Theatre
As Tiger Brown in the Resident Ensemble Players’ 2012 production of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Directed by Matthew Earnest, set and costumes by Matthew LeFebvre, lights by Eileen Smitheimer, photo by Paul Cerro.
As an actor, Anand has worked extensively in the Chicago theatre scene - including work with Steppenwolf, Goodman, Court, Writers, Northlight, Timeline, Chicago Children’s, Silk Road Rising, and Chicago Dramatists - while also maintaining a presence at regional theatres across America, such as Milwaukee Rep, Denver Center, Kansas City Rep, Chautauqua, Great Lakes Theatre, and the Utah, Idaho, Lake Tahoe, Hudson Valley, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas Shakespeare Festivals. Anand is currently playing Jafar on the new North American tour of Disney’s Aladdin.
He has premiered and/or workshopped new works by playwrights like Lauren Gunderson, Theresa Rebeck, Kate Hamill, Shishir Kurup, Matthew-Lee Erlbach, Minita Gandhi, Rammel Chan, Matthew C. Yee, Seth Bockley, Heidi Armbruster, and Robert Schenkkan.
Anand has been lucky to work with some of the leading directors in the industry, including Casey Nicholaw, Tina Landau, Mark Lamos, Davis McCallum, Katie Spelman, Devon de Mayo, Marco Barricelli, Sandy Robbins, JC Clementz, Jessica Thebus, Peter Amster, Stuart Carden, Nicholas Avila, Charles Newell, Sara Bruner, Lavina Jadhwani, Charles Fee, Marti Lyons, Nick Bowling, Anne Kauffman, Benny Sato Ambush, Matthew Earnest, Vanessa Stalling, Henry Wishcamper, Warner Shook, Jewel Walker, Jeff Perry, and Adrian Hall, among many, many others.
He is a frequent interpreter of the plays of William Shakespeare, having worked on 16 of the Bard’s plays - several of them multiple times. Some of the roles that Anand has performed from Shakespeare’s canon include Othello, Bottom, Launce, Jaques (twice), Posthumus, Orsino, Biondello, Polixenes, Falstaff, both Chiron and Demetrius, eight different characters across three productions of Hamlet, and one gentleman of Verona.
As a playwright and composer for the theatre, Anand and his frequent collaborator, Jonathan Spivey, have completed two pieces: Murphy’s Law, a road trip musical-comedy that had its premiere at the Strand Theatre in 2016; and Talmadge & Ray, a play with music for two actors which has workshopped in Chicago and New York City. In 2021, Talmadge & Ray was selected as a finalist for the inaugural So.Queer Playwriting Festival in Richmond, VA. He is currently working with his band The Winchesters on Evangeline, a theatrical concert event based on the Longfellow poem and folk tale.
Originally from Yorktown, Virginia, Anand studied vocal music at the University of Richmond, attended the School at Steppenwolf, and earned his MFA in acting from the University of Delaware’s PTTP. He also served as a full-time member of the faculty for the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Proud member of AEA, and lucky husband to Liz.
