Interview: Catching Up With MAN OVERBOARD's Roderick Ferguson

It's an interesting time for performer Roderick Ferguson. The accidental activist whose musical comedy cabaret show MAN OVERBOARD!!! is greatly centered around marriage equality in the place of his birth, the British overseas territory Bermuda, has been continuing his crusade for gay rights in his first home, while pursuing his passion for entertaining in his current home, Manhattan. With future bookings for the club act that tells his personal history through story and song, Mr. Ferguson has claimed his place in the cabaret community of NYC through originality and quality that sets him up for a bright future in the industry. And even though these are busy times for Mr. Ferguson, he took a few minutes out of his week to share a q&a with Broadway World about gay rights, his creative process, and whether or not bridge players are sensitive on the subject of their game.

This interview was conducted digitally and is reproduced with minor edits.

Roderick Ferguson, welcome to Broadway World.

Thank you, Stephen! I am delighted to be invited!

You had quite a year last year, making your New York City cabaret solo show debut and, immediately, capturing the hearts of the community. Put a picture in my head of that experience.

Oh, you give me too much credit. I'd captured some hearts ahead of time, and I still have many more hearts to go, but that's the goal! It was quite a year, though, and I'm immensely proud of MAN OVERBOARD!!! and the response it's getting. Picture me smiling broadly, which shouldn't be too hard, since I'm almost always smiling when I'm on stage.

Walk me through the journey of creating MAN OVERBOARD!!! and bringing it to the New York cabaret stage.

Patricia Fitzpatrick trusted me with the opportunity to debut a show at the Provincetown Cabaretfest in June, so I had a deadline to motivate the creation of MAN OVERBOARD! I created the title first, knowing that it conveys the right expectations for my vibe as an entertainer and that I have a story to justify it. During the pandemic I'd taken some MOTH-Esque storytelling classes, as well as some comedic storytelling classes, to refine some of my material. In the spring I started working with Faith Prince to put it all together. We figured out the songs and how we wanted to use them and brought on Bobby Peaco, whose arrangements and underscoring make me feel privileged to perform the show. Michael McAssey deftly made all our dreams come true in Provincetown, and eventually NYC. We even tweaked the show a bit when we performed it in Boston with Jim Rice on piano before the run at Don't Tell Mama's in NYC.

Your program is a fascinating amalgam of stand-up comedy, monology, and musical theater. Is that the general format that you like to follow when creating a new club act?

This is the best formula I've come up with so far, so I plan to stick with it, presuming you're using the word fascinating as a compliment! I just want to clarify for your readers that when you say 'monology,' you're describing the fact that I tell true stories from my life, as opposed to acting monologues written by someone else, like Shakespeare. I mean, he's fine as a writer, I suppose, but he doesn't need my help to get his work out there. My style of show has certainly evolved. I started off just singing songs with my fingers crossed, hoping I'd remember the lyrics. I then discovered patter as an opportunity for humor, abused patter as an excuse to tell funny stories, dabbled in standup, and landed in comedic storytelling. The material about the photo in my school yearbook with a monarch butterfly on my forehead is one of the first bits I did in standup. I recently found the photo! I've finally given myself permission in my club acts to put the stories first and sprinkle jokes within them. I also love to sing, and I use mostly musical theater songs in service of the story I wish to tell. It's harder to market the show because it's not purely comedy, and it's not as much singing as your typical cabaret show, but if the resulting product is compelling, then surely there must be a way to market it. We shall see :)

Man Overboard is incredibly personal. Was the creation of the script for this one-man show complicated, or did it just flow from you?

I don't know about a script flowing from me. The stories flow from me because they're all true stories, but every part of the script has been worked and reworked to trim the fat, and maximize the impact on the audience, whether for humor, wonder, or heartbreak. It was simple in one sense. I wanted to share the story of my involvement in the fight for gay marriage in Bermuda. In order to lay the groundwork for it, I had to describe my experience growing up there, my relationship with my mother, and my coming out experience. The hemming and hawing was in deciding which other stories we'd include in the middle of the show. The segment that we'll call "observations at the nude beach" was an old favorite, and the others were just the right ones to make it clear that I'm not a normal person.

You have been taking the production out of town - what has been the audience response to the show?

The show started out of town and the audience response was unbelievable. People spontaneously wrote glowing reviews and testimonials on Facebook, including some people who'd never really seen me perform before. People don't say, "Oh, it's so wonderful that you're talking about issues like mental health and gay rights." They say how entertaining the show is. That's my personal definition of success. My agenda is not to preach or educate but to entertain. The show has been booked this summer at the Arctic Playhouse in RI and THE ART HOUSE in Provincetown (I'm included in a fantasy lineup), but it hasn't played those venues yet. We also plan to do the show again in New York later this year.

You have a prestigious director helming your club act - how did you happen upon that stroke of good fortune?

It was my last good idea, back in 2017, to apply to the St Louis Cabaret Conference where Faith Prince was one of the faculty. She's funny and she sings. Maybe she'll know what on earth I should do next. Faith has been my mentor on my artistic journey ever since. Lucky for me she's also a prestigious director and an incredible human being. Incidentally, when I was in Bermuda taking my Advanced Placement biology exam in high school, there was a question that I only knew the answer to thanks to the voice of Faith Prince on the cast recording of Guys and Dolls. That answer was streptococci. It took 20 more years for us to meet in person, but Faith has been helping me my whole life!

At the center of this piece of theater is a very serious political matter. How has your fervor for politics and world affairs changed during your lifetime?

I grew up in a homophobic time and place, so I'm passionate about standing up for the powerless in general, but especially the LGBTQ+ community. I volunteered for many years for Boston Pride, went to protests and rallies, and followed every twist and turn of the gay marriage fight in the US. I had no idea I'd eventually be part of the gay marriage fight in Bermuda. I couldn't imagine Bermuda ever having a Pride celebration, let alone a campaign for same-sex marriage. What has changed for me is that I never really believed that one person could make a difference. I figured that was one of the pretty lies we tell children. Now I know it's true. Or true enough to justify trying. Even if you try but don't succeed, there is the butterfly effect. What we do still has an impact.

Do you think you will follow up Man Overboard!!! with a similarly-styled show, or would you like to break out, into something of a different nature?

I'm not going to go looking to pick any more fights with defenseless governments, but I've certainly got enough fun stories and a strange enough point of view to create another cabaret show. I'm open to do more work writing and/or performing comedic material, in musicals or other art forms, preferably on stage, because I simply love the exchange of energy with fellow performers and the audience. I'm really looking for any opportunity to inflict myself on more people.

You have other cabaret outings on your CV - why did it take so long to break into the New York scene, and why was now the right time to bring your work here?

Well, I was told New York audiences are sophisticated and discerning, and I wanted to wait until I was confident I could fool them anyway. I lived in Boston for many years, so if I put on a show there, I knew people would come, but no one knew me in NYC back in 2017 when I moved here. One of the things I love about comedy is the audience laughter, which is hard to achieve without an audience. I decided to bide my time with various trivial pursuits and lawsuits and it took four years to make enough friends to do a cabaret show :)

How are things with your mother? Has she had anything to say about Man Overboard!!!?

Haha! As you know, I give my mother a bit of a hard time in the show. I performed it three times before I let my mother see the video. There was a chance that was going to be the end of it because I wouldn't be able to perform the show without her blessing. Without giving too much away to your readers, let's say I cast her obsession with bridge in an unfavorable light. She saw the show and said, "You know, you're gonna risk alienating anyone who plays bridge." I love her humor. She also called the show, "theater of the most entertaining kind," and said, "best of all, it's clean." And she doesn't have a history of saying things to make me feel better, so that's quite the review!

Roderick Ferguson, thank you for visiting with Broadway World today. Good luck with the show, and good luck with the fight.

Thank you, Stephen. I plan to take both the show and the fight as far as they'll go. Thank you for everything you and Broadway World do for us all.

Read the Broadway World review of MAN OVERBOARD!!! HERE.

Visit the Roderick Ferguson website HERE.

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