All About Theater

Three years ago, Sharon Playhouse Artistic Director John Simpkins promised his loyal summer music theater audience a “straight” play each season. First came an excellent “Doubt,” then last year’s touching “Tuesdays with Morrie.” Now Simpkins has brought a new play, “Georgie,” in what is billed as a developmental workshop (which means it will officially open someday, somewhere else.)

“Georgie” is the creation of longtime actor and playwright Ed Dixon, who stars in this one-man show about his mentor and friend, George Rose. Rose, an English actor who settled in Greenwich Village, appeared in scores of Broadway shows, won two musical Best Actor Tony Awards and met a brutal death in the Dominican Republic. 

When they first met in New York in 1968, Dixon was a fresh-faced, gay 20-year-old from Oklahoma; Rose, 30 years older, was a supremely talented actor who made his homosexuality public but kept his private life to himself. Over the years Dixon learned about acting and theater from Rose; he heard Rose’s stories of the legendary greats he had worked with — Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Katherine Hepburn. Slowly the relationship turned into a co-equal friendship with Rose even asking Dixon for lessons on singing lieder.

Rose was an eccentric, complicated fellow. At dinner or over drinks, he regaled Dixon with theater gossip and impersonations; at home in Greenwich Village he lived with a collection of 17,000 recordings and several exotic animals, including a pair of mountain lions. But he harbored a dark sexual secret, never shared with Dixon, that eventually led to his murder in 1988. Discovery of the secret and the subsequent murder sent Dixon into a physical and emotional decline. “Georgie” is a final catharsis for Dixon, a way of seeing Rose clearly, talents and flaws, without judgment; the way theater can.

Ed Dixon is an accomplished and successful actor. After recovering from the darkness of Rose’s death, Dixon built a career that, remarkably, included playing many of Rose’s most famous roles. When he sings from “My Fair Lady” or “Pirates of Penzance,” he is big-voiced, assured:  a character actor at his best, like his mentor. And so he is throughout “Georgie.” He brings Rose to life through retelling Rose’s jokes and banter, recalling their conversations, even giving us some of Rose’s impersonations of other actors. His face and hands are almost mobile enough to tell the story themselves.

Under Simpkins’s direction — and one gets the feeling Dixon is as much self-directed as not — Dixon moves from side to side and often sits in a throne-like chair placed stage center, as if to change rhythm or to begin a new thought. Jamie Roderick’s scenery and lighting, simple and spot on, make the  Dominican Republic scene frightening when an intense light is broken into shadows by the blades of a slowly turning ceiling fan suspended from the flies.

But direction and sets and lighting seem of minor importance in this intensely personal show. Dixon, and the Rose he becomes on stage, are all we care about. “Georgie” is a play for audiences that love theater and good acting. It is still a work in progress —the opening needs to draw the audience in quicker, and it may be a few minutes too long — but it is a work that will surely find life in both Washington, D.C., and New York. It is a coup for Sharon Playhouse to bring it to us now.

“Georgie” runs for five more performances, May 28 – 31, at Sharon Playhouse in Sharon, CT. Call 860-364-7469 or go to www.SharonPlayhouse.org for tickets.