Theater
Reprising Max
Gay actor Ed Dixon draws raves for ‘Sunset’ performance
Actor Ed Dixon as Max in Signature Theatre’s current production ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ (Production photo by Chris Mueller, courtesy of Signature)
Ed Dixon’s emotional pendulum — as one might expect from an actor — swings wide.
During an hour-long interview in the lobby of Signature Theatre where he’s on the boards each night as Max in “Sunset Boulevard,” Dixon laughs uproariously and heartily several times recanting tales and dropping names from his four-decade career. And though no tears appear, two of the stories he tells involve copious sheddings thereof.
One even came during “Sunset,” though it was during his initial encounter with the musical 14 years ago when he toured with it for a year with Linda Balgord as Norma.
“In the movie it cuts away from (Max) all the time, but on the stage he’s up there a lot of time in the background just suffering,” Dixon says. “At the end of act one there was a part where I stand behind a fringe curtain at the part where Norma pulls Joe down on top of her and I would just release the curtain down on my face. Well after standing there for six months or whatever it was in that condition, feeling this wretched, painful condition, it’s like your body doesn’t know you’re only kidding. It’s like you’re really experiencing that. This one night I just started crying and cried all during intermission. People were going, ‘Are you OK? I was like, ‘Uhh, not really.’ It had really built up over the run. So how do you deal with that every day for a year? It makes you kind of crazy.”
This production, which runs through Feb. 13 and has been the second-biggest hit in Signature’s 21-year history (after “Les Miserables”), hasn’t been as emotionally draining, Dixon says. But it has been taxing. Returning to the role has been rewarding and challenging, he says.
The lessons Dixon, 62, uses to coach actors and singers for auditions in New York, where he lives on the Upper West Side, have come in handy.
“It feels different doing eight shows a week than it did 14 years ago. I was really vocally stronger 14 years ago but I’ve also been very pleased to see how much agility I still have. … I went into daily training months ago.”
It’s the most vocally challenging part Dixon — who has extensive opera and musical theater credits — has done in years.
Dixon in the Signature lobby. (Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
The Anadarko, Okla., native and son of a Church of Christ revival minister, knew early on he liked boys, even before he had the language to articulate it. Asked at church as a pre-schooler whom he would someday marry, he matter-of-factly answered Jimmy DeLong, a boy from his neighborhood.
“They said, ‘You can’t marry a boy.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ I remember that, but I didn’t know that I was gay. I just knew I liked Jimmy DeLong.”
Later, he had no idea what taunts (“Hey, queer ass!”) in middle school meant.
He arrived in New York (“Oklahoma is a wretched place,” he says) in the late ’60s and never looked back. Never even to visit his parents, from whom he was estranged and only saw twice in adulthood.
His big break came in the chorus of “No No Nannette,” a popular musical revival in 1970. Even though New York, and especially the theater world, was filled with gays at the time, it wasn’t an especially gay-friendly environment.
“Things were so different then you can’t even imagine it,” he says. “Even in the theater, you didn’t really talk overtly about it. And I was even more behind the times because I was coming from the Dark Ages. I remember in the dressing room of ‘No, No Nannette,’ there was an old queen who only spoke to us in the voice of Bette Davis and used to scare the fuck out of me. I was just like, ‘Oh god, please don’t let me end up like that, you know?’”
Even as recent as his first run with the touring version of “Sunset,” a role he’d eyed since it debuted in London in 1993, there were hints of homophobia in the casting process for the straight part. He knew everyone in the room and was chatting them up between readings. Before the callback, he was tipped off to tone it down.
“I’d had a big career by then,” he says. “One night at a party one of them pulled me aside and said, ‘They really want to know that you were married to her.’ I thought, ‘Are you kidding?’ I’d just been laughing and joking and being myself, you know, before and after I read. So I stayed Max through the whole callback and got it.”
This run, Dixon says, has been draining but creatively satisfying. He and co-star Florence Lacey have worked together several times before and enjoy a special camaraderie.
“We’re like an old married couple,” he says. “You know, I always go spend time with her in her dressing room before the show. She always tells me she loves me. She calls me Daddy and I call her Baby. It’s really sweet. She’s just one of those people who’s so sweet you think, ‘Is that real?” And with her it’s totally real.”
The feelings are mutual.
“Speaking about Ed Dixon, I’m always a gushing mess,” Lacey says. “Ed is a man of extraordinary talent with a big voice and a heart to match. He has a laugh that makes the whole world join in and he can break your heart with a look. He’s tough and sensitive both as an artist and in his friendships. I feel proud to call him my dear, dear friend.”
He’s worked non-stop since he came to New York except for a stint in rehab in the ’80s when he beat a cocaine addiction. Dixon just celebrated 20 years of sobriety.
After “Sunset” ends its run, Dixon will tour with the musical “Curtains.” And a comedy he wrote called “Scenery,” which explores the inside tract of a showbiz Lunt/Fontanne-esque couple in which the husband is gay, is getting rave reviews in Cleveland where it just opened.
Dixon says a life-defining moment came watching his mentor, the character actor George Rose, from whom he learned much about acting and life.
“He was middle aged, this gay, effete, Englishman, and he came into the room and he was just the most powerful man I had ever been in the presence of. That was a big moment for me. Because of him I realized, ‘Oh, you can be gay and still powerful.’ I didn’t know that before.”
Theater
Swing actor Thomas Netter covers five principal parts in ‘Clue’
Unique role in National Theatre production requires lots of memorization
‘Clue: On Stage’
Jan. 27-Feb. 1
The National Theatre
1321 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
thenationaldc.com
Out actor Thomas Netter has been touring with “Clue” since it opened in Rochester, New York, in late October, and he’s soon settling into a week-long run at D.C.’s National Theatre.
Adapted by Sandy Rustin from the same-titled 1985 campy cult film, which in turn took its inspiration from the popular board game, “Clue” brings all the murder mystery mayhem to stage.
It’s 1954, the height of the Red Scare, and a half dozen shady characters are summoned to an isolated mansion by a blackmailer named Mr. Boddy where things go awry fairly fast. A fast-moving homage to the drawing room whodunit genre with lots of wordplay, slapstick, and farce, “Clue” gives the comedic actors a lot to do and the audience much to laugh at.
When Netter tells friends that he’s touring in “Clue,” they inevitably ask “Who are you playing and when can we see you in it?” His reply isn’t straightforward.
The New York-based actor explains, “In this production, I’m a swing. I never know who’ll I play or when I’ll go on. Almost at any time I can be called on to play a different part. I cover five roles, almost all of the men in the show.”
Unlike an understudy who typically learns one principal or supporting role and performs in the ensemble nightly, a swing learns any number of parts and waits quietly offstage throughout every performance just in case.
With 80 minutes of uninterrupted quick, clipped talk “Clue” can be tough for a swing. Still, Netter, 28, adds, “I’m loving it, and I’m working with a great cast. There’s no sort of “All About Eve” dynamic going on here.”
WASHINGTON BLADE: Learning multiple tracks has got to be terrifying.
THOMAS NETTER: Well, there certainly was a learning curve for me. I’ve understudied roles in musicals but I’ve never covered five principal parts in a play, and the sheer amount of memorization was daunting.
As soon as I got the script, I started learning lines character by character. I transformed my living room into the mansion’s study and hallway, and got on my feet as much as I could and began to get the parts into my body.
BLADE: During the tour, have you been called on to perform much?
NETTER: Luckily, everyone has been healthy. But I was called on in Pittsburgh where I did Wadsworth, the butler, and the following day did the cop speaking to the character that I was playing the day before.
BLADE: Do you dread getting that call?
NETTER: Can’t say I dread it, but there is that little bit of stage fright involved. Coming in, my goal was to know the tracks. After I’d done my homework and released myself from nervous energy, I could go out and perform and have fun. After all, I love to act.
“Clue” is an opportunity for me to live in the heads of five totally different archetype characters. As an actor that part is very exciting. In this comedy, depending on the part, some nights it’s kill and other nights be killed.
BLADE: Aside from the occasional nerves, would you swing again?
NETTER: Oh yeah, I feel I’m living out the dream of the little gay boy I once was. Traveling around getting a beat on different communities. If there’s a gay bar, I’m stopping by and meeting interesting and cool people.
BLADE: Speaking of that little gay boy, what drew him to theater?
NETTER: Grandma and mom were big movie musical fans, show likes “Singing in the Rain,” “Meet Me in St. Louis.” I have memories of my grandma dancing me around the house to “Shall We Dance?” from the “King and I” She put me in tap class at age four.
BLADE: What are your career highlights to date?
NETTER: Studying the Meisner techniqueat New York’sNeighborhood Playhouse for two years was definitely a highlight. Favorite parts would include the D’Ysquith family [all eight murder victims] in “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” and the monstrous Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda.”
BLADE: And looking forward?
NETTER: I’d really like the chance to play Finch or Frump in Frank Loesser’s musical comedy “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
BLADE: In the meantime, you can find Netter backstage at the National waiting to hear those exhilarating words “You’re on!”
Theater
Voiceless ‘Antony & Cleopatra’ a spectacle of operatic proportions
Synetic production pulls audience into grips of doomed lovers’ passion
‘Antony & Cleopatra’
Through Jan. 25
Synetic Theater at
Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre
450 7th St., N.W.
Synetictheater.org
A spectacle of operatic proportions, Synetic Theater’s “Antony & Cleopatra” is performed entirely voiceless. An adaptation of the Bard’s original (a play bursting with wordplay, metaphors, and poetic language), the celebrated company’s production doesn’t flinch before the challenge.
Staged by Paata Tsikurishvili and choreographed by Irina Tsikurishvili, this worthy remount is currently playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre, the same venue where it premiered 10 years ago. Much is changed, including players, but the usual inimitable Synectic energy and ingenuity remain intact.
As audiences file into the Klein, they’re met with a monumental pyramid bathed in mist on a dimly lit stage. As the lights rise, the struggle kicks off: Cleopatra (Irina Kavsadze) and brother Ptolemy (Natan-Maël Gray) are each vying for the crown of Egypt. Alas, he wins and she’s banished from Alexandria along with her ethereal black-clad sidekick Mardian (Stella Bunch); but as history tells us, Cleopatra soon makes a triumphant return rolled in a carpet.
Meanwhile, in the increasingly dangerous Rome, Caesar (memorably played by Tony Amante) is assassinated by a group of senators. Here, his legendary Ides of March murder is rather elegantly achieved by silver masked politicians, leaving the epic storytelling to focus on the titular lovers.
The fabled couple is intense. As the Roman general Antony, Vato Tsikurishvili comes across as equal parts warrior, careerist, and beguiled lover. And despite a dose of earthiness, it’s clear that Kavsadze’s Cleopatra was born to be queen.
Phil Charlwood’s scenic design along with Colin K. Bills’ lighting cleverly morph the huge pyramidic structure into the throne of Egypt, the Roman Senate, and most astonishingly as a battle galley crashing across the seas with Tsikurishvili’s Antony ferociously at the helm.
There are some less subtle suggestions of location and empire building in the form of outsized cardboard puzzle pieces depicting the Mediterranean and a royal throne broken into jagged halves, and the back-and-forth of missives.
Of course, going wordless has its challenges. Kindly, Synectic provides a compact synopsis of the story. I’d recommend coming early and studying that page. With changing locations, lots of who’s who, shifting alliances, numerous war skirmishes, and lack of dialogue, it helps to get a jump on plot and characters.
Erik Teague’s terrific costume design is not only inspired but also helpful. Crimson red, silver, and white say Rome; while all things Egyptian have a more exotic look with lots of gold and diaphanous veils, etc.
When Synetic’s voicelessness works, it’s masterful. Many hands create the magic: There’s the direction, choreography, design, and the outrageously committed, sinewy built players who bring it to life through movement, some acrobatics, and the remarkable sword dancing using (actual sparking sabers) while twirling to original music composed by Konstantine Lortkipanidze.
Amid the tumultuous relationships and frequent battling (fight choreography compliments of Ben Cunis), moments of whimsy and humor aren’t unwelcome. Ptolemy has a few clownish bits as Cleopatra’s lesser sibling. And Antony’s powerful rival Octavian (ageless out actor Philip Fletcher) engages in peppy propaganda featuring a faux Cleopatra (played by Maryam Najafzada) as a less than virtuous queen enthusiastically engaged in an all-out sex romp.
When Antony and Cleopatra reach their respective ends with sword and adder, it comes almost as a relief. They’ve been through so much. And from start to finish, without uttering a word, Kavsadze and Tsikurishvili share a chemistry that pulls the audience into the grips of the doomed lovers’ palpable passion.
Theater
Ford’s ‘First Look’ festival showcases three new productions
A chance to enjoy historical dramas for free before they’re completed
The Ford’s Theatre Legacy Commissions: A First Look – 2026
Jan. 16 & 17
Ford’s Theatre
511 Tenth St., N.W.
FREE
Fords.org
When Ford’s Theatre debuted its new plays festival, “A First Look,” in 2023, it was unclear whether people would come for the staged readings.
“Before the pandemic if you announced the reading of a play, 12 people might show up,” says José Carrasquillo, director of artistic programming at Ford’s Theatre. “Since then, we’ve experienced comparatively massive turnout. Maybe because it’s cheap, or because of the very newness of the works.”
This year’s fourth edition showcases readings of three pieces currently in varied stages of development. The free, two-day festival offers audiences a chance to encounter historical dramas long before they’re completed and fully produced. None are finished, nor have they been read publicly. And befitting the venue’s provenance, the works are steeped in history.
The festival kicks off with “Springs” by playwright Jeanne Sakata and directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Commissioned by The Ford’s Theatre Legacy Commissions, it’s the both epic and personal story of Sakata’s Japanese American family including her grandfather’s experience in an internment camp.
“Sakata’s immigrant grandfather was an exceptionally skilled farmer who helped to stave off starvation in the camp. Still, he never gave up on the idea that he belonged in America. It’s very much a story of today,” says Carrasquillo.
Unlike “Springs,” the festival’s two other works weren’t commissioned by Ford’s. But they both fit the history brief and likely will benefit from the exposure and workshopping.
“Providence Spring,” by California based playwright Richard Helesen and directed by Holly Twyford, portrays Clara Barton (played by local favorite Erin Weaver) as a hero beyond the Red Cross whose then-radical initiatives included cataloguing the Civil War dead, many pulled from mass graves.
Directed by Reginald L. Douglas, “Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest” explores a slice from the life of the legendary civil rights activist and longtime congressman. With book and lyrics by Psalmayene 24 and music by Kokayi this collaboratively staged reading between Ford’s and Mosaic Theater is slated to premiere fully produced at Mosaic as a 90-minute musical in the spring of 2026.
“When I was hired at Ford’s in 2018, we began discussing hiring writers who do historical drama,” says Carrasquillo. “Our intention was resolute, but we didn’t do it right away. It took getting through the pandemic to revisit the idea.”
At the same time, the racial reckoning spurred Ford’s to hire playwrights of color to tell stories that had previously been forgotten or ignored.
For Carrasquillo, who is gay, the impulse to commission was crystalized when he saw the film “Hidden Figures,” a true story about “three brilliant African-American women — at NASA during the Space Race, overcoming racial and gender discrimination to make crucial contributions to America’s spaceflight success.” He says, “the film floored me. How many stories like this are there that we don’t know about?”
One of the festival’s happiest experiences, he adds, was the commission of playwright Chess Jakobs’s “The American Five” and its subsequent success. It’s the story of Martin Luther King Jr. and his inner circle, including Bayard Rustin (MLK’s brilliant, unsung gay adviser) leading up to the 1963 March on Washington. The play later premiered fully produced in Ford’s 2025 season.
Increasingly, the readings at Ford’s have become popular with both artists and audiences.
At Ford’s, Carrasquillo wears many hats. In addition to selecting plays and organizing workshops, he serves as an in-house dramaturg for some of the nascent works. But he’s not alone. Also helming the festival are senior artistic advisor Sheldon Epps, and The Ford’s Theatre Legacy Commissions advisor Sydné Mahone.
Because the plays are in development, comments from directors, dramaturgs, and the audience are considered and may become part of the playwrights’ rewrites and changes. If and when the play resurfaces fully produced, audience members might find their suggestion in the completed work.
Is this year’s festival queer influenced? Yes, both by those involved and the topics explored.
Carrasquillo explains, “While Sakata’s “Springs” is primarily about immigration, its message is relevant to the queer community. Civil rights are being taken away from us. We need this playwright’s story to know what has happened and what can happen to any of us.
“Many of Ford’s legacy commissions underscore the importance of civil rights in our country and that’s important to all of us. Queer and not queer.”
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