Broadway producer Tara Smith became the youngest lead producer on the Great White Way at 26 by co-producing the surprise hit Xanadu, despite industry skepticism and Michael Riedel's criticism. She traces her path from competitive figure skating through MTV internships to raising funds for a show nobody believed in.
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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. The Broadway producing bug bit Tara Smith at the age of 26 with a surprise hit, Xanadu. Tara shares how a once aspiring actress found herself as one of the youngest lead producers on Broadway.
It started with my sister's love for theater. I was—
younger or older?
Younger. My younger sister. I was sort of like the athlete of the family and was a figure skater and competitive for a while. And when I quit figure skating, my mom said, you're not going to sit in front of the television when you come home from school. You're going to do something else. And my sister came out of the womb like singing and dancing, embarrassing. Like we'd be at restaurants and she'd be tap dancing on tables. I was always very embarrassed about this, but that's sort of where my love for theater began. And then I started doing school plays and going to summer camp, theater summer camp. I went to Stage Door Manor. My parents are from New York, and so I spent a lot of time coming to New York, and my grandparents took me to my first Broadway show.
So you got bit first by the acting bug.
Yes, I did. And I performed. I performed all the way through college and moved to New York originally to perform and did about 6 months of EPA auditioning and quickly—
Define EPA for those—
Equity Principal Auditions. I did 6 months of that and then quickly moved into production, but I had up until that point had been interning at production companies from the time I was 15, and my parents always sort of, they were very supportive of my love of the theater, but also wanted me to learn all aspects of the entertainment world, and so I interned at radio stations, at MTV, Bloomberg Radio, film company Beacon Pictures in Los Angeles. And so when I moved to New York to do theater and was auditioning, my boss from Beacon Pictures moved to New York to do the first season of The Apprentice. I said, "Well, you know, I'm just auditioning. If you have anything, I'll come work for you." So I PA'd for about 2 weeks and then he said, "We're going on to the next show. Do you want to come to Vegas and work on this show called The Casino?" I said, "I'm in." I moved departments in that time frame and realized I moved to New York to do theater. This is not for me. Quickly one of my friends was producing a show and— or was writing a show, and I just at that point had had the confidence to say, I can do that, even though I had no idea what I was doing. But I was like, I can do that. And that was sort of the beginning of my production—
producing that show, the one that was being written by your friend?
Yeah, in, in New York. And that introduced me to the, the next stage of my producing life.
How old were you when you produced your first Broadway show?
I was 26.
And I'm sure that was a blessing and a curse all wrapped up into one.
It was really interesting, um, because when you're 26, you don't know how young you are. You think you deserve to be at the table, and at the same time, you know you have a lot to learn. It was an extraordinary experience because it was totally beshert, or meant to be. It's very rare that someone my age would be in a position to be a lead producer on a Broadway show. There are people out there that do at my age, you know, raise money and get producer credits, and that is probably more common, although also rare. But the position we were in with Xanadu, everyone thought we were crazy because, you know, you couldn't get another producer who had produced a Broadway show to come near it because Michael Riedel was writing columns from saying that you were idiots and that there was no way that this was going to work. Because of all of those things, it required 3 people who had never produced on Broadway to be like, "Yes, we can," which actually sort of became our motto through the thing thanks to Obama. But yeah, we can and we're going to and we didn't know any better and so it allowed a 26-year-old or 2 26-year-olds and a 35-year-old to produce a Broadway show for the first time.
And the community, you're right, at first everybody was just shaking their heads, but then once they saw what you'd put on, the community embraced you pretty quickly.
It's so easy, and it's a good lesson to learn, it's so easy to think that from the outside perspective that that show won't work. It based on a title, based on who's involved or whatnot. And I just kept thinking to myself, this is amazing. Like we'd be in rehearsal and we'd sort of say to ourselves like, well, either our taste is terrible or like this is gonna be the best thing ever. I think this is gonna be the best thing ever. But you know, it turned out to be, and I think it was such validation when it finally came out that people embraced us and really, it was so thrilling to get that stamp of approval, especially from the New York Times. When, I mean, when they don't love you, you're like, what do they know? But when they do love you, you're like, yeah, exactly, we rock. So it was amazing and it was, yeah, it was thrilling.
