Brandon Victor Dixon on Coming Home to The Scottsboro Boys in London & His Side Gig as a B’way Producer

Tony nominee Brandon Victor Dixon (The Color Purple) was center stage in the original New York production of the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical The Scottsboro Boys in 2010, only to miss out on the show’s subsequent Broadway transfer and acclaimed 2013 London premiere at the Young Vic. Now he has returned to the starring role of Haywood Patterson—one of nine young black Americans accused of raping two white women in 1930s Alabama—for the show’s West End transfer, currently in previews at the Garrick Theatre. It's an emotional homecoming—since last appearing in the musical, Alabama has granted posthumous pardons to three of the real-life “boys,” Dixon’s character included. Broadway.com caught up with Dixon to talk musicals that matter, mixing acting with producing, and what it might take to get him to stay in London.

They say you can’t go home again, but you clearly have!
Yes, I did all the readings and then the Vineyard production [off-Broadway] so it feels wonderful to come home and finish the other leg of our journey. I always thought from my knowledge of London theater and the audiences here that they would appreciate a truly genius piece of theatrical work.

I assume conflicts elsewhere kept you from the show’s British premiere last fall at the Young Vic?
I was in Motown [on Broadway] at the time but I’ve always been aware of each production of Scottsboro no matter where it’s happening. We’re all a family by this point.

What is it like to reprise something from four years ago? Is your sense memory kicking in?
In all honesty, this has been a wonderful experience but also a complicated one. I’ve never gone back to do a role again. Also, because some of our cast are from the Young Vic and some from Broadway, and some are new and some from the original, we’ve had to find a throughline so that we’re all operating from the same world.

is it gratifying be reminded of a musical that is willing to take such risks in its depiction of a shameful chapter in American race relations?
I just think this is a remarkable piece, not just in terms of its atypical subject matter, which is pretty much in the wheelhouse of Kander and Ebb, but the way in which they and [book writer] David Thompson and [director/choreographer] Susan Stroman managed to take this unknown but incredibly significant story and communicate the realities and circumstances of the times while putting it through a framework which is entertaining but also challenging.

You mean the minstrel show format?
Yes, which means that people can’t just watch [the production], they have to feel it; I think it’s an incredibly effective construction.

Haywood is a remarkable figure in that he refused throughout to confess his guilt in order to gain parole.
He's the final straw that won’t break. In order to be pardoned, the other boys had to plead guilty, which Haywood wouldn’t do, so he is the one character who never makes it out of prison. It’s as if he is saying, "You’ve taken so much from me as a person and as a human being, that I won’t allow you that power over me." He refuses to let anyone change or compromise who he is.

Did you know a lot about this event before you first came to this show?
I did not. I had to research the story to discover who these people were only to find that it was such a monumental moment in world history and nobody knew about it. My brother is a lawyer and he had studied the case in law school because it set a lot of legal practice but people for the most part are not educated about these kinds of stories in our history.

And as recent history has shown, we’re not entirely out of the woods yet.
Of course not. As much as things in America like segregation and Jim Crow have been abolished, the mentality that framed those things has not, so to that extent our show isn’t about Alabama—or racism in Alabama—as much as it’s about a mode of thinking that can become systemic in a society. And systems sometimes take longer to change than people do.

You say that you’d always thought British audiences would get Scottsboro —have you spent time here?
Yes, a friend and I were on the BADA [British American Drama Academy] program here at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1999, the year I turned 18. I used to shoot up to London to see theater and I still have an uncle who lives in Dollis Hill.

You’re also a producer with two Broadway credits [Hedwig and Of Mice and Men]. How did that come about?
I think from wanting as full an understanding of the production as possible, which means executing your lines and knowing who your character is but also how does my work fit into the context as a whole? My business partner Warren Adams and I formed our company WalkRunFly as part of what felt like a logical progression: if you want to execute things to your satisfaction, then you want to have as much control as you can. That leads to helping create work for others, not just yourself.

They say one in seven Broadway shows pays back, but both of yours were hits!
Frankly, some of those seven shows shouldn’t be on Broadway. For my money, there really are some ideas that are terrible ideas, so with regard to that one-in-seven success rate, you could argue that half of those should never have been produced.

Might you return to Motown when the musical crosses the ocean to London next year?
[Laughs.] We shall see, Matt, we shall see. Treat me nice, and I’ll stick around.