Annie Golden

The Shirts and the Bowery Clubs

While still in high school, Golden became the lead singer of The Shirts. Trouser Press describes the band as six Brooklynites who played Top 40 covers in neighborhood bars before moving to the Bowery club circuit in 1975. HuffPost names her bandmates as Bob Racioppo, Ronnie Ardito, Norman Shwiry and Artie Lamonica.

The club that mattered was CBGB. One of the band's early shows there was on a bill with Television, and Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, went on to manage The Shirts and help them get a record deal. Golden remembered the room this way: "It was a home base, a headquarters for many of us."

Three Albums for Capitol

The Shirts made three albums for Capitol: The Shirts in 1978, Street Light Shine in 1979 and Inner Sleeve in 1980. The first was made in England. Golden told ArtScene SA it was recorded "for Capitol/EMI in London," while the second, as she put it, "Streetlight Shine, was recorded at home in NYC." NME, looking back at her punk years in 2017, gives the same three titles and years.

The band split in 1981. According to Trouser Press, its members reunited several times afterward and released a comeback album, Only The Dead Know Brooklyn, in 2006. Golden kept recording on the side. Trouser Press notes a solo single in 1984 and her vocals on three tracks of Jing, the 1989 album that Artie LaMonica made under the name Arthur Jing for the Three Cherries label.

Jeanie in Milos Forman's Hair

Her move into acting came out of the same club. At CBGB she met the director Milos Forman. HuffPost reports that she was first cast in the 1977 Broadway revival of Hair, her Broadway debut, and that Forman then cast her as one of the four leads in his film version of the musical. She played Jeanie. The Primary Stages oral history adds that she got her Equity, SAG and AFTRA cards in 1977, the year of her Broadway debut. A 2015 profile on Call Me Adam summed up the route: she was "discovered on the Bowery fronting a rock band."

The film's release year differs between the sources we used, so we leave it out here. What they agree on is how she fit the cast. Her co-star Treat Williams called her "the heart and soul of that group of hippies," as HuffPost reported. Golden's own view of the show, in 2020: "Hair is immortal because it was ahead of its time."

She came to all of this without schooling in drama. "I had no training," she told HuffPost, and she has called herself "the illegitimate child of the legitimate theater."

Squeaky Fromme at Playwrights Horizons

In 1990, Off-Broadway, she joined the original production of Sondheim's Assassins at Playwrights Horizons. Golden originated the role of Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. The Christian Science Monitor reviewed the production in February 1991 and listed her, as Anne Golden, playing Fromme opposite Debra Monk's Sara Jane Moore.

Thirty years later, in 2021, TheaterMania listed her among the original cast members due to reunite with Sondheim for an anniversary event.

From Ah, Wilderness to Violet

Golden's credits show a working actor who moved between Broadway and the smaller houses downtown. The Primary Stages page lists Broadway runs in Ah, Wilderness (1988), The Full Monty (2000), Xanadu (2007) and Violet (2014). Off-Broadway, it lists A...My Name Is Alice (1983), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Disaster! A 70s Disaster Movie Musical (2013) and Underland (2015), the last of which ran at 59E59 Theaters.

When Casey Childs interviewed her for the oral history on May 24, 2018, she described her approach plainly: "When the work comes, you gotta go. That's what you want. You want people to use you up--everything you have." Her summary of the whole career was shorter: "All roads lead to Off-Broadway."

Broadway Bounty Hunter at Barrington Stage

In 2016 the composer Joe Iconis brought a musical to Barrington Stage that he had written for her. In Broadway Bounty Hunter, Golden played a fictional version of herself: a Broadway actress down on her luck. The Boston Globe review called the show a wild ride, and both the Globe and the Primary Stages page note that the part was built around her.

Norma Romano's Christmas Song

On the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black she played Norma Romano, an inmate who does not speak. HuffPost singled out the moment the character finally breaks that silence: her performance of "I Saw the Light" at the prison Christmas pageant. For an actress who had started as a singer, the scene put her voice back at the center. The Primary Stages page, written in 2018, still listed Norma as a current role, and NME's 2017 piece introduced her to readers as the Orange Is the New Black actress who once fronted a New York punk band.

Gamehendge at Madison Square Garden

On New Year's Eve 2023, the band Phish performed Gamehendge at Madison Square Garden for the first time since 1994, and invited Golden onstage. Jambands.com reported that she played Jimmy's grandmother and narrated "The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday," and that she sang on "Fly Famous Mockingbird." It was a rock stage again, almost fifty years after the Bowery.

Sources

• Exclusive Interview: Singer/Actor Annie Golden - ArtScene SA
• Annie Golden - Primary Stages Off-Center
• Shirts | Trouser Press
• Orange Is The New Black's Annie Golden used to be the frontwoman in a 1970's New York punk band
• Orange is the New Black's Annie Golden | HuffPost Entertainment
• Call Redialed: NEW Annie Golden Interview: From the Outbacks of Australia in Underland to Orange is the New Black
• 'Broadway Bounty Hunter' is a wild ride at Barrington Stage
• Fantasy Dodges History in `Assassins'
• Sondheim and Original Assassins Cast Will Reunite for 30th Anniversary Event
• Phish Perform "Gamehendge" for the First Time Since 1994 at MSG