John Rubinstein created the title role in the Broadway musical Pippin, directed by Bob Fosse, and won the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his performance in Children of a Lesser God.

Scroll down for full bio

Be sure to hear John Rubinstein’s 2012 Festival performance listed below

Thursday, August 16, 2012, 6:00 PM at The Lensic Performing Arts Center
Beethoven / Haydn / Neikrug

John Rubinstein is enjoying his 47th year as a professional actor.  His first professional job was in 1965 in San Carlos, California in Camelot, opposite Howard Keel.  In later years he revisited that musical, playing Mordred, and later King Arthur.  He made his Broadway acting debut in 1972 and received a Theater World Award for creating the title role in the musical Pippin, written by Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, directed by Bob Fosse.  In 1980 he won the Tony, Drama Desk, Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and Drama-Logue Awards for his portrayal of James Leeds in Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God, directed by Gordon Davidson, which originated at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and later moved to Broadway.  Other Broadway appearances were in Neil Simon’s Fools, directed by Mike Nichols, and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which earned him a Drama Desk nomination; he replaced William Hurt as Eddie in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, replaced David Dukes in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and starred in Getting Away With Murder, by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, directed by Jack O’Brien, and Ragtime, directed by Frank Galati.

In 1987 he made his off-Broadway debut at the Roundabout Theater as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with Stephen Lang and John Wood, and subsequently performed in Urban Blight, in which he introduced new short plays by Arthur miller, David Mamet, Christopher Durang, Terrence McNally, and others; and Cabaret Verboten.  In 2005 he won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Lead Actor in a Play, and was nominated for the Outer Critics’ Circle and Drama League Awards for his performance as George Simon in Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-at-Law.

His appearances in regional theaters include the musical South Pacific, the role of Billy in David Rabe’s Streamers at the Westwood Playhouse, Ariel in The Tempest at UCLA’s Resident Professional Repertory Theater, Marchbanks in Shaw’s Candida in Boston, both Sergius and Bluntschli in Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Pasadena Playhouse, several roles in Arnold Weinstein’s Metamorphoses, directed by Paul Sills at the Mark Taper Forum, and Warren Smith in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and in a 160-city national tour).  He starred in Sight Unseen at L.A.’s Odyssey theatre, Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass at Monterey Peninsula College, Merrily We Roll Along at the La Jolla Playhouse, in a version newly re-written by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, directed by James Lapine, and in the first Los Angeles production of Urinetown…the Musical.  In 2000, he made his London stage debut at the Savoy Theatre, starring opposite Donald Sutherland, in the play Enigmatic Variations, by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

He was the original Andrew Ladd III in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven opposite Joanna Gleason, opened the play in New York off-Broadway opposite Stockard Channing, with whom he subsequently performed it on Broadway, and went on to introduce it in San Francisco and Boston, and also performed it in Los Angeles and Washington DC.  He created the role of Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the musical by Terrence McNally, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, directed by Harold Prince at S.U.N.Y. Purchase, and the role of Kenneth Hoyle in Jon Robin Baitz’s Three Hotels for New York Stage & Light in Poughkeepsie.  He played Tateh in the American premiere run of the musical Ragtime, by Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty, and Lynn Ahrens, directed by Frank Galati, at the Shubert Theater in Los Angeles, receiving both a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle nomination and a Drama-Logue Award for Best Actor in a Musical.  He continued in Ragtime for its Vancouver engagement, and then completed a seven-month run in the same role on Broadway at the Ford Centre.  He has just finished a 15-month run in Los Angeles playing the Wizard of Oz in the musical Wicked.

His nineteen feature films include 21 Grams (directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inárritu), Red Dragon (directed by Brett Ratner), Mercy (directed by Richard Shephard), Another Stakeout (directed by John Badham), Someone To Watch Over Me (directed by Ridley Scott), Daniel (directed by Sidney Lumet), The Boys from Brazil (directed by Franklyn Schaffner), Choose Connor, Sublime, Rome and Jewel, Kid Cop, Getting Straight, Zachariah, Jekyll and The Car.  Since 1965 he has acted in close to 200 television films and series episodes, including “Mrs. Harris”, “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town”, “Norma and Marilyn”, Arthur Miller’s “The American Clock” (Cable Ace Award nomination), “Robocop: The Series”, “The Sleepwalker”, “In My Daughter’s name”, “Perry Mason”, “Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase”, “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles”, “Skokie”, “Movieola”, “Roots: The Next Generations”, and “A Howling In The Woods”.  He received an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of Jeff Maitland III in “Family”, a role he played on ABC for five years; and he starred for two years with Jack Warden in the CBS series “Crazy Like A Fox”.  He has had recurring roles on “Day Break”, “Barbershop”, “Angel”, “24”, “The Practice”, “Girlfriends”, “The Guardian”, and “Robocop: The Series”.

Mr. Rubinstein has composed, orchestrated, and conducted the musical scores for five features, including Jeremiah Johnson (directed by Sidney Pollack) and The Candidate (directed by Michael Ritchie), both starring Robert Redford, Paddy (with Milo O’Shea), The Killer Inside Me (with Stacy Keach), and Kid Blue (with Dennis Hopper); and for over 50 television films, among them the Peabody Award-winning “Amber Waves”, “The Dollmaker” (starring Jane Fonda), “Johnny Belinda” “The Ordeal Of Patty Hearst”, “Choices Of The Heart”, “Emily, Emily,”, and “A Walton Wedding”, as well as the pilots and weekly themes for “Family” and China Beach”.

He has appeared in performances of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat at Carnegie Hall, L.A.’s Music Center, and the Santa Fe and La Jolla Chamber Music Festivals, with Christoph Eschenbach, Pinchas Zukerman, Alan Gilbert, and Esa-Pekka Saalonen; he acted in a spoken version of Richard Strauss’s Elektra with Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic; he hosted the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Toyota Programs for Youth for two seasons, narrating Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with the orchestra; and he first acted in Marc Neikrug’s Through Roses  at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and subsequently at the Ravinia Festival, and in Seattle, Miami, and Philadelphia’ and he has twice performed with the Aspen Music Festival Orchestra and conductor Murray Sidlin in works by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

He spent six years as host for the radio program “Carnegie Hall Tonight”, broadcast on 80 stations in the United States and Canada, two seasons as host for the Los Angeles Philharmonic radio broadcasts, and two years as the keyboard player for the jazz-rock group Funzone.  He has recorded over 65 books on tape, including nineteen of the best-selling Alex Delaware novels by Jonathan Kellerman, E.L. Doctorow’s “City of God”, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Shadows on the Hudson”, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Independence Day” by Richard Ford, and Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor” and “OP Center” series.

In 1987, Mr. Rubinstein made his directorial debut at the Williamstown Theater Festival, staging Aphra Behn’s The River, with Christopher Reeve, Edward Herrmann, Kate Burton, Harry Groener, Ann Reinking, and Stephen Collins; the following season he directed the first American-cast production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangerueses, with Dianne Wiest, Anne Archer, and Dwight Schultz.  Off-Broadway, he directed the New York premieres of Phantasie, by Sybille Pearson, and Nightingale, by Elizabeth Diggs, and the world premiere of A.R. Gurney’s The Old Boy; and at Massachusetts’s Cape Playhouse, Wait Until Dark, starring Hayley Mills and William Atherton.  For television, he directed the CBS Schoolbreak Special “A Matter of Conscience”, which won the Emmy Award for Best Children’s Special in 1990, and episode of the CBS series “Nash Bridges”, the ABC Afterschool Special miniseries “Summer Stories”, and three episodes of the series “High Tide”.

He is a member of Interact Theatre Company in North Hollywood, where he directed and acted in Sondheim and Lapine’s Into The Woods, winning Valley Theatre League (ADA) Awards for directing and musical direction, and Sondheim and Wheeler’s A Little Night Music; and co-directed and played the title roles in Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, and in Elmer Rice’s Counsellor-At-Law, for which he won Drama-Logue awards and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for both co-directing and acting, as well a Ovation Awards for Ensemble Acting and Sound Design – the production itself won 27 awards.  He also acted in and did the musical direction for Urinetown…The Musical, and directed Sheridan’s The Rivals and Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls.  Mr. Rubinstein’s most rewarding experience has been participating in the lives of his five children: Jessica, Michael, Peter, Jacob, and Max.