‘Some Like It Hot’
Nov. 25 – Dec. 7
The National Theatre
1321 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Tickets starting at $67
Broadwayatthenational.com

For more than a year, out actor Edward Juvier has been part of the national tour of “Some Like It Hot,” the musical adaption of the 1959 classic comedy starring Marilyn Monroe and written and directed by Billy Wilder. 

Juvier, 49, plays Osgood Fielding III, a cheery millionaire in Depression-era America.  

With music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Scott Wittman and Shaiman, and a book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin, the 2022 musical is quite different as well with diverse casting, increasingly complicated backstories, and a non-binary character (Daphne). 

A talented tenor and Houston native, Juvier is a Cuban American who’s been working in musical theater since graduating from the Boston Conservatory in 2000.

“I personally love touring,” says Juvier. “I like the life on the road and visiting these old theater houses across the country. Seeing the locals that I remember and my friends and family that live all over. For me, a transient life is great. Maybe not so great for others.” 

Early in his career, he toured with “Phantom of the Opera” for six years. He began in the ensemble and covered two principal roles, and moved to swing which gave him the longevity covering 11 different roles in that show, a life-changing gig that he remembers fondly.

WASHINGTON BLADE: As a gay actor touring in a hot musical with some queer themes do you feel that you make an impact?

EDWARD JUVIER: Oh yeah, it’s important for queer people to see representation on stage. Our version of the show is a sneak attack; it doesn’t hit you over the head with themes. Seeing an old story that takes a turn where you’re left to accept what’s happening onstage and by that time, you’re in love and rooting with the characters. You feel it from the audiences and we play some of the reddest of states. 

Queer, trans, nonbinary people meet us at the stage door in tears thanking us for the representation. They didn’t even know when they came to the show that they’re going to see something with such an affirming message to their lives, and they’re thrilled when they find that out. 

BLADE: How were you drawn into musical theater?

JUVIER: I was lucky that my Texas high school made annual trips to New York to see Broadway shows.  On one trip, I remember seeing “Will Rogers Follies,” I felt like Keith Carradine was looking and talking right to me. 

And the next day, we saw “Falsettos,” the original production. After seeing those two very different shows it was as if I blasted off into the Broadway world. 

BLADE: Did “Falsettos,” a musical about AIDS, resonate with you as young gay student? 

JUVIER: Absolutely. It shook me to the core. 

BLADE: Has being gay made you a better actor?

JUVIER: I think what makes a great actor is somebody who has enormous empathy, able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, and what better than a queer artist to be able to empathize. 

I came out pre- “Will and Grace.” A different time to be coming out than it is now, which shows immense progress but also put us through challenges. It’s been a part of my journey. 

I’m lucky to have the best, most supportive family. No Trumpers to deal with when I go home for the holidays. So, I’m grateful for that especially at this time of year.

BLADE:  How do you approach a comic character like Osgood. 

JUVIER: I approach him with honesty and simplicity and try to get out of the way of cheap jokes. 

When I’m feeling that I’m pushing myself I remind myself to just say the words. I think the musical is so beautifully crafted in a way to brings the show to a new audience. Changes aren’t a diss on the original but the world has changed. 

BLADE: Are you a big fan of the original?

JUIVIER: I respect the original. It’s been with me all my life especially being a queer artist. We grew up watching “Some Like It Hot.” This takes old themes and jokes that don’t land so well and brings it to a new audience.

Particularly with my role played originally and so brilliantly by famed comedian Joe E. Brown. In the movie he’s not a multi-dimensional character. He’s more of an old, rich pervy guy. That’s just how it was back then. And I’ve had the great privilege to play him differently.  

It’s not strictly necessary to know anything about Henrik Ibsen when you watch “Hedda” – the festival-acclaimed period drama from filmmaker Nia DaCosta, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video after a brief theatrical release in October – but it might help.

One of three playwrights – alongside Anton Chekhov and August Strindberg – widely cited as “fathers of “modern theater,” the Norwegian Ibsen was sharply influenced by the then-revolutionary science of of psychology. His works were driven by human motivations rather than the workings of fate, and while some of the theories that inspired them may now be outdated, the complexity of his character-driven dramas can be newly interpreted through any lens – which is why he is second only to Shakespeare as the most-frequently performed dramatist in the world.

Arguably his most renowned play, “Hedda Gabler” provides the basis for DaCosta’s movie. The tale of a young newlywed – the daughter of a prominent general, accustomed to a life of luxury and pleasure – who feels trapped as the newly wedded wife of George Tesman, a respected-but-financially-insecure academic, and stirs chaos in an attempt to secure a future she doesn’t really want. Groundbreaking when it premiered in 1891, it became one of the classic “standards” of modern theater, with its title role coveted and famously interpreted by a long list of the 20th century’s greatest female actors – and yes, it’s been adapted for the screen multiple times.

The latest version – DaCosta’s radically reimagined reframing, which moves the drama’s setting from late-19th-century Scandinavia to England of the 1950s – keeps all of the pent-up frustration of its title character, a being of exceptional intelligence and unconventional morality, but adds a few extra layers of repressed “otherness” that give the Ibsen classic a fresh twist for audiences experiencing it more than a century later.

Casting Black, openly queer performer Tessa Thompson in the iconic title role, DaCosta’s film needs go no further to introduce new levels of relevance to a character that is regarded as one of the theater’s most searing portrayals of thwarted female empowerment – but by flipping the gender of another important character, a former lover who is now the chief competition for a job that George (Tom Bateman) is counting on obtaining, it does so anyway.

Instead of the play’s Eilert Lövborg, George’s former colleague and current competition for lucrative employment, “Hedda” gives us Eileen (Nina Hoss), instead, who carries a deep and still potent sexual history  – underscored to an almost comical level by the ostentationally buxom boldness of her costume design – which presents a lot of options for exploitation in Hedda’s quest for self-preservation; these are even further expanded by the presence of Thea (Imogen Poots), another of Hedda’s former flings who has now become enmeshed with Eileen, placing a volatile sapphic triangle in the middle of an already delicate situation.

Finally, compounding the urgency of the story’s precarious social politics, DaCosta compresses the play’s action into a single evening, the night of Hedda and George’s homecoming party – in the new and expensive country house they cannot afford – as they return from their honeymoon. There, surrounded by and immersed in an environment where bourgeois convention and amoral debauchery exist in a precarious but socially-sanctioned balance, Hedda plots a course which may ultimately be more about exacting revenge on the circumstances of a life that has made her a prisoner as it is about protecting her husband’s professional prospects.

Sumptuously realized into a glowing and nostalgic pageant of bad behavior in the upper-middle-class, “Hedda” scores big by abandoning Ibsen’s original 19th-century setting in favor of a more recognizably modern milieu in which “color-blind” casting and the queering of key relationships feel less implausible than they might in a more faithful rendering. Thompson’s searingly nihilistic performance – her Hedda is no dutiful social climber trying to preserve a comfortable life, but an actively rebellious presence sowing karmic retribution in a culture of hypocrisy, avarice, and misogyny – recasts this proto-feminist character in such a way that her willingness to burn down the world feels not only authentic, but inevitable. Tired of being told she must comply and cooperate, she instead sets out to settle scores and shift the balance of power in her favor, and if her tactics are ruthless and seemingly devoid of feminine compassion, it’s only because any such sentimentality has long been eliminated from her worldview. Valued for her proximity to power and status rather than her actual possession of those qualities, in DaCosta’s vision of her story she seems to willingly deploy her position as a means to rebel against a status quo that keeps her forever restricted from the self-realized autonomy she might otherwise deserve, and thanks to the tantalizingly cold fire Thompson brings to the role, we are hard-pressed not to root for her, even when her tactics feel unnecessarily cruel.

As for the imposition of queerness effected by making Eilert into Eileen, or the additional layers of implication inevitably created by this Hedda’s Blackness, these elements serve to underscore a theme that lies at the heart of Ibsen’s play, in which the only path to prosperity and social acceptance lies in strict conformity to social norms; while Hedda’s race and unapologetic bisexuality feel largely accepted in the private environment of a party among friends, we cannot help but recognize them as impediments to surviving and thriving in the society by which she is constrained, and it makes the slow-bubbling desperation of her destructive character arc into a tragedy with a personal ring for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in their own inner circle, simply by virtue of who they are.

Does it add anything of value to Ibsen’s iconic work? Perhaps not, though the material is certainly rendered more expansive in scope and implication by the inclusion of race and sexuality to the already-stacked deck of class hierarchy that lies at the heart of the play; there are times when these elements feel like an imposition, a “what-if?” alternate narrative that doesn’t quite gel with the world it portrays and ultimately seems irrelevant in the way it all plays out – though DaCosta’s ending does offer a sliver of redemptive hope that Ibsen denies his Hedda. Still, her retooling of this seminal masterwork does not diminish its greatness, and it allows for a much-needed spirit of inclusion which deepens its message for a diverse modern audience.

Anchored by Thompson’s ferocious performance, and the electricity she shares with co-star Hoss, “Hedda” makes for a smart, solid, and provocative riff on a classic cornerstone of modern dramatic storytelling; enriched by a sumptuous scenic design and rich cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, it may occasionally feel more like a Shonda Rhimes-produced tale of sensationalized scandal and “mean-girl” melodrama than a timeless masterwork of World Theatre, but in the end, it delivers a powerful echo of Ibsen’s classic that expands to accommodate a whole century’s worth of additional yearning.

Besides, how often do we get to see a story of blatant lesbian attraction played out with such eager abandon in a relatively mainstream movie? Answer: not often enough, and that’s plenty reason for us to embrace this queered-up reinvention of a classic with open arms.

The Rehoboth Beach annual tree lighting at the bandstand will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 28. Festivities are preceded by a sing-along by Clear Space Theatre beginning at 6:30 p.m.

And if you’re not tired of tree lightings at the beach, check out the annual Dewey Beach tree lighting along Rt. 1 at Fifer’s market on Saturday, Nov. 29. Festivities start at 5:30 p.m. and include local businesses offering food and drinks along with the lighting.