Podcast Episode 87 Transcript – Richard Frankel

Ken: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the end of summer episode of the Producer’s Perspective. My name is Ken Davenport. I am so excited to have on the podcast one of the real journeyman Broadway producers, six-time Tony award-winning producer Mr. Richard Frankel. Welcome, Richard!

Richard: Hello. Nice to be here.

Ken: So Richard has produced a wide variety of projects on Broadway and off-Broadway – I have a special place in my heart for people that do both – from The Producers to Hairspray to Smokey Joe’s Cafe, not to mention Penn and Teller on- and off-, and the show that keeps on stomping, Stomp. So, Richard, tell us, how did you end up in the theatre biz? Where did it all begin?

Richard: The head of the stage crew in my high school was this gorgeous woman who turned out to be a really inspirational theatre teacher as well, so I ended up with two, actually, inspirational theatre teachers in high school and they both were gorgeous and they both were wonderful and I just completely hooked in high school on the stage crew, being like the AV squad, that kind of thing, doing lights and sound and building sets and such.

Ken: And how did that lead to producing? Did you follow these women wherever they went?

Richard: Well I followed them through high school and in college I majored in theatre and I started working as soon as I got out. I always knew I wanted to do this. I first wanted to be a stage manager; after time as a stage manager in many, many other jobs – there’s a line from a Lanford Wilson play that I quote frequently, which is, I think, in A Tale Told where there’s a pro tennis player and he was a young kid with no money and somebody handed him a tennis racket and he hit the ball with the tennis racket and as soon as the ball hit the racket he knew he was a tennis player. So the line is “Once you know what you are the rest is just work,” and that’s really how it’s been for me. I was really lucky; I knew this was what I wanted to do from an early age.

Ken: When you were in college majoring in theatre were you an acting major, a tech major?

Richard: I basically did tech. I actually ended up majoring in television production at Brooklyn College but I did a lot of plays and I took a lot of theatre courses. I actually majored in television production because I liked the people in the television department better than I liked people in the theatre department. I’ve said, actually, that even after all these years, after 40 years of working with great stars, I still haven’t accounted arrogance like college seniors in the theatre department. That’s sort of the epitome that I’ve encountered in my entire of arrogance. I liked the people in the television department so I did a lot of work in there too.

Ken: And your first job out of school?

Richard: My first job out of school was, right out of school, I went into the Peace Corps for two years and I lived in Ethiopia for two years, which was great for somebody from Brooklyn. I was 20 years old when I got out of college and I had really not been out of Brooklyn before. Well, I think I had been to Miami once or twice, which was like Brooklyn. I had two years in a village in Ethiopia and when I came back I jumped right in – I got a job as a sound technician on an off-Broadway show where they told me which dial to turn at which time and I pressed play on the recorder – I couldn’t fix anything or do anything. But I started doing that and then I was an assistant stage manager and I did a lot of tech jobs and I used to build sets at the Delacorte in the summers. I worked as a skilled stage hand doing set construction all night. I don’t know if they still do it but the show would close on Sunday and the other one would open on Wednesday or Thursday and people would work 24 hours in the park getting the sets in, which was better than thrilling, and I had a wide variety of jobs like that. I believe I once worked for the Weisslers when they were doing Shakespeare out of a station wagon and I loaded the station wagon once for whatever it was per hour, but I had a wide variety of tech jobs. Eventually I became a stage manager and at some point I decided that I didn’t want to work eight shows a week. I didn’t mind working hard as producers or marketing directors but I didn’t want the eight-show-a-week life, that’s a particular choice that people make and they don’t view it as a sacrifice, I don’t think, because most are thrilled every time they walk through the stage door and that makes up for it, but I didn’t want to so I got into management.

Ken: So you started in general management and company management is what you did as well?

Richard: I was off-off-Broadway for a long time. I worked at La Mama for several years, I went to Europe with a La Mama company, and I worked downtown – I used to say that there were a couple of years that I didn’t go above 14th Street – and then I got a job at Ensemble Studio Theatre as the sort of all-purpose administrative person. I did everything from fundraising to marketing to brochures to press to all sorts of stuff. Then I went to a regional theatre as a marketing director and press agent. Then I went to Circle Rep which was the seminal influence on my life – I was there in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when it was really a fantastical place. We were doing Fifth of July and Talley’s Folly and all the Lanford Wilson plays, Buried Child and Mamet and Sam Shepard. It was really thrilling being there. I was the marketing director for a few years and then I became managing director. As the managing director, we moved several shows to off-Broadway and ran them, like Fool for Love we ran for a few years, actually, and we moved Talley’s Folly to Broadway and various other things. So when I left there I thought I had sufficient experience in running shows off-Broadway and even a little bit on Broadway. I hardly knew anything, I realize in retrospect, but I thought it was good training.

Ken: And the first show you produced?

Richard: Penn and Teller. While I was at Circle I had gotten the rights to Penn and Teller, who were “just” magicians, and they had wanted to move from being magicians. They were making a living doing magic castles and various magician gigs but they wanted more, they wanted the theatre, and I talked them into giving me the rights to produce them in New York.

Ken: Do you remember what you paid for those rights?

Richard: I don’t remember what I paid for the rights but I remember that the show cost $175,000 to do at the Westside Arts and that I was going to take – it was my first job, my first commercial job, getting a salary and I had a child and I had to make a living and so it was important that this succeed for me and it was very important for them too, this was their shot at New York, so there was a sense of urgency – I wouldn’t say desperation but there was real urgency and we really depended on each other to do a good job. They were depending on me and I was certainly depending on them. I’ll say this because it was them mostly, as opposed to me – we nailed it. It just was great, it was a fantastic period of time and it was a fantastic success and they were on Saturday Night Live. This is ‘85, they were on Saturday Night Live, I think, the season of ‘86-87 like seven times and they were on Letterman several times. They were just a cultural sensation, as they well deserved. In raising the money for Penn and Teller, in which I was going to take six months and a couple of thousand dollars here and a couple of thousand dollars there to do it, because I really didn’t have sufficient contacts, I met Tom Viertel and Steve Baruch, who were in the real estate business looking to get into the theatre, so we quickly saw that there was a symbiotic relationship to be had. I, as I say, thought I was long on experience; I wasn’t quite as long as I thought but I thought I knew what I was doing and they had access to investors, the real estate business was really moving at the time, so they would raise the money and I would show them what I know and we would split everything and we’ve been doing that since 1985 – we’ve been together and doing all the shows. Steve Baruch, who still handles our fundraising, raised the money for Penn and Teller in an afternoon. He called up ten or twelve people who put up $10,000 or $15,000 each and it was done. I think we started in October and I was planning on it taking six months – we might have the money by the spring – and he did it in an afternoon. Very impressive. It turned out to be a wonderful relationship with Penn and Teller and a wonderful show and our relationship with them has continued even though we’re far apart geographically – they’ve been in Las Vegas for 18 years, whatever it was, but we brought them back to Broadway last year. It was year, it was a really satisfying experience.

Ken: So think back to that moment where you decided that you were going to get the rights to Penn and Teller to produce their show. Look, my first show I produced, it was just me in my apartment, I wasn’t married, I wasn’t even dating anybody – here, you have a family, you have a child, you’re going to produce your first show. What gave you the courage to think “I can do this. I can make this happen. I can make this work.”?

Richard: They say it takes ten years – I had been working in the theatre since ‘70, ‘71; I thought this was the time. When I left Circle I could have gone to another regional theatre, I remember talking to a couple, but it just seemed like this was the moment.

Ken: It’s funny, it’s the same thing for me. I was company managing shows for ten years and then a show came along and I was like “I think it’s just time. I’d better give this a shot.” I did not raise all my money in one afternoon, however.

Richard: Nor could I have. I tell our interns now, I tell people, if you want to be a producer you can hire a general manager to do almost everything except raising the money. Getting the property and raising the money are two things you can’t avoid and someone who wants to be a producer who figures “Well, I have a lot of skill and I was a stage manager and I know how the theatre works and I can do this, I just have this little problem with fundraising,” you can’t avoid it. I know you know this, I guess I’m saying this for your audience, but I do make a point of it to the interns and the time-tested way of dealing with that is if you don’t have a lot of money or access to money, find somebody who does and become their partner. That’s sort of the time honored way of dealing with this problem but it has to be faced and it has to be dealt with.

Ken: Fantastic advice – and still to this day you are one of the few producers out there who, like me, like the small investor.

Richard: Yes.

Ken: You embrace the small investor – why do you like the small guy versus the big whales?

Richard: It happened by accident. It was a great idea that we fell into. We had, I think, twelve people for Penn and Teller and the second show we did was Driving Miss Daisy which was costing $400,000 to transfer from Playwrights Horizons to off-Broadway and we had half of it – Jane Harman had the other half – so we had to raise $200,000 for that and we thought we had to ask the Penn and Teller people if they wanted to continue and do the second show and then we wanted some new people to come in so we realized that we would restrict it to $10,000 and we told people they could not invest more than $10,000 and we got our twenty people and we did Driving Miss Daisy and of course that was a big success too and we did national tours of it and we learned a bit about doing bigger productions at the same time, and so the $10,000 was just something we started doing and we continued it with the subsequent shows. What it did and why we still like it is that it turns theatre “investing” into recreation – it’s just not the same thing. If you’re putting $10,000 in a show and you get half of it back, that’s $5,000 of it back and you get a tax deduction for the other $5,000 and you went to the opening night and you got a poster and you had a good time with it, it puts theatrical investing, we believe, where it actually belongs, which is in recreation, and it takes the pressure off – their kid’s not not going to go to college because they lost their money on a play and they’re not going to be unable to pay the mortgage. There are some people who have continued with us through all the shows, the 70 or 80 shows. We have a few left from Penn and Teller but people do it and some have done very, very well and some have lost money but it’s never the financial catastrophe that would make you think better about buying a bond, for example, if you were actually investing.

Ken: One of the other things I’ve loved as I’ve watched your company from afar – and now from close, if you will, because your office is close to ours, in the same building – is that you do a lot of things in house. You general manage in house, you’ve got accounting in hours, you have marketing in house. Talk to me about the benefits of doing everything in house instead of going to many of the vendors.

Richard: Well, we loved it, especially when we were doing a huge volume, which we were for a long time. For any years, when we were doing The Producers and Hairspray and the first round of Smokey Joe’s Cafe and such we had multiple companies and several shows so the office might have two tours of The Producers plus The Producers in New York and Hairspray in New York and two tours of that and the London company and everything else, so there might be eight or ten or twelve productions, full size Broadway productions being operated out of the office, and Stomp has continued since ‘94 so we always had Stomp and we had two tours of Stomp for a while so while we had this mass volume it just seemed efficient to have a lot of the functions in house. The other thing, which we have joked about, is there are services like tour booking, which we did in house for a long time, or press which we did in house, we no longer, our volume isn’t like that anymore, but you can stand over somebody’s shoulder and yell at them – not that we yell at people – but you really can keep a close eye on it because everybody in the theatre, all the independent vendors, including ourselves as general managers, everybody is juggling multiple shows and there’s a certain comfort to know that your marketing director is doing nobody’s marketing but yours. That’s not that all the independent vendors in the theatre, including ourselves as general managers, don’t do wonderful jobs for every client but there’s a certain comfort in it.

Ken: Have you had a checklist for picking shows that you want to produce over the years? How do you make a choice?

Richard: That’s like the great question, right? For one thing, your choice is amongst what’s available. That’s first choice. The Book of Mormon was not available to us. I would like to think that, had The Book of Mormon come through the transom, we would have said “Hey, this is really great.” The Producers was available to us. So the first thing is that a lot of the shows that you would have loved to have done just ain’t yours and you don’t have any access to them. How you choose a show, of course, is the $64 million question. I think the first thing, to me, is how engaging, emotionally, it is for the audience. If you can move them, they will come. They will buy tickets, they will tell their friends, but they have to be emotionally engaged, they have to be really drawn into it, they have to care and it has to be a subject they care about, whether or not they knew in the first instance that they cared about it. Hairspray, for example, which has all the political points, issues around inclusion and such, I don’t know if somebody set out to make a musical about inclusion but it ended up being about a girl wanting to dance on TV and in the getting there you have a lot of realizations and a lot of truths are revealed about the way you feel about race and the way you feel about opportunity and inclusion and it’s just an altogether fascinating subject as well as being emotionally engaging, so I would say the first thing is “Is it emotionally engaging?” and the second thing is “Is it a subject that people want to see, whether or not they know it? Is it a subject that will interest them?” Unfortunately, there’s a lot of musicals that are written about subjects that I just wish the composer and the book writer had kind of run it past us first, you know, “I’ve got this great idea for a musical!” Well, at that point you should really be examining what the subject is and whether you’re surfing the zeitgeist and whether it’s something that people really care about and people can really get engaged in. The battle is half won or lost there.

Ken: Anything you remember passing on that you wish you hadn’t passed on?

Richard: Yeah, I’m sure there are, and my partners will no doubt remind me of things I didn’t want to do but I can’t think of anything at the moment. I remember having the thought when I worked off-Broadway in the ‘80s that I took comfort in the fact that every good show that you saw in the ‘80s, anywhere other than the Shakespeare festival in the Public Theatre, Joe Papp had passed on, because he got everything first, everybody went to him first, so I thought “Well, he can’t be that smart because everyone good on Broadway, everything good off-Broadway he decided not to do,” is the way I used to think about it. So I can’t think specifically of something that we passed on, actually.

Ken: You’ve been producing for a couple of decades now – what’s the one, the biggest difference you see about producing today versus producing on Broadway when you started?

Richard: I was, fortunately or unfortunately, even though I started in the ‘80s, the day when one guy produced a musical, Herman Shumlin, had passed. So that wasn’t in the cards even when I started and it required partnerships. It didn’t require partnerships on the scale that we have now and, although the sums were really high, they didn’t require the kind of crazy desperate scrambling for large, giant amounts of money that it does now, so that’s different. I think if we’re talking about all producing, that is plays as well as musicals, the biggest difference, I guess, is that when we started, fortunately, plays were done off-Broadway and you could have real commercial successes off-Broadway, which is much more difficult now – and plays, as I recall, weren’t being done that frequently on Broadway. Now, of course, you can do any play you want on Broadway as long as you have a movie star, so we have a couple of plays that we’re trying to produce on Broadway and it’s focused at the moment on a search for movie stars which seems to be what’s required. Back when I started I was doing Driving Miss Daisy and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and The Cocktail Hour, all these plays that made money, Love Letters, the first production, they made money, they were good plays, it was like a piece of business – it was buy cheap and sell dear – you would do the play, it would have its run, it would run a year or two and you would get a tour out of it. It was very simple. Off-Broadway now is much more challenging, just because of the number of seats and the expenses haven’t stayed in sync. So Broadway plays require movie stars and Broadway musicals require vast amounts of money, of course. I don’t know if I’m jumping ahead but then there’s the theatre jam-up which, in my mind, is all to do with variable pricing.

Ken: Please, expand on this one. This is new, I haven’t heard this – I love this idea.

Richard: Well, now, it’s very scientific – I hope I’m not telling tales out of school – it’s very scientific about how prices are set and these premium prices don’t come out of the sky, they’re figured out, and if somebody bought H101 or 103 for a particular price we look at what we can sell H105 and 107 for the following week and the result is that shows, I think, are doing better, financially, than they used to. It used to be that a play would run its course and the grosses would decline – I mean it still happens, of course, but I just think the process is stretched out much longer now because ticket yield is an actual factor in the economics of a show so that, combined with the short runs for the movie stars which can happen in the playhouses, there’s just no theatres. It’s just become sort of nightmarish.

Ken: Well let’s talk about premium ticketing for a bit because you were a producer on The Producers, one of the biggest hits we’ve had in the past twenty years, and you were really one of the first shows to do a real premium ticket with the now-defunct Broadway Inner Circle. The top price for The Producers was?

Richard: $400.

Ken: 400 bucks.

Richard: Seems quaint and cute now.

Ken: I know, I was Googling about this and you guys got a lot of flak for this.

Richard: We did, we got a lot of flak. When we opened and we had the face value of the ticket at $100, as opposed to, I think it had been $89 or $90 for other shows, we were on page one of the New York Times – not the inside front, the first page of the entertainment section, it was on page one of the New York Times that we had charged $100 for a ticket – which of course now is a bargain. The Producers was heaven on Earth in every respect. Creatively, financially, in every way, it was just a wonderful experience, really a privilege, and when we opened and the lines were literally around the block we felt big and bad for a period of time and then we realized that many, most, some – a large proportion of the tickets – were simply being bought by brokers who were reselling them. So we were selling them for $100 and feeling terrific and they were selling them for God knows what, and that money was not going to Mel and the other authors, to Tom Meehan, and it wasn’t going to the directors and the designers who had royalties and it wasn’t going to our investors and it wasn’t going to us; it was going to guys who had addresses in New Jersey and three hundred credit cards who were buying up the tickets and reselling them, so it was disturbing. I know it was perceived as rampaging greed but we honestly didn’t see it that way. We honestly thought it was unfair and we were going to try to get the system righted the best we could so that the money went where it should be going, which is to the people who created the show and the investors who invested the $10.5 million in the show, because none of them were participating in the resale market. We figured this out and tried to do it – and, of course, in retrospect it was very primitive what we were doing and it didn’t last. The Producers did just fine, we’re not complaining about how we did on The Producers, but it was a beginning infantile effort at this and we took the heat for everybody else who is now doing really well from it, so there we are.

Ken: You were one of the first barricades thrown in the street that didn’t cause the French revolution but you started it.

Richard: That’s exactly right, or I did know if you know the battle of Algiers, about the Algerian revolution, it all takes place four years before the actual revolution happened and they all get killed just like Les Mis, everybody gets shot down in the street and the real revolution happens a few years later. That’s sort of what happened with us although it’s ridiculous for me to say that we were shot down in the street with The Producers – it was great and it was a wonderful experience – but that was our tale about the premium seats.

Ken: When did you know, on The Producers, that you had something special that was really going to knock it out of the park like it did? Was it in the rehearsal room, was it when you read the screenplay?

Richard: That’s actually a story. The fact is that Mel and Tom Meehan wrote The Producers and they developed it with Mike Ockrent who was married Susan Stroman and they developed it themselves and they did a reading and they invited all ‘The Producers’ in town to come to the reading but they did it, they cast it, they wrote the whole thing, so every producer in town went to this reading and it was fantastic and it was born perfect. I mean I would like to say that, as the producer of The Producers, I created it and was solely responsible for its quality but the fact is they created it, those five people and Glen Kelly and various other people created the piece and it came out of the womb sort of perfect. Very minor changes between that reading and what we ended up with on stage. Much of the cast was in the reading as well. Most people, I think, completely flipped at the reading, I certainly did, and I didn’t know Mel and I didn’t know anybody else and he was surrounded by people who knew him – other producers, theatre owners – and I talked to him but he was looking over my shoulder at somebody else more important so I went home despondent and I wrote him a letter, I wrote him a letter that explained how it had been, I remember seeing the movie of The Producers in the Cinematheque in Paris in the 1970s where I was the only one laughing in the theatre – nobody else found it funny and I was rolling on the floor – and I had watched it a million times afterwards and my kids watched it, it was a family thing and we absolutely loved it. So I put all of that in the letter to him and I told him how qualified we were – we had been running Smokey Joe’s Cafe around the country and had done many tours and we were good managers. I stressed that but I also stressed how much it meant to me and I put some jokes in – I remember I wrote in all caps “I WANT THAT MONEY!” with an exclamation point, which of course is a line from the show, and he called the next day.  The phone rang and there he was.

Ken: “Uh, Richard, Mel Brooks on two for you.”

Richard: That’s right. It was one of the all-time moments. He came and interviewed us and basically he hired us. He ended up putting together producers, he put together the touring entity and Jujamcyn and himself and us – we were the operating arm, we were the general managers and kind of the line producers, and the other producer was Clear Channel or Live Nation or whatever they were called at the time but it was the largest operator of touring venues in the country and that was the partnership and it was a terrific partnership, it worked really well. Rocco was wildly enthusiastic about it – Rocco Landesman, who ran Jujamcyn at the time. It worked out but that letter was really important. It was written out of despair and desperation.

Ken: That’s the second time you’ve used the word “desperation”.

Richard: Really?

Ken: It seems to work out for you.

Richard: I guess it does, in the spirit of The Producers.

Ken: People ask me all the time – “Should I write a letter?” and my answer is “What’s it going to hurt? Are you not going to get it any more than you’ve not gotten it? Why not give it a shot?” So obviously most shows can’t be The Producers, unfortunately. How do you deal with a show that doesn’t work? How do you personally take that?

Richard: Well it never gets easy. It’s never easy. The ones that are successful creatively and don’t recoup are disappointing, you’ve failed your investors and it’s disappointing and you feel “Why are these other shows being recognized and we’re not? It’s unfair, this is a really wonderful show.”

Ken: Do you have an example of one of those shows in your list of many?

Richard: No, I don’t. There are some Sondheim shows, for example, that don’t recoup. Most of Sondheim’s shows didn’t recoup originally and over time we’ve done four Sondheim revivals and all of them have been like in a dream, I can’t believe my good fortune that we were working on these shows and working with him, but not all of them recoup and you’re disappointed but the shows worked. The ones that just fail because they never came together and they never worked are massive disappointments and create heartache as well as guilt for “failing” the creators of it, the writers, and failing the investors in it. Somehow it’s our fault, it’s the producers’ fault if the show fails, ultimately, I mean we are running the thing. Of course we’re responsible – we can’t control everything, of course, but we’re responsible nonetheless and some of the big failures that we’ve had, Leap of Faith, Time and Again in the ‘90s – we worked seven years on Time and Again and we just never made it work. It’s a wonderful piece of material, it just never came together despite the seven or right iterations of it that we tried. Those are heartaches; I don’t know what to say about it. Leap of Faith I thought was way better than it was received. I felt it deserved better but I recognize that it had problems. It had inherent problems with the story. Maybe the answer to that is we shouldn’t have done Leap of Faith, it was about a very unsympathetic person at heart, but it was heartbreaking. So I don’t know if that’s the best answer to your question but the ones that you fail at are tough.

Ken: How do you bounce back?

Richard: Well, you just bounce back. They say Hal Prince always had a reading of another play the day after the opening. Unfortunately, the way we’re all set up in business, where we have to do multiple shows – we’re in a business where the business model is that the show will go not bankrupt but the business will end in a period of time. For example, it’s one of the reasons we opened 54 Below – we had the idea that we could run a theatrical endeavor that would run for years and years and years and we wouldn’t be concerned about it closing, but the nature of the business is that shows will close – they will go through an infancy and a maturity and a prosperity and an old age and then they will be gone, and so decease of that, if you want to make a living in this business, you have to keep the pipeline full, so the nature of the business mandates that you’re always onto the next show, it’s an absolute requirement – you’ve got people to pay, you have to have another show. So that financial imperative has been the key to sanity as well, because how am I going to recover from any one of the really disappointing ones? The answer is I have other children that need to be fed and I’ve got to deal with them.

Ken: Okay, my last question, which is my James Lipton-like question. I want you to imagine that the genie from Aladdin comes to your office and says “Richard, I want to thank you for the 60, 75 shows you’ve produced on Broadway and the incredible contributions you’ve made to this industry by granting you one wish.” What’s the one thing that drives you so crazy about Broadway, that makes you mad? I see you in the elevator all the time – you’re nice and jovial, everything seems fine. What makes you so mad about this business that can get you banging on the tables and staying up at night that you would ask this genie to wish away?

Richard: I don’t know. I don’t know. What would I wish away? Honestly, it sounds like I’m dodging it, but I can quibble with the power structure – producers don’t have any, basically – and I can quibble with the secondary markets that make a lot of money and the providers of services who are quasi-parasites, I can quibble with all of that and I know this sounds like a cop out but it isn’t, I am genuinely thrilled with the whole thing, I genuinely love it. It’s been the same, not only for the hundred years of Broadway, but there was a press agent from gladiator fights, I mean people have been presenting entertainment to other people for thousands of years. There was somebody worried about the box office, presumably, at the colosseum and the system is so filled with history and so filled with tradition and peoples’ roles that I genuinely love it – and that’s while being realistic about the disparities, the unfairness of bit aspects of it, there are large aspects that are just unfair, both business aspects and creatively too, I mean the actor pool is ridiculously talented and it’s just heartbreaking that there aren’t enough jobs for everybody given how good they are. You have auditions and it’s a joke, actually, what comes through the door – everybody who comes through the door is so gifted and so talented. So there’s unfairness on the creative side and there’s unfairness on the business side as well. Maybe what I’m saying is even the genie couldn’t fix it. Maybe that’s the note I should leave on – the problems in the theatre are so complicated it would challenge even the genie.

Ken: But what I love about your answer is that you love it anyway.

Richard: I do love it anyway.

Ken: Despite its dysfunction and all the neuroses the industry has. Well thank you so much. I’m no genie but thank you for doing the podcast. Thanks, all of you, for listening. We’ve had the producer of The Producers on today – pretty good! I’m Ken Davenport. This has been another episode of The Producer’s Perspective podcast. We’ll see you next time – don’t forget to subscribe!

Related Posts

Podcasting

Ken created one of the first Broadway podcasts, recording over 250 episodes over 7 years. It features interviews with A-listers in the theater about how they “made it”, including 2 Pulitzer Prize Winners, 7 Academy Award Winners and 76 Tony Award winners. Notable guests include Pasek & Paul, Kenny Leon, Lynn Ahrens and more.

LEARN MORE