Max grew up on a potato farm in the small prairie town of Rice, Minnesota. Some of his first theater adventures took place in his best friend's basement, where he played Captain Hook and ran the fly rail. A couple years later he played a lost boy in a real theater, and he was never the same.
He graduated from St. Olaf College with a degree in theatre and a concentration in media studies. Since graduating, Max has worked with several theaters throughout the Twin Cities and around Minnesota, in addition to creating his own work.
Acting credits include the Guthrie Theater (A Christmas Carol, Sunday in the Park with George, As You Like It), Nautilus Music-Theater (Carousel, Ordinary Days), Children's Theatre Company (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Sneetches, Shrek, Cinderella, The Wizard of Oz, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Mr. McGee and the Biting Flea, Romeo & Juliet, Bud Not Buddy, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day), Theater Latté Da (All Is Calm, C.), Park Square Theatre (Johnny Baseball, The Pirates of Penzance), Ten Thousand Things (The Unsinkable Molly Brown, The Good Person of Szechwan), the Jungle Theater (You Can't Take It With You, Redwood), Great River Shakespeare Festival, Skylark Opera, Paul Bunyan Playhouse, Minneapolis Musical Theatre, Frank Theatre, Illusion Theater, Ordway Center, Old Log Theatre, and the History Theatre. He also co-directed Artistry's production of Songs for a New World.
Max created, produced and starred in Fruit Fly: The Musical, which premiered at the 2012 Minnesota Fringe Festival. The autobiographical musical, co-written with Sheena Janson Kelley, composer Michael Gruber and director Nikki Swoboda, was further developed as a part of the Illusion Theater's Fresh Ink series, and received its full-length premiere there in 2015. His next musicals were Shelly Bachberg Presents: How Helen Keller and Anne Frank Freed the Slaves: The Musical (2013 Minnesota Fringe) and Shelly Bachberg Presents: Orange is the New POTUS: The Musical (2015 Minnesota Fringe). Ball: A Musical Tribute To My Lost Testicle (2016 Minnesota Fringe) has toured throughout the Midwest and traveled to New York City in 2018 for United Solo, the world's largest solo theatre festival. Delgadina, a musical for young people inspired by a Chilean folktale, was awarded an Artist Initiative grant by the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Pansy, a tribute to the gay underground cabaret movement of the 1930s, had its first workshop in the NEXT Festival at Theater Latte Da.
Max works as a soloist and section leader at Spirit of Hope United Methodist Church in Golden Valley under the direction of Jerry Rubino, as well as a freelance commercial actor, voice-over artist, playwright, and lyricist. He has taught with St. Olaf College, Yellow Tree Theatre, the Guthrie Theater, St. Cloud Civic Theater, Plymouth Playshop, Southeastern Summer Theatre Institute, Maple Grove High School, Lakeville North High School, and Spotlight Education, which hosts his mini-webseries Musical Theatre In A Minute. In 2012, Max and Sheena Janson Kelley began curating Musical Mondays, a monthly cabaret showcase that features the best of the Twin Cities musical theatre community. In 2019, Max launched Pin Spot, a hybrid musical theatre lecture-cabaret series sponsored by Theater Latté Da and funded in part by an Innovation & Exploration Fund grant from the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. He was also a Cabaret Fellow at the 2020 O'Neill Center Cabaret and Performance Conference.
In his spare time, Max likes spending time with family and friends, being outside, cooking, reading, and watching movies. He lives in New Hope, Minnesota, with his husband, Allen.
