From Academic Medicine to Broadway
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Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation, and Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; 2Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network, Room 429, 600 University Ave, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
2010, my wife and I attended a performance of Evita I natJuly the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. A young man walked
onto the stage, sat down, and started singing Oh What a Circus. After one verse, we looked at each other and said “Who is this guy?” Josh Young is an American musical theater actor who had been cast as Che after an extensive North American search. He has a booming voice and was perfect for the role. At the end of the performance, Josh was signing copies of his CD in the lobby of the theater, so we bought one and had a very brief chat. I gave him my card and we started to correspond by email. A few months later, he asked me to produce his second album. I had no idea what that meant but said “yes” right away. Over the course of the next 10 months, I learned all the steps involved in producing an album: song selection, hiring an orchestrator, laying down the instrumental tracks, then the vocal tracks, editing, mixing, mastering, getting the licenses, manufacturing the CDs, and electronic dissemination. It was a lot like doing a research project, lots of strategy, vision, creativity, and logistical problems that needed to be solved. As well, it required passion; we had to really want to do it. We were very proud of the result, and I played the tracks in various stages of production on my car stereo and office systems over and over again. The next year, Josh was cast as Judas in the Stratford production of Jesus Christ Superstar (JCS), which also starred Paul Nolan (Jesus) and Chilina Kennedy (Mary Magdalen). The production was a terrific success. Andrew Lloyd Weber came to see it and they decided to transfer the show to Broadway. Some plays had transferred from Stratford to Broadway before, but this was the first musical so it was a big deal. We became (and remain) good friends with the trio of actors, met the director of the show, and the next thing we knew I was a Producer of JCS on Broadway. (There was a group of producers; I wasn’t the only one.) There were lots of fun events that followed: opening night and the party afterwards, reading reviews, taking my college friends to the show, getting nominated as a producer for a Tony in the “best revival of a musical” category; Josh was nominated for best featured actor in a musical (a very big deal), and going to the Tony ceremony. Neither Josh nor I won a Tony, and the show only stayed open for 4 months. We lost all the money we invested.
Received March 23, 2020 Accepted April 8, 2020
But that’s theater—most shows do not recoup their investment and many make no money at all. Lesson learned. A byproduct of producing one show is that I got to meet producers of other shows. So next came pitches to produce or invest again. My background in economics helped me to understand proposed budgets for shows: t
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