"Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir"
Jeffrey Seller
Simon & Schuster
Unless you’re a Broadway nerd, you probably don’t recognize the name Jeffrey Seller – producer and author of Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir – but you for sure know the groundbreaking, Tony Award-winning shows he’s played a significant role in bringing to the stage, including “Rent,” “Avenue Q,” and a little piece called “Hamilton.”
Growing up in the poorest section of Oak Park, Michigan (outside Detroit), the adopted son of a drugstore clerk and a philandering, brain-damaged (following a motorcycle accident), part-time process server, Seller was first bitten by the theater bug after being cast in his temple’s Purim play. He wrote his own show, “Adventureland” (the name of the production company he founded years later), which a teacher gave him time and space to develop, and later landed a key youth role in a local adult production.
But musicals were his first love, as he listened to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” obsessively, and went to see touring shows like “Pippin” at Detroit’s Fisher Theater.
Seller speaks for many of us Broadway geeks when he writes, “Musicals unlock feelings inside of me that no other experience can. Because musicals radiate unique aural and visual stimulation. More laughter. More tears. More goose bumps. More yearning and longing and hope than other forms of art. … And the Tony Awards are our Super Bowl.”
Clocking in at nearly 400 pages, Theater Kid offers an exhaustive account of Seller’s life and career, to the point of making me wonder how Seller could possibly remember the outfit of someone he once had a brief interaction with. The prose is thus a bit workmanlike in its precision, adopting the feel of a personal journal.
The flip-side of this is that Seller is also bracingly candid about everything, whether it’s his father’s chronic flatulence, Seller’s first solo sexual experiences or, eventually, the blossoming of a relationship with his roommate at the University of Michigan, Andrew Lippa, a composer/lyricist who went on to have considerable Broadway successes of his own. (The two men struggled to maintain their relationship in the earliest days of their fledgling careers in New York, as AIDS continued to haunt the gay community.)
Seller first made the move to New York with a low-paying job in public relations. He eventually got into the business of booking touring shows. Along the way, a friend takes him to see a rock monologue called “Boho Days” by Jonathan Larson. Seller is profoundly moved by what would become Larson’s “Tick, Tick… Boom!” and offers Larson constructive feedback – about the show’s title, for one, and the need for a stronger, more inviting point of entry than the song “Boho Days” (which results in Larson writing the electrifying “30/90,” about turning 30 in 1990). If nothing else, “Theater Kid” demonstrates, again and again, what a sharp talent Seller has for spotting and articulating a developing show’s weaknesses.
Though “Tick, Tick… Boom!” never makes it to Broadway, Larson tells Seller about a piece he’s working on inspired by “La Boheme,” set in the AIDS-riddled East Village. Because Seller and Larson have become artistic partners, Seller plays no small role in role in “Rent”’s development journey.
When one workshop reading, for instance, felt like a step backward, Seller writes, “I’m deflated and a little bit embarrassed. Though there were good songs, they were untethered to any identifiable story. The cast never faltered, but their energy had no focus. I didn’t walk away thinking about any of the characters. I had hoped ‘Rent’ would be the answer – to musical theater, to my professional life. Instead, it felt like a mishmash.”
Seller then had a tough love conversation with Larson the next day to convey all this – making you realize that the most groundbreaking, unconventional musical theater shows of our generation often struggle to find their feet, precisely because there’s no blueprint.
“Theater Kid” goes into far greater depth with “Rent” than with “Avenue Q,” “In the Heights,” and “Hamilton.” This makes a kind of sense, since “Rent” not only put Seller on the map as a producer, but also opened the door for many other shows that would go on to shake up Broadway.
If you’re still shaky on what a producer (who’s not just fronting money) does, Seller offers this summary while “Hamilton” was in its nascent stages: “My job was to say yes, to nurture the artist, not to tell the artist what to do. To be there when the artist asked for suggestions. … This is where a dialogue begins that requires the producer to weigh what to offer and when to offer it. Many practitioners focus on the hard skills of producing – optioning the play, raising the money, booking the theater – but they don’t think about the soft skills – giving an author a place to write, making them lunch, showing up without demands or pressure, sending the right note at the right time.”
Judging by Seller’s success, that seems to have worked out for him. Theater fans (like me) are much richer for it.
