Golf helps “Wicked” star Mary Kate Morrissey play one of Broadway’s biggest roles.
At the end of the first act of the hit Broadway musical “Wicked”, Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch of the West, belts out the song “Defying Gravity” as she flies on a broom for the first time to escape the Wizard of Oz and the rest of a cruel world that has turned against her. But what most in the audience at the Gershwin Theatre don’t know about the captivating actress currently playing the lead role, Mary Kate Morrissey, is that she spends much of her free time getting golf balls to take flight as well.
“Golf is a bug that has crawled up into my soul,” Morrissey says with a laugh. “All I want to do is play.” The game is a new obsession for the 35-year-old actress. “My dad always wanted my siblings and me to play golf, and all I wanted to do was go to theatre camp,” Morrissey says of being dragged to the course as a kid growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Downingtown. “I was like, I cannot believe I am sitting on the top of this hill while they are doing ‘West Side Story’ three blocks away.”
Morrissey wound up going to that theatre camp, and the rest is history. She is now living out her childhood dreams as the star of one of Broadway’s all-time biggest shows, which celebrated its staggering 21st birthday at the Gershwin in 2024. Based on a 1995 Gregory Maguire novel with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, the global blockbuster has received even more attention than usual recently with the release of the “Wicked” movie, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.
Long before that, an integral part of Morrissey’s journey involved going to a 2004 performance in which original cast members Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth had the day off – and she’ll never forget seeing understudy Shoshana Bean, who went on to become a Broadway legend as well, in the role of Elphaba. “I was just so floored by it,” Morrissey recalls. “At the same time, I was holding space for, Wow, I want to do this so bad and also I’ll never be good enough to do what they’re doing on stage.”
Morrissey wore a “Wicked” shirt on dress-down days at Bishop Shanahan High School, but her road to follow Menzel, Bean and others in playing the iconic role of the misunderstood, green-skinned girl wouldn’t be complete for a few decades. After earning her BFA in musical theatre from Syracuse University in 2011, Morrissey didn’t get cast after her first audition for “Wicked” in 2014 but returned six months later and earned the role of Elphaba’s standby on the national tour beginning in 2015. Over the next nine years – interrupted by the pandemic and playing other roles, including Janis in the US-wide tour of “Mean Girls” – Morrissey worked her way up in a world with an even deeper talent pool than pro golf, becoming the principal Elphaba on tour in 2017, then the standby on Broadway in 2023 before finally getting the nod to take over the role full-time starting in March 2024. However, to steal the title of another musical, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
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“My mum bought me a set of clubs for Christmas [in 2023] and was like, ‘If you want to hang out with me, you’re going to have to learn how to play golf,’” says Morrissey, whose mother, Mary Beth, had picked up the sport after retiring two years earlier. “That was not on my bingo card, but I had just booked Elphaba, and I thought, What better time to have a hobby?”
Morrissey contacted an indoor simulator facility, GOLF v.2, in her Brooklyn neighbourhood and started getting a lesson every week with instructor Kyla Williams. As with her day/night job for which she’s always trying to improve, Morrissey says she “loves to be in class”. If you follow Morrissey on Instagram – amid an entertaining mix of behind-the-scenes content including her stringent vocal preparation and tedious green make-up process – you can see that she has picked up the game quickly, already breaking 100 in her first season. She found golf was helping her prepare for one of Broadway’s biggest roles as well.
“Putting all of my self-doubt and imposter syndrome onto the golf ball as I start the last week of rehearsals and move into my next chapter of ‘Wicked’,” she captioned an Instagram post last February showing her smashing a 180-plus-metre drive into a simulator.
Doing eight shows per week doesn’t give Morrissey much time to play 18 holes, but she takes lessons and plays the Flushing Meadows Pitch & Putt. She’s found golf to be the perfect hobby for a variety of reasons. Morrissey loves spending quality time playing with her family, friends and husband, Trevor, who yells “Fore!” for her when she needs to rest her magical voice. As much as she enjoys being inside the theatre, golf has provided this Elphaba with her own way of “flying free”.
“When I’m out playing, I don’t have a spare brain cell for the show,” says Morrissey, who has already upgraded her clubs after getting fitted. “All I’m doing in the sunshine for those four hours is thinking about how to get that tiny ball into that hole. That is so restful for all of the pressure and all of the singing and all of the blocking or the interpersonal relationships on the stage.”
She’s also learned some mental lessons that she’s taken from the course to the stage. “Golf is teaching me how to be better in a high-pressure job because if I’m focusing on one bad thing I do, then the next thing will be bad,” says Morrissey, who used her rare time off from the show in 2024 to go on golf-centred trips to New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. “It’s mindset training. If I have one bad note, I can’t think about it. I have to keep going.”
Although Morrissey says golf isn’t “popular” within her Broadway circle, she’s trying to get more of her colleagues into it. She’s excited to participate in producer Ken Davenport’s fifth annual Broadway in the Woods outing this northern summer. Meanwhile, she remains thrilled to be playing the role of her dreams – especially during this exciting time for the show.
“There’s always something new, and that fuels the performance and changes it a little bit,” says Morrissey, who attended a special screening of the “Wicked” movie in October that brought together members of the current and original casts as well as movie co-stars Erivo and Grande. “This role is so challenging; it’s like playing the hardest course over and over and over again, so there’s always something that I’m working on or something that I’m trying to figure out.”
That process will end soon, though, with Morrissey’s year-long “Wicked” run – a typical duration for playing such a demanding part – wrapping up. Like Menzel, Bean and others before, Morrissey will pass on the green make-up to another talented actress and fly off to whatever roles the future has in store. But the first thing this Elphaba plans to do after putting down her broom is to pick up her new sticks.
“I’m going to [play] golf,” Morrissey says. “I’m bringing my sister and my mum – we are going to a golf camp for a month.”
And nobody in all of Oz is going to bring her down.
