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[0:00] Janine Scott: And so I think that that is the best way to prepare to know as much as you can about what happens in the theater, is like the biggest resource you'll have.

[0:13] Janine Scott: Welcome to the Black Business of Broadway, a podcast brought to you by the Broadway League and Black to Broadway.

[0:20] Janine Scott: Here we highlight the stories, how-to's, and successes of the Black Professionals and Legends of Broadway.

[0:27] Janine Scott: I am your host, Janine Scott.

[0:38] Janine Scott: Today we have a Broadway and touring company manager with over 20 years of experience in the performing arts. Please welcome Miss Kim Shaw.

[0:49] Janine Scott: Kim holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theater from Spellman College and a Master of Fine Arts in Theater Management and Producing from Columbia University. Some of Kim's Broadway and touring credits include Moulin Rouge, the musical, Diana, a Bronx Tale, and The Lion King. Kim is the company manager for Bad Cinderella, which is currently in previews. Welcome, Kim.

[1:14] Kim Shaw: Hi.

[1:15] Janine Scott: How are you, Janine?

[1:17] Kim Shaw: So glad to be here.

[1:19] Janine Scott: I am so glad to have you and to finally be able to have a conversation. We have been hitting a lot of the different positions, but company manager has not been talked about yet. So I am so happy to have you as our first company manager to talk to.

[1:34] Kim Shaw: Yeah.

[1:40] Kim Shaw: I'm happy to talk about company management anytime.

[1:44] Janine Scott: So can we can you go back a little and tell us, you know, how old you were when you first saw your Broadway show and what role did that play in inspiring you to build a career in the arts or on Broadway?

[2:00] Kim Shaw: Yeah, well, I saw my first show when I was four years old at the St. James, and I loved it. I think in that moment I knew that I wanted to pursue theater and Broadway specifically. I mean, it's like been my entire life. My parents were actually in theater, but that's how they met. And so they like went in theater class at Fordham Lincoln Center. My mom was a producer, my dad was a director, they went out on a date, they went to La Mama, they ran into Robert De Niro.

[2:35] Kim Shaw: Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right, and the rest is history. And so, you know, both of them ended up doing other things to provide a lovely life for me. But that love of theater never went away. And I think that we maybe saw every musical on Broadway every season. If it was a tough ticket, you know, maybe not. But even like I think I stood for my first show when I was 10. So it was right to just get in and see all the shows, and it was just a part of who we were. They both worked in the city. I studied piano at Manhattan School of Music, so we were in the city every single Saturday. So I had lots of opportunities to see a show. And my most of my childhood, I just knew I wanted to do theater. I thought I was going to be like a hit musician, and I went to school as a classical pianist, and quickly found out that I had no interest in singing for my supper any longer.

[3:34] Kim Shaw: And that it's intense, right? And it's intense to be study music here in the city, and it's intense when you get to school, and after I'd 15 years of playing intensely, I was like, I'm finished here. And that's how I made the transition to theater. Like when you're a music major, you have to have another fine arts credit. And so I stuck went across the hall and I went to the theater department, and I took stagecraft and did lighting and was a stage manager for the music for a musical, and kind of the rest is history. And while I was there, I did the internship as a company manager at The Lion King, and it was its first year. So wow. So it was a very, very, very exciting time. And to walk into the building several times a week and see at the time there were 53 people in that cast, and for them to have somebody who looked like them handing them their paycheck on a weekly basis is something that a lot of them had never experienced before.

[4:38] Kim Shaw: And so Sam Wright, God rest his soul, came in one day and was so upset. I was like, oh my gosh. And usually, you know, I try to pull myself together, but I was young, and that was a day that I could not. And right, he really like sat me down and he said, you know, please don't give up. Because you know, there at that point in time there had been other Black company managers, but there weren't any. And he said, we come to work every single day working for people who do not look like us, and if you can stand it, you will make a change and a difference in every single company moving forward. It won't be easy, right? But it is worth it for you to do it, and that has stuck with me through the ups and the downs and seeing people get jobs over me who were less qualified and less educated and all those other things, knowing that eventually I was going to walk into a room of people who look like me.

I was going to be in charge of their workspace and how they got paid, and to be a resource just to know that there's somebody on the management team who is not asking you to perm your hair so you can get a wig on. Like that kind of thing. And that's really, really been my motivation over the years. Because I think company management is not an easy job, and you have to be called to do it. And that was my call to do it.

[6:04] Janine Scott: So can you tell the audience a little bit more about what a company manager is, who they are and what role they play?

[6:13] Kim Shaw: So company manager is on the management producing side of things, and we are the producer's representative in the theater for the eight shows a week. And so it is the days are long, you know, we start anywhere between nine and eleven o'clock in the morning, and we really don't take our first like breath until the curtain goes up at the end of the night. And we are responsible for like we'll do things that are like every single week we run the payroll. Every single night we sign off on the box office statement, we report the numbers back to the producers and the general managers. If not, we take that responsibility on. We handle the travel, the housing, transportation for all the people who work on the show, both cast, crew, creative team. And you know, we are the first frontline managers of the show. Some people call us the CFO of the production.

[7:47] Kim Shaw: Yeah. But that's basically, but that's really kind of what we do. I'm like, see, I'm like CFO, COO, CEO really. So what I'm because you all do, as a company manager, you do a lot. You wear the human resources hat sometimes, you wear the treasurer hat sometimes, you wear the therapist hat, even though you know that's not really in the job description, but because we're dealing with humans here, and you all are the ones who are the first to interact with them on a day-to-day. How would someone how could someone prepare themselves to get into company management? Like you mentioned being a company, being an intern at with The Lion King. How can someone get into being a company manager? Like what skills, what traits, what classes, what's out there?

[8:49] Kim Shaw: I think that a lot of things in entertainment, and particularly on Broadway, there's usually no straight line path. People get there how they get there. Sometimes it's a relationship, sometimes it's the school you went to. And similar to being a stage manager, I think that the more you know about what happens in the building, the stronger a company manager you are. So if you're somebody who has studied lighting, has been a musician, you've been a dancer, you've worked in a box office, you've been a lighting designer or a set designer, the more that you know and can have an intelligent conversation with the people, the better you are at your job. Everybody comes with their different, we talk to actors differently than we talk to crew, differently than we talk to our house manager counterparts, differently than we talk to the marketing team, and to be able to talk to have a productive conversation, a respectful conversation with the multiple parties in the building, the better you are.

It's like we're responsible for knowing a lot of things, but I think it's impossible to know everything. So you have to be able to utilize your resources. So you can come to it having spent 15 years as a dancer or spent, you know, 10 years as a musician. There are actually a lot of musicians who are company managers because we deal with math. And so I think that that is the best way to prepare, to know as much as you can about what happens in the theater is like the biggest resource you'll have. And you might not use it right away, but when you're finally sitting in the chair, it is the thing that you will draw on the most.

[10:37] Kim Shaw: I think that it's really helpful to know what everyone is up against in the building. Like someone's boss may be something on paper, but the person they're actually answering to can be someone very, very different. And to understand that dynamic and understanding that dynamic is to have been in enough rooms to have seen those kinds of things go down. So I think that that's one. The other thing is you should have some basic computer skills. Right. There are a lot of people who have the people skills in order to do the job and do that part of the job well. But the baby steps that you take to build up your knowledge to be able to be a company manager, such as like doing the box office reports and reporting the wraps on a daily basis.

That's like a job that we'll give a lot of people when they first start. And in order to be able to do that, you have to know how to use Excel. Right? You have to know how to do a formula, you have to know how to check your work and how to see when something's not adding up correctly, and either have attention to detail or know your tricks for finding the details. If that's not your personality, doesn't mean you can't have the job. It just means that you have to attack it differently. So knowing Excel, it's a big one, knowing Word for right now, to be able to read a contract, to write a contract, and knowing what happens in the building. I think that those are like the three most important things that you should have and do.

And then there are other ways, like you know, people study theater management and administration, but I find that most of those programs are focused on nonprofit, and being a nonprofit company manager is very different than being a commercial theater company manager. Not that there's not some overlap, but the skill set that's required and what you're responsible for can be very, very different. And so, yes, you can study in school, there are things that you know you can talk about, but really it is knowing how to use Excel, knowing how to speak to people, knowing how to read a contract, and then letting people know that you're interested in the work and having those relationships to help you actually get there.

[12:47] Janine Scott: Well, that's good. I mean, that's good to know, though, because I think sometimes we we're like, I'm gonna go to school and I'm gonna study theater management, and to hear that it's commercial theater is different than nonprofit theater, and I think we know that because we're in the industry, but I don't know that a lot of people on the outside looking in, you know, know and or understand how commercial theater and nonprofit theater differentiate.

[13:19] Kim Shaw: So thanks for highlighting that.

[13:21] Janine Scott: Yeah.

[13:22] Kim Shaw: So along the way, have you had what other influences have you had throughout your career? Well, I mean, I have mostly only ever worked in entertainment, which I don't know if that's good or bad. Um, but I even on, you know, my time between shows, I will do wardrobe for TV, or I will do accounting. I've done accounting, that's what I did during the shutdown was when I was an accountant for 90 Day Fiancé. And so I, which was like a, I love reality TV, and so I was like, I'm getting a reality TV job during the shutdown. What can I do? And what can I do that's gonna make me a better company manager? So I like went to be an accountant. Uh, and I did, I learned a ton. Um, and the application, and you know, it's always fun to see what the parallels are between the different mediums in entertainment.

So that was great. Um, you know, I like that sponge, right? When they told me when I was an undergrad that I was to learn what everybody does and how they do it and shout out everybody and talk to everybody and lease note that that's always kind of been my thing. I've been a stage manager, I've worked on like lighting crews, I've done wardrobe, I have done a bit of wardrobe, you know, and I've been an accountant. So I have just been gathering all the experiences, and I feel like the more that I do, the better I am as a company manager, and the more people I know, you know, like oh, we're, you know, doing wardrobe and shopping TV shows in New York, you know, you have somebody who needs an opening night dress or has press all of a sudden, and I have a relationship with a lot of the studio services, um, people who work at Saks and Bloomingdale's and all those different stores, right? All of those things kind of contribute to, you know, just being better at this.

[15:25] Janine Scott: Right. So earlier you talked about, you know, at The Lion King, um, being able to, being able as a woman of color to hand them their paychecks and them seeing you. Can you talk about charting, you know, your own course as a woman of color in this industry and the impact of having someone like you as a member of management?

[15:52] Kim Shaw: When you're young and you have jobs, people think that you don't want to work for whatever little bit of money that they're offering. And so my initial hurdle was, oh, you have more experience than this. So the answer is no. So then I thought to myself, okay, like I went on a tour and I came back, and I was like, okay, I think what I need to do is to go to grad school. And that's how I ended up at the Columbia Theater Management and Producing Program, which was also great. That it's, you know, a lot of people have gone through the program, but it's really commercial theater focused if you're a theater manager, and you spend time in the different offices, and the people who are actually running Broadway are actually teaching these courses.

And it was a great way for me to build relationships to learn the nitty-gritty of how the job actually gets done. Um, there, I could really, I would say that everyone in my cohort, there were five of us, everyone is doing really, really well, right? There's a Tony Award-winning producer, we have a press agent, we have somebody who's gone on to like run in the mall entertainment. Um, everyone's been really successful, and to me, it was like for us, it was just like the stepping the bridge to the gap. So, yes, we learned something, but the relationships that we took from there really kind of, um, were the things that have paid the most dividends. Um, while there we had a class in theater development, like audience development, which I know that we've been talking a lot about since, you know, the murder of George Floyd, right?

Which is, you know, yes, sure, yes. But to me, I'm like, we've been having this conversation for 20 years. Right. So I was having this conversation when I was in grad school, and I'm pretty sure my parents were like, well, we were having that conversation when we were in school. Um, so right, talking about how we get different audiences into the theater and paying money to see theater. And yeah, and one of, right, and the answer, I don't know what the answer to that is. I know that the dollars are out there, that's a different discussion. Right. And I could talk about that all day long. Um, but while I was there, there were, I had a person, a professor Donna Walker-Keune, who had just written a book about, you know, who's being invited to the table.

And that's kind of like I, one that had a big impact on me, and like that's exactly what I think all the time. I'm like, there are people sitting around here. My family is their theatergoers if they think it's for them. My parents saw everything. My family that lives in New Jersey, just on the other side of the Hudson River, they've seen Hamilton, they've seen The Color Purple, right? They will go see it if they think that it is for them. And so, you know, I've always, I wrote a paper when I was in school called "Broadway Makes My Ass Hurt" because tell us that. Russell Simmons had his Deaf Poetry Jam, and he had this piece in the New York Times that was like, Broadway makes my ass hurt. So my show has a DJ, I have this, and people, my theater is going to be packed eight shows a week because we are going to be speaking the language, doing the things that people who look like me want to actually see, and they're gonna pay to come see it.

Um, and so I was very fired up about that in school, and Donna really was like, okay, you're engaged. She's like, well, let's go, you're gonna come help me do this grassroots effort. And I'd be out in Brooklyn at the fairs and at parades, handing out things, talking to people, talking up to shows that were her clients. Um, and so still to this day, like even when we had that discussion about AMO, like all of those things still weigh in my hand in my mind, they are still the principles with which you get people to come to the theater.

[19:50] Janine Scott: Yeah, yeah. Um, so you know, like so. There's that part of it. So she helped me out, um, and really like helped me open my mind and change the way that I talk about theater and commercial theater and audience development, and I think that oftentimes people when they have people of color on their team for whatever reason, they're hoping that they'll be able to talk about the things that they think are their blind spots. Right. And so sometimes you have to be the resident Black person.

[20:24] Kim Shaw: Yes, yes, yes, and I've always been someone until very recently I had a negative experience with that, but I have I've never had a problem being the resident Black person. You want me to tell you? Right. Are people gonna think that this is racist? The answer is yes. Or is it like, is this offensive? Yes. Have you left this group of people out? Yes, right, or whatever it is. I don't mind being that person. I also don't mind like making people feel better about something bad that they've done. Right. And so being able and open to do that, I think has allowed me into a lot of spaces that maybe I would not have been allowed in previously. Right. And now it's just like age. There are a lot of people that I have now gone through the ranks with.

Right. And so their perception of me, instead of not being somebody that they wanted to go to P-Town or Fire Island with, or not being someone that they see at their bar all the time, or not being their nephew, I'm now the person who was an intern at the same time, the person who was in grad school at the same time. And so I think that there is a level of acceptance of me and who I am that just has to do with familiarity. And so to have gone to the same schools, to go through the same programs, to work on the same blocks, to talk about the offices that we survived, right? There's that part of it that I think is, um, one of the privileges that I carry with me that some people who are newer into the industry don't actually have. And it's not lost on me that I have that.

[22:06] Janine Scott: Right. Well, and it's like you said earlier, it's about the relationships, and it's the relationships that you've built and that you've nurtured, and clearly throughout those relationships, you've proven to be authentic and be consistent, and that's why there's that level of trust, that trust and credibility that you've established, you know, within this industry.

[22:32] Kim Shaw: I'm what you see is what you get. I will tell you one time, you know, I sit in an interesting position where people come to me first with a lot of things. And I think that because of my age and all those other things, that that's also true in the offices and not just with my companies. And so I will tell you one time that something is like not great, or I will give you the heads up that somebody is offended by something or you've done a wrong. Right. I'll tell you one time, and then I feel like it's on you to address it or not. But I'm not really going to not gonna like beat you over the head about it. I'll just go on and mind my own business.

[23:15] Janine Scott: Right. But Kim, people appreciate that. And that's why I say you, you show up authentically and you're consistent, consistently the same, because you know, although we had never, you know, met in person, I know people who know you, and they're like, and they all say the same thing, which are great things, you know. They're like, oh yes, you gotta meet Kim. She's very, she is, she's gonna tell you like it is, and it's great and it's wonderful. And if you need an advocate and you need someone, that's who you want. So that's why I say that you've established yourself, you know, within this industry, and people know who you are, and they respect you and they respect your voice and they respect your position. So I'm, I'm glad now to finally have had the opportunity to chat with you.

[24:09] Janine Scott: So, last question, we asked this of all of our guests. Um, what is one piece of advice you'd like to share with the future Black leaders of Broadway?

[24:20] Kim Shaw: You never know who is going to be the person that's going to get you to where you want to go. You don't know if you're sitting next to them, you don't know if they're working for you, and so to get to know as many people as you possibly can and to have a respectful mutually beneficial relationship with them is like how you survive around here. That coupled with take all of the meetings, take all of the meetings.

[25:06] Janine Scott: Take those meetings. Take all the things. It's like a, it's a running theme. It's a running theme. And it's so true. Well, Kim, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. And I look forward to seeing you again.

[25:23] Kim Shaw: Yeah, me too. I'm so glad we did this. Thank you.

[25:26] Janine Scott: I want to thank our guests and you, our listeners. You could have been doing anything else, but you chose to spend your time with me, and I am grateful. Be sure to subscribe at bpn.fm/bbb. So you'll never miss an episode. While you're at it, tell a friend. I'm your host, Janine Scott, and we at the Broadway League hope you enjoyed this episode of The Black Business of Broadway.