February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
At 40, the Irish-American actor Michael Hayden, after racking up one of the best performances of his career in one of the juiciest roles any young actor could ever hope to undertake, namely Hal, the wayward princeling who will become King Henry V, will have to make his mind up about where he, his wife and his child will live, whether in London or New York.
The Minnesota-born, Connecticut-raised actor has worked more or less continually in the New York theater in the last several seasons, added to which are significant sojourns to stages in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, but the idea of living and working in England has been nagging at him for the better part of a decade now.
And there are reasons. One is that his wife, Elizabeth Sastre, is British. Another is that London is where Hayden scored his first really significant success, playing Billy Bigelow in director Nicholas Hytner?s Royal National Theatre production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic ?Carousel.?
When Hytner?s brilliant and marginally radical rethinking of ?Carousel? transferred to Lincoln Center, Hayden found himself playing Billy on the same stage where he?s now doing Hal.
Following his triumph as the doomed hero of the R&H adaptation of Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar?s ?Liliom,? transplanted to a New England mill town, the actor joined the company of the just-closed Roundabout Theatre revival of ?Cabaret,? playing Clifford, the na