Sue Frost, Randy Adams, and Tim Kashani break down what Broadway producers actually do across a show's lifecycle: raising capital and planning marketing before opening, then managing marketing, casting, and audience response once it runs. They juggle multiple shows at once while monitoring finances and preparing tours.
Chapters
Let's look at a day in the life of— a day in the life of a Broadway producer. What might that day look like?
Wow. Every day's different.
Every day's different.
It depends. If you're in pre-production, you're focused on developing the show. You're focused on raising the money. You're focused on sort of, you know, shows in development. You've got to develop a marketing plan, an advertising plan. You have to be talking with your creative team. You have to make sure that your manager is comfortable with where you are budget-wise. I mean, pre-production and production is like the easiest thing to define because you've got a goal in sight. You've got a date that you've got to get to. When you're open—
I mean, after we opened Memphis, it was like— I'll never forget this. Randy and I looked at each other and went, "Oh, we knew how to do that. Now what do we do?" Oh, now we have a whole other thing.
We've got to keep the show running.
You're really good at opening shows because you do like 6, 8, 10 of them a year. It's like, oh, I got that open, on to the next, on to the next. But then it was like, oh, oh, we're open now. What do we do? Now we got to figure out—
Now we got to keep it open. Now we got to figure out what to do.
I mean, you know, there's ongoing stuff. The marketing, the advertising is constant. Monitoring the, you know, the money usually stabilizes itself after you open. We're at the theater. One of us is at the theater almost every single night because we're still trying to figure out who the audience is. We're watching the show, even though the show is technically frozen, the actors are now starting to get comfortable and, you know, just sort of checking that out. Memphis ran for almost 3 years, so then we got into that ongoing recasting and putting the bones of the tour together while we're still maintaining Broadway. I would say with Memphis, because it was our first one, we really had tunnel vision, just really just Memphis.
That's all we really did.
Until we got the national tour open, and then it was like, we gotta start thinking about the future. What other projects we've sort of like let lay fallow, and what do we want to move on sooner than later.
Yeah, 'cause these days there are other shows that we are also talking about in the course of any given day that we're working on.
Yeah, yeah, so like, for example, and I don't know, sometimes we laugh about it because at the end of a particularly stressful day, I look at him, I go, now is there any one of our shows that we haven't had to deal with today? You know, so it's like all of a sudden, it's like this project that's 3 years out, all of a sudden, the lawyer's calling you about something, and then, This, which is 8 months out, all of a sudden everything's falling apart and you've got to look at everybody's schedule because so-and-so got a movie. You know, it's like all that kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, it's like, wow, that was intense. And then the next day, you don't hear from anybody about anything.
