The Importance of Being Alexis Baigue

Despite having one of the most active social calendars of any Utahn, Alexis Baigue is surprisingly easy to find. Just try the nearest theatre. Or, in the case of this particular weekend, your nearest Brewvies where he’s just seen She’s a Boy I Knew, about Canadian filmmaker Gwen Haworth’s transitioning from biological male to female. Baigue calls the film, part of the 5th annual Damn These Heels! Film Festival “very, very moving.”

“Actually [local actress] Ann Cullimore Decker gives me a run for my money, but I think that she and I compete for the people who see most live events in Utah,” Baigue jokes as he waits for his bus. “We have a severe addiction, but I figure it’s healthier than crystal meth, so I’m not seeking recovery at this time. I mean, why go to crystal meth when Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony will explode your head safely and just as effectively?”

When Baigue isn’t in the audience getting his “fix,” you can often find him getting it on stage – which is only fitting, as Baigue won QSaltLake’s Most Faaabulous Actor Award for the first time this year. In the past few years he’s acted in a number of local productions including play readings at Salt Lake Acting Company, Pygmalion Productions’ The Sex Habits of American Women in 2007 and a number of university productions as a member of the University of Utah’s Actor Training Program.  He has also appeared in several commercials (including one for the Utah Donor Registry) and is a mainstay in Saturday’s Voyeur, SLAC’s annual satire on the collective wackiness that is Utah culture and politics. Humming a few bars from a Mister Rogers song, Baigue explains that he’s playing Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker “in the Gayborhood” in this year’s show (a reference to the then-mayoral candidate’s discovery of the term for a neighborhood made up of mostly gay people), as well as “a tap-dancing queer missionary.”

“It’s great fun to be playing a queer missionary 12 years after I did so for the first time in the 1996 Voyeur, Fatman of the Opera,” says Baigue.

Great fun, perhaps, also because Baigue was nearly a queer missionary himself. Born in Salt Lake City to Mormon parents, Baigue remembers being called to be the vice president of his LDS Seminary Class at the same time he was coming to terms with his sexual orientation.

“In ninth grade people were saying, ‘You’re gay, aren’t you? You’re a fag,’” recalls Baigue, doing a spot-on impression of a Utah schoolgirl. “And I was saying, ‘No, I’m not. I have no interest in kissing boys.’ But I think they realized what I wasn’t even feeling yet.” But after graduation, Baigue came out to himself and to friend and fellow graduate Kurt Bateman.

 “It wasn’t until I met my fist partner [San Francisco poet and playwright] Morgan Ludlow that I really came out to everybody,” he says. “I never did, ‘Hey everybody I think I’m gay!’. It was, ‘Hey everybody, this is my boyfriend Morgan’.”

At about the same time he was discovering his sexual orientation, Baigue also discovered theatre. But as his friends at West Jordan High School tried out for Anything Goes, he says he was reluctant.

“I thought, 'I need to take a drama class before I can audition!' I know nothing about acting – a ridiculous misnomer that one needs to take classes before one can be in a play.” But wanting to do things the right way, Baigue enrolled in the school’s introduction to theatre class and was cast in the spring musical, Brigadoon.

“I tried to quit it,” he says. “I went to Salt Lake Community College and kept taking drama classes there – where it was elevated to theatre not drama classes – and I thought I have to pick a major and buckle down and be an adult, but it just never worked out, I just couldn’t’ shake the a habit.” In 1999 he auditioned and was accepted into the University of Utah’s Actor Training Program and he projects that he will graduate “in 2020.”

“I still have several general credits to go,” he laughs as he playfully breaks into another song – “I Won’t Grow Up” from the musical Peter Pan. “If I graduate I might have to move to New York City like I always said I wanted to, but I would be a piece of plankton in the sea of big fish that is New York. So it’s nice being a guppy in Salt Lake City.”

And what is the guppy’s dream role? “Roxie Hart,” he says without missing a beat.

Seriously, though.

“The Man in Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang, or Bunbury in the play of the same name by Tom Jacobson,” a SLAC reading of which Baigue participated in recently. “I’m a tiny bit too old for The Man, but fortunately, I’m look a bit younger than my age. Someone should also produce Bunbury. It’s never been done as a full production in Utah and I’m the best actor in Utah for the role.”

As for what he does when not acting or watching other people act, Baigue insists that he tries to “create the illusion that I’m acting all the time.” When cajoled, though, he admits to enjoying a good book, such as C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.

“I wonder if Edmund was gay,” he jokes. “Any boy who loves Turkish Delight and worships a diva like the White Witch has got to be a little faglette.” He also advocates for gay rights and environmental causes, often jokingly vowing to eliminate global warming by 2015. And, he collects stamps.

Really.

“It’s not like I have a book for them, I just keep buying and hording them or giving them away as gifts,” he says.

And while he lampoons Salt Lake City on stage every summer, Baigue says he loves Utah’s capitol.

“I’m very pleased to call Salt Lake City home,” he says. “I love that I know where to find fun in the city. I’ve lived here long enough that I don’t have to search for everything I want. I have more friends here than I can actually manage and you know it’s small enough that you can navigate it but large enough that there’s a lot of fun things to do here – and it’s still almost affordable!”

And, of course, there’s always plenty of theatre to perform in as well as to see.

“I’m hoping to make it down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival and to Salt Lake Shakespeare, and then of course I’m hoping to get up to Logan to see Gypsy and Into the Woods,” he says.

Good thing his drug is a healthy one.