Lee Alexander won a state championship in Poetry in every one of his four years of high school.
As a Detroit Country Day freshman he won the MSCI Novice State title. Then he won the MIFA state championship in Class B/C/D Poetry as a sophomore, again as a junior and again as a senior. Our State Finals books reach back to 1979, and in all that time we can find only nine competitors who have won three or more individual state titles. He is one of them.
The titles only begin to describe it. At the 2016 Region 9 tournament, every judge who saw him, in every round, ranked him first and gave him a perfect score. At that year’s State Finals all eight of his preliminary ballots came back the same way. He won the 2017 Maple Invitational in a field of 49 and that season’s Walled Lake Western Warrior tournament in a field of 46. We have eleven of his tournaments on file. He won nine of them and finished second in the other two. It is one of the finest records in our archive.
Poetry, in MIFA’s rules, is the performance of a poem or a program of poems with nothing but a voice and a body. No props and no costume. Whatever happens in the room, the performer has to make it happen. For four years he did that as well as anyone in Michigan ever has.
He is proud of it, too. His professional bio, the one casting directors read, still lists him as a four-time forensics state poetry champion, and a 2024 profile in Who’s Who in Black traces his path through voice lessons, high school theatre and competitive forensics.
The teacher who mentioned MPulse
He was also a theatre kid. At Country Day he played leads in Chicago and Ain’t Misbehavin’. But he has said he had no idea performing could be a career until his high school theatre teacher suggested he try MPulse, the University of Michigan’s summer institute for high school performers. He went, fell for musical theatre all over again, and two years later auditioned for Michigan’s musical theatre program, the school he had wanted most. He got in.
He graduated in 2021 with a BFA in musical theatre and a minor in performing arts management and entrepreneurship. His Michigan roles lean toward men who hold the floor: Duke Senior in As You Like It, Pontius Pilate in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, a reverend in Passing Strange and another in Crowns. As a junior he played Robert in The Exonerated, a documentary play assembled from the words of people freed from death row. That profile singled the performance out as a milestone, and it is easy to see why a poetry champion would be at home in a play built entirely from other people’s words.
Las Vegas, St. Louis, West 57th Street
In July 2022 he made his debut at the Muny in St. Louis, in the ensemble of Sweeney Todd. About six weeks after it closed he opened in Las Vegas with the first North American tour of Jagged Little Pill, the Alanis Morissette musical directed by Diane Paulus, and he stayed with the tour for two years. He went back to the Muny in June 2024 for Les Misérables, where his bio lists him as Bamatabois.
The rest of the résumé travels. He has played the Emcee in Cabaret at the Trentino Music Festival in Italy, Ambrose Kemper in Hello, Dolly! at the Middle Saxony opera house in Germany, and Aeneas in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. He has sung Gershwin as a guest vocalist with the Toledo Symphony and played the lead gamer in a national Xbox commercial.
He is now in New York with Masquerade, the immersive revival of The Phantom of the Opera that runs inside a former art supply store on West 57th Street. Paulus directs this one too. The production sends six groups of about 60 people through the building every night, which takes several Phantoms, Christines and Raouls working at once, along with a bench of swings who can step into the show wherever it needs them. Playbill lists Alexander among the swings, and his bio has him understudying Raoul. The run has been extended through January 2027.
A second name
There is a second career under a second name. As Le$Lie he released the album Pressure in 2024, made with Stephen Riesen, a high school friend who records as Stevie the Vibe. The two founded Vibrascope Records to give independent artists affordable design, playlist promotion, social media and mixing help in one place. They held the album’s listening concert on June 26, 2024, at the Detroit Repertory Theatre.
Detroit comes up whenever he talks about his work. He told Who’s Who in Black that his fondest memory of the city is seeing Cathy Rigby’s touring Peter Pan at the Fisher Theatre as a small child, and that Detroit is the first place he let himself imagine a life in the arts. He has also said he wants to mentor young Black performers coming up behind him. His advice to other actors is practical. Treat yourself as a business, he says, and build more than one way to make a living from what you can do.
Nine years after his last round, a working New York actor still wants the people who hire him to know what he did in Poetry. We think that says as much about the activity as it does about him.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
