KALAMAZOO, MI — Jerry Dixon appeared in his first musical, “Anything Goes,” in the late 1970s as a student at Kalamazoo Central High School.
In the decades since, he has appeared in four Broadway musicals, starring in three, and directed and acted in dozens of other shows off Broadway. This October he will make a triumphant return to Kalamazoo to direct Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs of a New World” at Farmers Alley Theatre.
Dixon, who calls Manhattan home, left Kalamazoo permanently for the Big Apple in 1983.
“I was only supposed to visit New York for three months, but I wound up staying for three years without returning home,” he said. “The theater bug got me and got its hooks in me, and I didn’t let it go.”
That bug led to roles in the original casts of such Broadway musicals as “Once on this Island,” “Five Guys Named Moe,” and “I Was Looking at the Ceiling.” After prioritizing directing for close to 20 years, Dixon returned to the Broadway stage in 2015-16 for a production of “If/Then.”
He’s also appeared in numerous films and television shows and has sung with the Belgian National Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra and more.
His return to Kalamazoo this fall will be the first in a half decade as he directs a four-person cast, starring Cara Palombo, Nattalyee Randall, Jos N. Banks and Matthew Stoke.
The musical selected is one Dixon anticipates gripping ticketholders from the first notes and not letting go until the last.
The play is a popular one as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, not just because of the smaller cast size, but because of what it says about human perseverance after getting hit by negative surprise after negative surprise.
The show’s setting comes with no stage direction from its writer, leaving its place and time for its songs to be completely up to the director. For Dixon, that chosen setting was the modern workspace post-pandemic.
“People coming out of zoom and going to their physical workspaces are having a surprisingly challenging time,” Dixon said. “The workspace that was familiar to them on a daily basis, a place that was comforting, their livelihood, is now this place of worry and questions and challenges and even somewhat dangerous.
“We’ve gone through something, and we can’t just sit around in our offices and talk about the weather or sports. We’re much deeper than that. We’ve been through way too much to go back to that trivial place.”
The musical will address the newly found challenges faced by its four characters as they return to their offices, presenting a familiarity to audience members of what we have all been collectively going through over the past year-and-a-half in this country, he said.
“Rather than run away from challenges these four people are going to get into this workspace and figure things out like the -isms, sexism, racism, culturalism, racism homophobia, misogyny,” Dixon said. “They’re going to figure out the world’s problems in an hour and a half.
“And if that sounds impossible, it probably is, but that’s what we’re working on these days. We’re all coming back to our workspaces trying to figure the world out, reshape it and make it better. Two years ago, we wouldn’t have had these conversations. But now people want to talk about that stuff, and no longer is it going to be ‘oh, we don’t talk politics or religion in the workspace.’ It’s gone beyond our daily grind.”
The play is running from Oct. 8-24 at Farmers Alley Theatre, 221 Farmers Alley in Kalamazoo.
For tickets to “Songs for a New World,” as well as information on other upcoming events at Farmers Alley and COVID-19 safety guidelines, visit www.farmersalleytheatre.com.
For more information about Dixon’s career, visit www.jerrydixon.com. To see his complete bio, click here.
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