The New York Times dubbed him “the last leading man” for his Tony-winning career on Broadway.
This Saturday, Brian Stokes Mitchell headlines “Broadway in Bethesda” at Round House Theatre.
“A lot of people know me from Broadway, so I like to give people what they want and what they came to hear, so I try to give them a lot of Broadway tunes, but I was actually raised on all kinds of music,” Mitchell told WTOP. “I was raised on standards, I was raised on jazz … so I like to mix my set up a lot and give people a really beautiful experience. … When you leave the theater, you should feel better than when you walked in.”
Born in Seattle in 1957, Mitchell moved around a lot as a kid because his father was in the U.S. Navy. He spent most of his time growing up in Guam and the Philippines before settling in San Diego at the age of 14.
He got his breakthrough TV role in the “M*A*S*H” spinoff sitcom “Trapper John, M.D.” (1979-1986) before landing his first Broadway role in a show called “Mail” (1988). He followed up with other stage roles in “Oh, Kay!” (1990) and “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) before teaming with playwright Terrence McNally on “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), which earned Mitchell his first Tony Award nomination.
“Terrence was a spectacular human being, just really, really smart, one of the best playwrights I’ve ever met,” Mitchell said. “[He] just had a way of connecting what was happening on stage with that human part of us.”
He won his first Tony the following year for the Broadway revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” (1999) before two more Tony nominations for “King Hedley II” (2001) and “Man of La Macha” (2002). That same year he played the title role in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at the Kennedy Center in the nation’s capital.
“One of the things that I love about the theater is that it’s unique, it’s about live performance, you’re experiencing something that is happening in front of you, for you, only ever that one time in all of time in all of space,” Mitchell said. “If you go to a movie, you’re watching the same movie on the screen all the time … but in a live performance … the performer on stage, me in this case, is working from the energy of the audience.”
During COVID, he went viral belting tunes out of the window of his New York City apartment.
“I was actually one of the first people that I knew that contracted COVID,” Mitchell said. “I just started spontaneously singing ‘The Impossible Dream’ out my window. Everybody looked up and said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’ … The next day there were more people, a neighbor taped it, it went viral and it got to the point where 1,000 people on the street came to hear me sing. … I never thought a virus would cause me to go viral.”
Hear our full conversation on the podcast below:
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