In this Showbiz U interview, composer and sound designer Lindsay Jones recounts his unconventional path from a childhood obsessed with records and a BFA in acting to becoming a prolific theater sound designer. After moving to Chicago post‑college, a friend’s request for heavy‑metal‑style original music for a small theater production turned into a six‑month hit, sparking a flood of sound‑design commissions despite Jones’s lack of formal training. Over nearly two decades he built a full‑time career, traveling nationwide to design sound and write music for theater. The conversation highlights his Broadway debut with A Time to Kill, which originated from a 2010 Arena Stage production that the director, Ethan McSweeney, later brought to Broadway, despite Jones’s lack of Broadway experience. Simultaneously, Jones discusses his involvement with Bronx Bombers, a project that emerged through his prior collaborations with writer‑director Eric Simonson on regional productions such as Lombardi in Milwaukee, where audience enthusiasm left a lasting impression. Throughout, Jones reflects on the demanding nature of theater work, the financial realities compared to other jobs, and the emotional power of live performance that makes the career rewarding.
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What do you get when you have a Broadway professional and a camera crew? Long story short, you get a lot of cool info when you get Showbiz U Luminaries. Composer and sound designer Lindsay Jones has closets full of awards for his work in film, television, and theater. This year, he makes his Broadway debut with A Time to Kill. We catch up with Lindsay at the Golden Theatre to talk about his journey. Let's start just really simple. You're sitting in a chair at a Broadway theater.
Yeah.
The journey to get to this chair began when?
Oh my gosh. When I was a kid, I was really interested in music and sound. I really always listened. I had lots of records and I didn't have a lot of friends when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time just listening to records and memorizing liner notes in the back of all my dad's jazz records. And I wanted to be an actor when I first started out, so I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts and I got a BFA in acting and I got a classical training. I thought, this is really what I'm gonna be. After I got out of school, I moved to Chicago, and I was working as an actor and playing in a rock band. And a friend of mine approached me. He had a small theater company, and he said, hey, we're doing this show, and we need somebody who could write a bunch of original music that's like loud heavy metal music. And I said, sure, that sounds great. So I put together this music for this show, and the show became a big hit, and it ran for 6 months in Chicago. And all of a sudden I had all these people calling me asking me, hey, can you do sound design and music for our show? And I didn't really know anything about what I was doing at all. I just was making it up. And I thought, well, I'll just do this until things dry up, and then I'll go back to acting. And it hasn't dried up. Never. It hasn't. Almost 20 years later, here I am sitting in a Broadway theater. So that went from being this thing I did every once in a while to being my part-time gig to my full-time gig, and now I travel the country and do sound design and write original music for theaters all over the country.
A lot of people say, "Well, I want to do Broadway," and then they look at how much you actually make on Broadway unless your show's a hit.
Yeah.
But comparatively, you probably could make more at the corner McDonald's if you look hourly as to what the amount of work that goes in. Into what's going on. So it's a journey to get there. And all of a sudden now you've got two shows simultaneously. Leaping into that precipice of Broadway, how did that happen?
Wow. Well, how A Time to Kill came forward was that I was hired to do a production of this show at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. In 2010, and what they told me at the time was, we're interested in taking the show to Broadway. And at the time I thought, well, that'll never happen. You know, or if they do, they won't take me because I have not been on Broadway before, and it's a real leap of faith to take a designer who doesn't have Broadway experience and bring them in. So I thought, well, I'll just do the show and I'll do my best and see what happens. We did the show in DC and it got a great response, and then from there I had a great relationship with the director, Ethan McSweeney, who I've worked with for a long time. And I don't really know. I think what happened is a lot of people sort of said, no, let's invest in this person. Let's bring him in. And I'm so grateful.
And then simultaneously, Bronx Bombers. How did that come about?
Bronx Bombers came about because, I think, because I have worked with Eric Simonson, who's the writer and director, in the past. I've done several shows with him in California and here in New York, and I think he reached out to me because of that. I worked on Lombardi, not the one that was on Broadway, but I did the first regional production of it in Milwaukee, which was an amazing experience because the audience who came to that show were so excited to be there. You know, when you have An audience that attends a play, usually they're like, "Well, this will be fun. I'm looking forward to this." This audience in Milwaukee from Lombardi was like, they were so excited. They came and they tailgated before the show out in front of the theater and they wore costumes and they were, like when the show started, they all started cheering like it was at a huge game. It was one of the best experiences I've ever had and I think Eric saw that production and I did both original music and sound for that and so I think, From those things, I think I got sort of asked to do Bronx Bombers, which I'm also really excited about doing.
Give us just one or two of those moments where you just go, wow, I get to do this for a living.
Very early in my career, I did a production of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, and it was a national tour that went all over the country. We went to Clear Lake, Iowa, which was the very last place that Buddy Holly played before he died in the plane crash. That night. And I think that many of the people in that audience were at that concert 35 years earlier from when we were there. And so we got up on stage and I started playing all the songs and we were, you know, going through the show. But this audience was different in the, in the sense that they had such a personal investment in the show that you really felt like they were there with you every moment of it. And so at the end, when we sort of hit the big finale and we sort of say, you know, what happened to Buddy Holly after that Clear Lake show, you know, you could feel this real sense of catharsis as the audience was able to finally sort of relive that experience of what they had been through and also be able to sort of celebrate it as we came out of that and sort of played the last few songs of that show. And it was really profoundly moving experience that I'll never forget. It was really incredible, and I think that's— that really speaks to what the power of theater is, you know, that there's— film will always be able to tell a story and you'll always be able to see something, but there's something about the live interaction between audience and performer and that sort of palpable connection between the two. And when theater does its job right, it really can make a human connection in a way that no other art form can. And so I'm really a big believer in theater. That's, that's what is part of what inspires me to come to work every day and do my best, is because I want to make that connection. I want to make that connection as often as I can and give people the opportunity to sort of live through theater and hopefully be able to experience life in a new way as a result.
