Power Play
The next time you’re watching a smash Broadway show, keep in mind that some of the biggest New York stars are the ones you never see.
By Robert McGarvey. Photograph by Chad Windham.
Who’s in charge here?
Walk outside onto one of Broadway’s side streets, look up at the theater marquee, and, suddenly and loudly, a question ricochets: Who’s calling the shots? One theater is playing Mamma Mia!, a musical based on 30-year-old disco songs by the Swedish group ABBA, while, nearby, another is showing Butley, a 35-year-old play about an English professor’s oh-so-British midlife crisis. (It’s starring box-office fave Nathan Lane and is enjoying a Broadway revival.) A few doors down is The Coast of Utopia, a Tom Stoppard play about the lead-up to the Russian revolution. And then there is The Faith Healer, a gossamer Brian Friel play about a murder in an Irish pub.
Do these productions have anything in common — anything at all?
In fact, they do. Broadway comprises 39 stages, and the reality is that only a handful of people decide what gets staged, what closes, and what will never open. You don’t know their names; they aren’t actors or actresses, and they don’t appear on magazine covers. They are directors, producers, and writers, and when they shine a green light on a play, it happens — on Broadway and in the leading Off-Broadway houses. Read on to meet five of the most powerful people on Broadway (plus several others who are part of the exclusive club).
Director
Des McAnuff
Des McAnuff’s plays have reaped baskets of Tony Awards — Broadway’s biggest honor — for Big River, The Who’s Tommy, a Guys and Dolls revival, and more. His directing credits range from Billy Crystal’s smash-hit one-person Broadway show, 700 Sundays, to intense, big-headed dramas such as A Walk in the Woods, a play about nuclear disarmament and possible global annihilation. His Jersey Boys, about the Four Seasons singing group, just may be Broadway’s toughest ticket this season. But the irony of McAnuff is that for most of the past 20 years he has served as either artistic director or, more recently, director-in-residence of the La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego, some 3,000 miles off Broadway. This spring, McAnuff, 54, is shifting his base to the Stratford Festival of Canada in Ontario, still a great distance from Broadway.
He thrives on the physical separation from New York City. That’s because he has succeeded by testing material in the low-pressure, lower-cost atmosphere of La Jolla. Jersey Boys, for instance, opened there. Now he says he has great ambitions for a New York run of Zhivago, a new musical (based on the epic Boris Pasternak novel) that premiered in La Jolla in 2006. “When we are not opening on 45th Street, there’s a lot less pressure on us,” says McAnuff, who is known to tinker with a show, from its script to its casting, right up to its New York opening.
“I never set out to achieve a popular success,” McAnuff admits, revealing more of his formula. “I try to tell a great story.”
Curiously, when he first was asked to get involved in Jersey Boys, he declined. Later, when shown an outline, he was less than dazzled. “I just didn’t respond to what was on paper.”
It wasn’t until McAnuff “discovered the stories behind the songs” that he got excited and decided to dive in. “I got interested in telling this story not to create a Broadway hit but because I believed the story of the Four Seasons is a great story that deserves to be told.
“I believe I am not weird. If I’m passionate about a work — if I really love it — there is a good shot others will share that passion. In theater, you have to go with what turns you on.”
Other marquee names: John Doyle (Company, Sweeney Todd), Jack O’Brien (Coast of Utopia, Hairspray, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels)
Artistic Director
Todd Haimes
In 1983, the Roundabout Theatre Company was 18 years old — and broke. Debts amounted to $2.5 million and the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection five years earlier, yet recent Yale grad Todd Haimes said yes to a job running the company. Thanks to a generous board member, Roundabout emerged from bankruptcy within two years, and Haimes put the group on a trajectory that mixes equal parts art and financial stewardship. Flash-forward to 2007, and the not-for-profit Roundabout is putting on plays on three stages and has about 45,000 season-ticket subscribers — “twice as many as any other theater company in New York,” says Haimes, 49. Haimes does not direct plays; he determines the plays that Roundabout will produce.
Look at a Roundabout season, and what pops out are the boldfaced names. In 2005 and 2006, for instance, Gabriel Byrne, Harry Connick Jr., and Alec Baldwin did turns on the company’s stages. In 2007, Swoosie Kurtz, Blythe Danner, and Audra McDonald are performing. Early on, Haimes recognized an important fact in making theater economically viable: Celebrity matters in filling seats. But the eyepopper of a monetary factoid is that the top pay Haimes offers is $1,100 per week. “You can only imagine how much more Harry Connick Jr. makes giving concerts,” says Haimes. This is where his personal secret sauce comes in: “I spend a lot of time cultivating relationships with the actors, actresses, and directors I want to work with,” says Haimes, who says he might invest months in piecing together a package that would bring, say, Byrne to act in Eugene O’Neill’s little-performed play A Touch of the Poet, a production that Roundabout staged on its Studio 54 stage in its 2005–2006 season. Haimes snares the big names by promising artistic freedom coupled — importantly — with limited runs that rarely take up more than four months of a top-grade actor’s year.
Haimes still has big dreams, big goals. And that’s expensive. “I want to get the funding to do more large-cast plays. A typical Broadway play might have five actors. There are older plays I want to do that have 20 or 40 actors. You don’t see those shows on Broadway anymore.” Unless, of course, it is Haimes producing, as he did with the Threepenny Opera, a musical that Roundabout staged in 2006 with dozens of parts.
Other marquee names: Lynne Meadow, Manhattan Theatre Club; Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater
Playwright
Doug Wright
A musical about a mother and daughter who hoard cats and, in their declining years, join the felines in eating cat food? That’s Doug Wright’s Grey Gardens, a surprise Broadway success that is the story of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, cousins of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis who descended into an economic and personal decline that might, at first glance, seem more the stuff of a tragedy than of a musical.
Wright, 44, is proof that the best shows can come from the most unpredictable material. A few years ago, he had a smash hit with I Am My Own Wife, a play about a German transvestite who endured both Nazism and the Communist occupation of East Germany. From those unlikely ingredients, Wright fashioned a play that won not only Tonys but also the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. No wonder he was asked to work on Grey Gardens, an offer he rejected several times (“I didn’t initially see the story line,” Wright says). But Scott Frankel, who wrote the music, “kept wearing me away, and after two years, I said okay.”
But just when you think you have Wright niched, chew on this current endeavor: “I’m writing the book for the Broadway-bound musical version of Disney’s beloved The Little Mermaid. It’s an unabashedly charming story. I think this is an exciting project.”
Born in Dallas, Wright wrote his first play at age 11 — it was, he says, “an epic two-and-one-half-hour drama where everybody dies.” At 19, in college at Yale, he wrote The Stonewater Rapture, his first viable play, which he says “still gets produced 30 or 40 times a year.”
Wright says the trouble with playwrighting is the money, or rather the lack thereof. Even with his successes, he has to “pay the mortgage writing scripts for Hollywood.” (One movie script became the film Quills, named best film of 2000 by the National Board of Review.) Playwrights, he says, often are paid last — and when a play is struggling to break even, “it’s not unusual for the playwright to be asked to defer income.”
Why doesn’t he stop writing plays, then? “I’m addicted. I’ve been addicted since I was a little boy and my parents put me into a jacket and tie and took me to see Life with Father at the Dallas Theater Center.
“There is one remarkable thing about playwrighting: We have absolute authority when it comes to how and where our work is presented. That’s not true in film, because the studio owns the script. People will always write plays, because you get a sense of yourself as a genuine author. I will always think of myself as a playwright first.”
Other marquee names: John Patrick Shanley (Doubt), Martin McDonagh (The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Pillowman)
Producer
Margo Lion
She was in bed, sick with a cold, watching John Waters’s film Hairspray, about a “pleasantly plump” Baltimore teen in 1962, when the lightbulb came on: This could be a great Broadway musical. Nearly five years after its opening, the show is still selling 10,000 tickets weekly, and that right there is what makes Margo Lion different. An independent Broadway producer (she raises money to launch a new show by picking up the phone — and with a $10 million average budget for a new musical, that’s a lot of calling), she has the job of coming up with the unexpected. Lion excels at it, and she got into the business in 1977; her shows — including The Wedding Singer and The Crucible — have since accumulated 19 Tony Awards and 29 Drama Desk Awards.
It hasn’t always been easy for her to raise money. When she wanted to produce Jelly’s Last Jam in 1992 — a play that takes place somewhere between heaven and hell, in the Jungle Inn, where singers and dancers take jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton on a tour of his life — she had to mortgage her apartment and put a prized piece of art up as collateral. Jelly’s Last Jam won three Tonys, ran on Broadway for more than a year, and helped position Lion, 61, as somebody whose tastes translate into hits. “When we decided to do Hairspray, we raised the money in six hours,” she says. “If you show the appropriate people the material you want to produce, you will probably raise the money you need.”
Hairspray repaid its investors in nine months, says Lion, and that’s about as fast as black ink flows on Broadway.
“What is a Margo Lion production? I like shows that have contemporary relevance. And I want to put on shows that draw young people into the theater. That is very important to me,” she says. “Hairspray has become a huge family show. We actually have had to buy booster seats so that small children can watch. We have so many six-year-olds attending, and that is thrilling to me.”
Other marquee names: Philip J. Smith, president, the Shubert Organization (Company, The Vertical Hour, A Chorus Line — 2006 revival); Jon B. Platt (coproducer of Wicked, past credits include Angels in America and Copenhagen)
Angel
Elysabeth Kleinhans
Little artsy theaters in New York are hidden in offbeat, dimly lit alleyways in TriBeCa, the Lower East Side, and, increasingly, low-rent Brooklyn. And then there is 59E59 Theaters, a theater complex located at 59 East 59th Street between Park and Madison avenues — in the thick of the Upper East Side’s glitter gulch of high-end fashion retailers like Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf Goodman. And yet this three-stage complex, which sits on the home turf of New York’s social elite, hosts some of the most fringe plays imaginable, such as a dead-on-perfect production of His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley in the Zam Zam Room — a celebration of the 1960s hipster comedian who influenced everybody from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor — and a staged reading of poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” This is a theater that is unafraid, takes risks, and, in most cases, prices its tickets only slightly higher than a movie theater’s.
How does Elysabeth Kleinhans afford this artistic license? Simple: Her family had long owned the Hotel Delmonico (Kleinhans acted as managing partner of the property for many years). The story goes that Kleinhans’s mother, real estate mogul Sarah Korein, acquired a number of New York City properties during the Great Depression for pennies on the dollar. Most of that property was sold and traded up over the years. In 1981, the Kleinhans family bought the Hotel Delmonico — which, in 2002, was purchased for $115 million by Donald Trump. Then Kleinhans did something that just doesn’t happen in Midtown Manhattan anymore: She built a three-stage theater complex from scratch (199 seats in the largest theater, 50 to 70 in the smallest).
Could she possibly make money doing this? Don’t be silly. Theatrical “angels” don’t make money; they spend it supporting the art that matters to them. “We have an endowment that funds the theater. It is a nonprofit, which, by definition, means we are losing money,” says Kleinhans.
Kleinhans’s enthusiasm for theater dates back to 1995: “I was dating an actor, and, well, it was a tragic mistake,” she says with a laugh. “It changed my whole life. I just got more and more involved in theater.
“We are helping artists put on shows that might get no attention,” says Kleinhans, who is particularly proud that her theater is home to the Brits Off Broadway, an annual multiweek festival of new British theater, showcasing numerous cutting-edge plays. “These are works that would not get a showing in the U.S. without us.”
Although she has been actively involved in putting on theater for only five years, Kleinhans, 65, already has made a name for herself and for 59E59. “What I have learned is that if you are nice to people in theater, they want to work with you, and they want to keep coming back,” she says. “This business is all relationships.”
Other marquee names: Jim Simpson, the Flea Theater; Robert Rosenberg, president of the New Group