Sue Frost and Randy Adams, Tony Award-winning producers of Memphis and First Date, left stable theater jobs to launch Junkyard Dog Productions. Frost spent 20 years at Goodspeed Opera House; Adams grew TheaterWorks' budget from $300K to $7M before they quit to become Broadway producers together.
Chapters
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. This week, Tony Award winner Sue Frost and Randy Adams, producers of Memphis, First Date, and founding partners of Junkyard Dog Productions, share with us their path to producing. Now, you came to this world of Broadway as commercial producers from a route of the nonprofit world. Can you talk a little bit about first each of your journeys and then how you met?
When I left college, I came to New York. I had worked in Summer Stock. I thought I was going to be an actress. That was a bad idea. And so I came to New York, and because of the Summer Stock, the office work I'd done in Summer Stock, I found jobs through those people that I worked with. And after a couple years, I realized I really wasn't going to be an actress, and I was no longer interested in going down that path, but I was enjoying the work in the management offices. And I did that for almost 10 years, decided that I didn't really want to be a general manager, and I didn't really know what I wanted to be, and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life in New York. And then I got an opportunity to go out to Goodspeed Opera House, and I thought I was going to go for the summer and figure it out, and I stayed for 20 years. And then I like to say where they were going to give me my 20th anniversary party, I said, "Time to go. Time to go. Always time to go when they start throwing parties." So I quit that job, and then over the course of the next 6 to 12 months, decided to come back to Broadway. And I wasn't really trying to persuade him to join me, but the idea was so compelling, he quit his job. Look what happened. And look what happened.
Well, I, let's see, where did I go? I did undergraduate school in theater, thought I was going to be an actor there.
That's pretty much the universal—
Well, you don't know there's other stuff. You get the bite, get the bug, get bit by the bug, and then you realize that maybe that's not for you. But until you're out there trying to figure it out, you don't really know all the other stuff that's available to you.
Yeah, so, and I was lucky in my undergraduate school, I got exposed to a lot of things, house management, ticketing. I had a really great professor who sort of took me under his wing. He started his own summer theater off campus, so in the second— I guess I was a junior or whatever— he made me the associate producer, and I was like, what is that? You know, and so I began learning all this stuff and casting and everything else. Then I went back to graduate school at the University of Kansas and did that for 2 years and continued to run the summer theater during the summers in that. I was offered 3 different jobs. One of them was the most— or the least lucrative— was at Theater Works in Palo Alto. It was a community theater at that point in time looking to make the transition into professional world. And so I went to TheaterWorks and we started out with a budget of $300,000 and I was there 21 years and by the time I left it was a budget of $7 million and it was a LORT company.
So you made it past the 20-year mark.
Just barely.
Just barely.
You became legal too.
Just barely. And then Sue, Sue like leaves Goodspeed and she's like, I, you know, I'm like, what are you gonna do? And she's like, I don't know.
I was tossing ideas back and forth with him because To go back to your question of how we knew each other, we had both, while we were running our respective theaters, served on the board of the National Alliance for Musical Theater and realized over the course of that time we had very similar tastes in terms of the shows we were developing, the writers that we liked working with, and all of that. So, and we were very much on the same wavelength. And at that time, a lot of people would say to us, you two should go run a theater. You'd be great together.
Why do we want to do that? You know, we sort of had that kind of synergy going. And so I said, you know, after a few months of trying to figure out what I was gonna do, I said, yeah, maybe I'm just gonna, I don't know. And Randy said, let's do it. Let's just do it together. Let's do it together. And I said, you have a job. He goes, nah, you quit yours, I'll quit mine. I mean, it was that stupid. It was that stupid. I mean, supposed adults, you know, who should be making fiscally responsible decisions. No, no, quit the paying job. Give up the 401(k), give up the healthcare, just go. Like, stupid, right? Stupid, but we did it.
Following the dream. Following the dream.
Following the dream. But you know, you're talking about how you sort of grew into all those different things. That same thing happened to me. When I did the summer stock thing, I was hired as the assistant box office treasurer, 'cause I said, I can't be an acting apprentice. I need a job, I need to be paid. And then the box office treasurer didn't show up, so I had to open the box office. And then the house manager got arrested for prostitution, so I had to become the house manager. And then the company manager liked me, He liked me, so I became his assistant. And I literally worked 14, 16 hours a day and filled whatever hole there was. And that sort of propelled me along to the next thing and the next thing. And that's how I figured out all these other jobs, because I was just thrown into them.
And it was certainly not because we were necessarily trained.
Not that any training.
On-the-job training.
And people ask me now, I have no marketable skill sets. I just don't. But I foolishly jump into whatever has to be done.
Well, we're both like that in that regard. I think that's why we've made these careers.
