Broadway star Mary Kate Morrissey, best known for playing Elphaba in “Wicked,” traded the stage for the fairway in the latest episode of Paige Spiranac’s YouTube series “Hot Birds,” helping the golf personality finish 2 under par through nine holes at Forest Hill Field Club.
The pair played a scramble from the forward tees, aiming to make as many birdies as possible.
“Let’s try to go under par,” Spiranac said before the round.
“Okay, let’s go under par. Under par. I’d be thrilled,” Morrissey said. “Paige is going to be carrying me on her back.”
“No way. No way,” Spiranac replied.
“Like, it’s mostly like, how are you feeling today? You know what I mean?” Morrissey said.
“I’m feeling great cuz I’m next to you. So, vibes are high. Couldn’t be better,” Spiranac said.
Morrissey kept her approach simple on the first tee. “I’m just going to try to make contact here. Let’s make some good contact,” she said. “It’s not war. It’s just golf.”
“Hit the ball. Didn’t miss. Didn’t chunk it. Little bit of an open face, but we’re getting warm still,” she said after her shot.
Spiranac asked about what she called a nearly nonexistent pipeline between golf and Broadway.
“It’s basically nonexistent,” Morrissey said. “Well, I’m most known for playing Elphaba on Broadway.”
Spiranac, dressed in green for the occasion, said she wanted to honor her guest. “I was like, I’m such a big fan. And I don’t know if she gets like sick of this or not, but I was like, I’m going to go with all of the green,” Spiranac said. “Brought out the emeralds. Did everything I could to like channel Elphaba and you and your legend status.”
Morrissey has also played Janis in “Mean Girls” and Elsa in “Frozen.” Asked about her dream role, she said she hoped to create one.
“I’d love to, like, originate a new role. I’d love to play Joan of Arc on Broadway. I think that that’d be really cool,” Morrissey said. “And like be kind of like a sort of glam rock Joan of Arc, like hot. But that’s my ultimate dream, and my dream is for Brandi Carlile to write the score.”
“Okay, we’re putting it out into the universe,” Spiranac said. “It’s a lot of golf people, so I don’t know if we can do that. But if you know anyone right now, you heard it here. Let’s make it happen.”
After a strong approach on the opening hole, Spiranac said, “Are we the best team ever?” and added, “We’re going to get a birdie on the first hole. What a way to start.”
The putt slid by, and the team settled for par. “Par on the first, but not bad. We’ll take our par,” Spiranac said.
Morrissey has appeared at events including Shinnecock and the KPMG, and she said her path into the sport surprised her.
“Absolutely not. Never in a thousand years did I think I’d be making my way in golf ever,” she said. “But I think that something I can add to the golf community and to the tournaments is like culture and talent and storytelling. And that’s kind of what I’m an expert at. And I’m obviously not an expert at playing golf, but because I love golf, I can find the story within it.”
“And so I’ve been having a really good time, like, telling the story where each course is the setting, the players, the character, the trees, the villain, and how they overcame their obstacle, you know?” she said.
Spiranac agreed. “It’s so crazy because it does actually really overlap with what you know best, and it is really about, like, the storytelling because a round of golf, there’s a lot of things that happen to you,” she said. “The highs are high, and the lows are low. Like your character arc throughout a round of golf is like I’m going pro.”
“And it does feel like it’s very theatrical in a way,” Spiranac said.
“It is for sure,” Morrissey said. “And something that I think is fun because I’m always thinking of, like, a music catalog in my head is like all the different songs that go with the experience that I’m having in the moment. So you’re like standing over a putt and you’re like, with every breath I take. Just little things like that that I think make other golfers laugh, which we need to be doing on the golf course because we’re all way too stressed.”
Spiranac said she wore G/FORE shoes, Monday Swimwear socks, a dress by Year of Ours and emeralds from London Jewelers, which sponsored the segment. Morrissey wore J.Lindeberg shoes, socks from a sneaker shop in Ocean City, New Jersey, which she called her favorite on the planet, a skirt and a Lululemon top.
“If we make an eagle today, we get $1,000 to London Jewelers, and you can pick out your own emeralds,” Spiranac said.
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” Morrissey said.
“So, eagle is the goal today, and hopefully we can get some diamonds and be iced out,” Spiranac said.
Asked for her top three musicals, Morrissey said it depends on her mood.
“I love ‘Rent.’ Like I just think ‘Rent’ is like such a good musical,” she said. “It reflected the time period it was in. It was just, it’s a stunning musical. I love ‘Hair.’ I like stories of rebellion. And I love ‘Titanic,’ which is an old one.”
“Okay, so my very first musical I ever saw was ‘Hairspray,'” Spiranac said.
“Oh, you’d be such a good Penny,” Morrissey said.
“Oh, I can’t sing. So, we need to talk about that in a little bit,” Spiranac said. “And I love ‘Wicked.’ I really do love ‘Wicked.'”
Spiranac said she saw the show on Broadway “long, long time ago,” and added, “I was going to say ‘Hamilton.’ I’m like, you’re probably such like basic answers. I can sing like every word to ‘Hamilton.'”
“Things are basic cuz they’re good,” Morrissey said.
“And ‘Lion King.’ I love ‘Lion King.’ I’ve seen it so many times,” Spiranac said.
“I love that show. And honestly, I feel like every Simba or Mufasa I meet are like amazing people,” Morrissey said.
Asked whether that isn’t always the case, Morrissey compared theater to professional golf. “It’s probably the same as golf. Do you know what I mean? It’s hyper competitive,” she said.
On the second hole, Morrissey launched a tee shot over a tree while Spiranac’s went elsewhere. “I can’t believe you went over that tree. That was so crazy,” Spiranac said. “You and I had like a tale of two shots.”
“I’m new. I’m new,” Morrissey said.
Morrissey said she loves to run and weightlift, and that her mother was a basketball referee. She noted that longer clubs remain a challenge. “But it’s just like the longer clubs are tough, tough for me,” she said.
Morrissey said she is producing her own YouTube series.
“Last year we filmed two pilot episodes of ‘Broadway to Birdie,’ which is the YouTube series that I’m working on,” she said. “It’s silly, and it’s short, and it’s like I bring Broadway stars out onto the golf course and kind of let their audience see them trying it, having fun, encouraging both audiences to try something new and integrating them because I think golf can learn a lot from theater and theater can learn a lot from golf.”
“I think that theater can benefit from the golf community’s like patronage. And I think that golf can benefit from the culture and storytelling aspect that theater professionals bring,” she said. “So I’m just trying to, like, connect everybody, you know what I mean? Try to make this big cookie. And so we are shooting like eight to 10 episodes. We already have six of them done right now.”
“That’s awesome. I can’t wait to see all of them,” Spiranac said.
A birdie putt burned the edge on the second hole. “Brutal. Such a good putt,” Spiranac said.
Spiranac asked how hard it is to sing “Defying Gravity.”
“It’s hard,” Morrissey said. “But the stage at the Gershwin is on a 1% incline. It’s called a raked stage for theater, so that the audience can see more because the house is so big, the theater is so big. So when you’re singing ‘Defying Gravity,’ that’s the only time your feet are level cuz you’re on a platform that rises up like a cherry picker, almost like a belt that clips around you and then you rise.”
“And so the hardest song to sing is actually ‘The Wizard and I,'” she said. “Because you’re not even warm. It’s like the second or third hole, and you have to give like an unbelievable performance, and you just started.”
Asked about her worst onstage mistake, Morrissey described what performers call “the white room.”
“I can laugh about it now,” she said. “The white room is when, like, all the life drops out of you and you, like, everything goes kind of white, and you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing because you forgot something. Like I forgot a word on stage.”
“I’ve never been in that situation here. If I mess up, we just go, that’s funny,” Spiranac said.
“It was the middle of ‘No Good Deed,’ and I was like, it was like ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’ and I forgot what comes next,” Morrissey said. “And the conductor, like, locked in on me, and he sang me every word a half a beat before I was supposed to say it. And he sang the rest of the song to me. So I’d be like, ‘I’m wicked through and through.’ And he gave me like the performance of a lifetime. Honestly, he did because everything he was doing I had to do cuz I had completely lost what I was supposed to do.”
“And he like walked me through it in front of, you know, 1,900 people,” she said.
Morrissey also recalled a stage injury. “The other bad thing that happened is I got concussed on stage cuz I was hit with a monkey wing and I swear to God I rang like a bell,” she said. “I was like, ‘Am I going to finish the show right now?’ And I did. But I went to PT afterward, and she was like, ‘Wow, you’re concussed. Like, your eyes are dilated like this. You got to go home.'”
Spiranac said she could not imagine the memorization. “I don’t understand how you can memorize all of the lines, all of the songs, and like do it night after night,” she said. “They’ll give me like five things to say, and I just can’t memorize things.”
“Weeks,” Morrissey said of her preparation time. “And you can’t skimp on your prep because if you don’t prepare enough, that’s when you forget stuff and that’s when you’re like up in front of thousands of people.”
On the third hole, Spiranac said of a Morrissey shot, “I don’t think it gets any better than that. We should just go up to your ball.”
After losing a ball, Morrissey said, “I’ll take it. I can’t believe I lost that ball. I love that ball.”
Asked about golf superstitions, Morrissey said, “So many. I have superstitions, and I have house rules.”
“My superstitions are that you shouldn’t pick up a ball on the course, especially if it’s in like the fescue or somewhere bad, because it might carry the juju of the golf that was being played before and you don’t want to carry that into your round,” she said.
After Spiranac shanked a shot, she said misses are part of the game.
“See, golf, it just happens. It just happens,” Spiranac said. “Weird things happen on the golf course, and it’s totally fine. I love to show the good and the bad cuz it literally like that is golf and you’re not going to have, you know, perfect shots every single time. And I do think sometimes people on YouTube golf will rehit so many and then you play with them in person, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s not actually how it is.'”
“I think it’s really cool of you to show that,” Morrissey said. “Like watching you, I’m like, ‘Wow, she’s such a good player. She’s so good.’ And then you hit a shot like that, I’m like, ‘She’s human.”
“You’re very rarely going to hit like the perfect shot,” Spiranac said. “Golf is just trying to manage all of your mishits.”
Standing over a birdie putt, Morrissey thought of her mother. “My mom would make this putt,” she said. “She’s an assassin. This is like her perfect, she’d be like, ‘This is a gimme.'”
“Channel your mom,” Spiranac said.
Spiranac holed it. “Now, that was a true team effort,” she said. “Drive for me. The next two shots from MK, I made the putt, and that puts us at one under through three holes.”
“We’re going to beat what we thought,” Spiranac said.
Morrissey said her original goal was simply to play with anyone. “Until this point, I really just wanted to be able to play with whoever. That was my whole goal,” she said. “And now it’s more like I think I’d like to move back a tee. Like I’d like to get confident enough that I’m playing from the whites instead of the reds.”
“But the thing is, though, you don’t have to,” Spiranac said. “So like I would always play back with my friends cuz I was like, ‘Oh, I just feel like this is something I need to do.’ And then I realized that golf is more fun when I can play from whatever tee makes me feel good. And sometimes that is the forward tees.”
“I always tell people if you’re not shooting in the 70s from the forward tees, then you shouldn’t move back yet,” Spiranac said. “Short game is the most important part of the game. And so it forces you to work on your short game. But you want to get comfortable going low too cuz a lot of people when they start to like shoot their personal best, they get really anxious. And so by playing forward tees, you are able to get used to making birdies and having wedge shots in and approaching the game in more of an aggressive way.”
“I’m dialed, babe,” Morrissey said after a good shot.
“You are dialed. You’re dialed today,” Spiranac said.
Spiranac asked whether Morrissey could hit the famous note from “Defying Gravity” on the spot.
“I would probably have to warm up. I’d probably do it, but it wouldn’t sound great,” Morrissey said. “Well, if you do it first, I’ll do it.”
Spiranac gave it a try. “I sounded like George in the jungle,” she said. “But I hit it.”
“You hit it. You actually hit it,” Morrissey said, adding that her favorite version came from Pink at the Tony Awards.
The team faced a long, downhill eagle putt worth $1,000 from London Jewelers. “Let’s make this putt for $1,000. No pressure to set the scene,” Spiranac said. “I think I’m feeling good about you, MK. I think this is yours.”
It missed, but they tapped in for birdie. “The good news is we are in for birdie. So that makes us two under,” Spiranac said.
Morrissey said that when her best friend makes a birdie, “she does a cartwheel.” On bogeys, she added, “I consider bogeys like bogey wonderland.”
“You’re gonna make bogeys. It’s gonna happen. But if you double or triple, you just want to always avoid like the big, big numbers,” Spiranac said.
On the par 3, Morrissey found the center of the green. “I’m not going to lie. I went to golf camp ahead of this,” she said.
“I would not play you for any amount of money right now,” Spiranac said.
Morrissey said she enjoys watching Charley and Nelly on the women’s side and has played with Akie and Esther in amateur programs.
“So, I’m always rooting for Akie, and I played with Esther, too. So, when she came really close this past weekend, I was really rooting for her,” she said.
She said a trip to the Masters shaped her fandom. “I went to the Masters the year Rory won,” she said. “It was a month after I finished ‘Wicked.’ And I felt like I was watching my story being played out in front of me. Like he had waited so long. He finally got it. And like when he won it, it made me so overwhelmed with emotion. Rory will always be like one of my favorite players because of that story. And I love Shane too.”
Spiranac praised the host course. “I’ll say that this is probably the hardest course that we’ve played in the series,” she said. “So, Forest Hill Field Club, you’re no joke of a course. Like, you’re a great course. We love you, but you’re a little challenging.”
Describing her dream course, Spiranac said, “For me it’s wide fairways. Like I have like a wide open golf course and then I love a challenging fast green.”
“Oh, see, I love a slow green,” Morrissey said. “Like, give me an aerated green, and that’s from working on the munis. But I, yeah, a wide open fairway. And then I like a little bit of hazard around the hole. But I hate like a plateau green, or like a two tier. I don’t like that.”
When a ball stopped on a slope, Morrissey joked about her place in the standings. “I just don’t want to be in DFL. That’s what I told my friends,” she said.
“And you’re number one in my heart,” Spiranac said.
Through six holes, the team remained 2 under. “We are just burning the edges right now,” Spiranac said.
“Paige is carrying me on her back, but I don’t mind the lift if you know what I mean,” Morrissey said.
Spiranac then made a prediction. “I think you could get to single digits next year,” she said. “I think you could be a nine handicap next year. I’m dead serious.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Morrissey said. “On this day, I’ll write it in my calendar. On this day right here, and if I am a nine handicap, I’ll owe you $100.”
“I think you just have all of the ability and your mindset is good, too. And that’s like the biggest piece,” Spiranac said. “Do you like the grind? Cuz you’re going to have to work through the times where you’re not feeling that good about the game. And that’s when most people give up.”
“I love it,” Morrissey said.
“You’re going to be a nine handicap,” Spiranac said.
“And you’re going to be $100 richer,” Morrissey said.
After a strong Morrissey shot, Spiranac asked about the proper stage bow. “Depends on what character you’re playing,” Morrissey said, describing a deep, respectful bow for Elphaba and a regular one for Elsa. “I like the straight guy bow. The leading man. The straight guy bow is my favorite.”
Spiranac offered a quick lesson on a sidehill lie. “Since it’s below your feet, you’re going to feel like you’re going to top it. So, you want to make sure that you kind of bend your knees just a little bit more and then just swing normally from there,” she said.
“Oh my gosh, Paige, you’re such a good coach,” Morrissey said.
“I really want to play Black Desert. I think that’d be so fun,” Morrissey said. “There are a couple of courses that I don’t think I’m quite good enough to play, but I want to play Pebble when I’m a little bit better. I’m going to go play Pinehurst in the fall.”
“I’ve been lucky to play a lot of really great places, but there’s still so many,” Spiranac said. “I haven’t played Pinehurst yet, so I really want to do that. I played Pebble, but I haven’t played any of the other courses around there, except for Cypress. And of course, like Augusta. Everyone wants to play Augusta.”
“We’re a really good scramble team,” Spiranac said. “Honestly, I feel like when I hit a bad shot, you’re there to back me up. Vice versa.”
Morrissey said she has four more episodes of “Broadway to Birdie” to shoot in September and invited Spiranac on.
“I’d love to. You have to sing though,” Spiranac said.
“The whole gag of it is that you go out and you play and the loser of the hole has to sing. So you could just whoop my a**, and I would just sing the whole time,” Morrissey said.
“I think I’d be nervous to come on your show and sing and I think you were a little nervous to come on here and play,” Spiranac said. “It’s like you don’t obviously want to be judged for the thing that you’re bad at, or you’re learning. To sing publicly is probably one of my greatest fears.”
“But I could send you a couple easy songs ahead of time,” Morrissey said. “‘Rubber Ducky.’ Like whatever. Just the easiest.”
After one of Spiranac’s drives found the ideal spot, Morrissey said, “Holy absolute c**p.”
“I always wake up and listen to morning jazz,” Morrissey said. “And then if I’m playing golf, I always listen to Paul Simon. And then if the vibe needs a shift, I listen to Latin music or Irish drinking songs. But I love like the 70s. I love the music of the 70s.”
“I kind of listen to everything,” Spiranac said. “My mom, she loves, loves, loves music, and she always has it on in the house, but her favorite is like The Cure and she loves like kind of like alt music. She was a professional ballet dancer, and she went to the National Ballet of Canada.”
“It’s cool that your mom was a ballerina and she would listen to alt rock,” Morrissey said.
Morrissey holed the final putt for par, and Spiranac told her to take a bow.
“With that massive par save, we finished at two under through nine holes, which beats our goal,” Spiranac said. “And this course was really hard. Thanks again to Forest Hill Field Club. You brought the challenge today.”
“I had a blast,” Morrissey said. “It’s not about the score, it’s about the giggle.”
