian American music professor who had met as students at Juilliard. He studied theatre and voice at Yale, graduating cum laude in 1983, and was a member of Skull and Bones. Off-Broadway work started that same year with Malcolm in Macbeth, and two years later he played the poet Rimbaud in Total Eclipse.
His Broadway debut came in 1993 as the young Tommy in The Who's rock opera, a role that earned a Tony nomination and a share of the cast album's Grammy. In 2004 he won his first Tony, for Best Featured Actor, as the assassin Booth in Sondheim's Assassins. The 2005 Sweeney Todd revival directed by John Doyle had its actors play instruments on stage, so Cerveris sang the murderous barber while playing guitar. A second Tony followed in 2015 for Fun Home, in which he played the father, Bruce Bechdel.
Playbill once called him perhaps the most versatile leading man on Broadway, and the range is hard to argue with: Romeo at the Goodman Theatre, Juan Perón in the 2012 revival of Evita, Kurt Weill in LoveMusik, and the rock diva Hedwig in London's West End in 2000.
Away from musicals he keeps a parallel life in rock and country. He played guitar on Bob Mould's tour for The Last Dog and Pony Show, released a solo album called Dog Eared in 2004 with guests from Sonic Youth and Sleater-Kinney, and in 2011 formed the duo Loose Cattle with Kimberly Kaye, trading vocals in the manner of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Screen work includes Ted Gunn in Mindhunter and the valet Watson in The Gilded Age.
Source: Michael Cerveris
