This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Ken Davenport: Hey everybody, if you're looking for a holiday gift for the Broadway lover in your life, look no further. I've got it. Your holiday shopping is done. Get Be a Broadway Star, the only Broadway board game out there, and the number one selling Broadway themed gift on Amazon.com. Visit BeABroadwayStar.com today or get it on Amazon. Now on with the podcast.

[0:19] Ken Davenport: I wanna be a producer with a hit show on Broadway. I wanna be a producer. Hello everybody. Welcome to a very special episode of The Producer's Perspective Podcast. You know why? So two reasons. First, this is our hundredth episode. Insert trumpet sounds here. It's been almost two years since I asked myself, I wonder if the leaders of our industry would come talk to me about the business and let me record it. Obviously they have. And we've had ninety-nine of them so far, and I've loved them so much. I've learned so much in this process. And based on the number of subscribers and listeners out there, you've all enjoyed them as much as I have. So thank you so much for helping us get to 100. Second reason today's episode is very special is because of our guest today.

He is without a doubt one of the best independent producers out there, and I've been after him to do this podcast for a while. He finally agreed. Please welcome to the podcast, Broadway producer David Stone. Welcome, David.

[1:16] David Stone: I can.

[1:18] Ken Davenport: So David is the producer of Spelling Bee, Three Days of Rain with Julia Roberts, the Pulitzer Prize winning Next to Normal, If/Then, the upcoming War Paint with Patty and Christine. I only have to say their first names. Oh, and he's also the producer of that little show you've never heard of, that one that has been one of the highest grossing shows on Broadway for over a decade. Wicked. So David, before Wicked, how did you get started in the theater?

[1:41] David Stone: I started really young. I went to a performing arts summer camp called French Woods, and a lot of people that I work with now, I actually met when I was a kid. And it was really bad, you know, I knew then that this was my group. This was my tribe, this was who I needed to be with. You know, we're sitting here actually the morning after the morning where the election didn't go the way we thought and hoped, and I was reminded last night, especially I went to see Kristen Chadwick do her Broadway concert, and it was the right place to be. She was very aware of the moment. Jason Brown, who I actually went to camp with, wrote a song for this moment and how we were feeling, and I think that this group, it's a cliché to talk about the theater community, but it is a community.

And I have every bit of strength I have in this business because of the people that have lifted me up and moved me forward. And I am so lucky that I got to grow up in this community. And yesterday and last night really proved that we are gonna take care of each other, especially for these next three years.

[3:02] Ken Davenport: What was besides being in that tribe when you were a kid, what was it specifically about the theater that you were drawn to and why producing?

[3:10] David Stone: If you were in, you were an actor.

[3:11] David Stone: I was an actor and a director, and I did a lot of plays and musicals, even through college. And I didn't think that I wanted to live the life of an actor necessarily. I thought it was a rough road, and I didn't think I was talented enough. But I got a job. Well, I was at an internship in between my junior and senior year of college at Jujamcyn Theaters. I wrote an independent study on that with my senior year, and that's why I did this internship. And it was the summer that a guy named Dick Wolf was leaving and Rocco Landisman was coming in. So I got to see this real sea change of new Broadway happening when Rocco came in. New Broadway. It was a long time ago now. It was 29 years ago. But I, uh, then when I was graduating, Howard Logan, who was the general manager there, introduced me to a few offices and I got a couple of job offers, but I decided I wanted to work in commercial theater, and I worked with Barry and Fran Weisler right out of college.

And I got to learn. I had an old-fashioned apprenticeship. I really got to see every side of it. I worked probably 14 hours a day and had no life, but they took me under their wing and taught me. And I learned a lot of things to do, and of course, as you do with your mentors or parents, a lot of things not to do and things that I would do differently. And it wasn't that I got bit by the bug because that probably happened earlier, is that I understood that this was a place for me in producing that I could express myself through the shows I did, but also that I thought I would be good at it.

[4:43] Ken Davenport: Any great advice you got way back in the day that you still remember today? You still quote Barry or Rocco or...

[4:43] David Stone: No, I think it wasn't so much advice as I watched the way Barry knew every detail, the way Fran talked to the creative teams at cast. I think that, you know, I can draw a straight line from the way Barry would market shows and think about how to communicate what he wanted to say about a show to the public. And so there's a straight line I could draw from learning that from him to specifically The Vagina Monologues or Wicked and how to sort of push something out into the world.

[5:24] Ken Davenport: In a sentence, what's a producer's job?

[5:26] David Stone: A producer's job is to be the small business owner of a small business, but also to be the cheerleader and psychiatrist and Jewish mother and everything to do with making sure the artists have what they need to make something great and then taking it and, and I don't mean exploiting in a bad way, but exploiting it and pushing it out into the world.

[5:51] Ken Davenport: Has that changed since you were an apprentice back into what you do today?

[5:56] David Stone: No, I think there are the essential job of producing is the same. I think there are many more people that are producers, but always, you know, one or sometimes two lead producers of a show, and that hasn't changed. I think the size of things, the numbers involved are obviously very different, and the shows make more money than ever before, they lose more money than ever before. The risks are just greater, but the process is still I think the same.

[6:25] Ken Davenport: What was your first show that you produced?

[6:27] David Stone: I produced a show, I was twenty-seven. I produced Family Secrets, which ran off Broadway at the West Side Theater for about a year and a half and then toured. And then my first Broadway show was a year after that. It was called What's Wrong with This Picture? Donald Margulies had just come off of Sight Unseen and Joe Mantello was just leaving Angels in America. This was his first Broadway show, State Prince, it just won the Tony Award for Guys and Dolls. I had this little off-Broadway hit and it closed in a week.

[6:54] Ken Davenport: A week.

[6:55] David Stone: A week.

[6:56] Ken Davenport: So your first show you come out, you come up to bat, and you smack it out of the park off-Broadway wise.

[7:01] David Stone: Yeah.

[7:01] Ken Davenport: And then you're gonna graduate to the bigger leagues.

[7:04] David Stone: Yeah.

[7:04] Ken Davenport: How did you feel after that show closed in a week? What was that like for you?

[7:08] David Stone: Well, you know, I talked about the theater community. The morning the reviews came out and they were terrible. I got calls from Joel Grey and Jimmy Niederlander and Arthur Lawrence and James Lapine, people that I had worked with. Jimmy gave me this investment in the show and Brooks Atkinson in the theater. And they all said, "Now you're bruised." And Jimmy said, "It's easy to have a hit, it's easy to have a flop. The hardest thing to do is to have a hit after a flop. You have to get back up and do that because I had a hit and I had a flop, so I had to keep going." But knowing that that actually is what made me part of the club was interesting. You know, failure is, and I don't love the word failure, but not success anyway, is common in this business when seven of ten shows dump the coup and people aren't as afraid of failure as they are in film or television.

So I think that it didn't make me want to continue actually, knowing that these other people were supporting me and had had it themselves. You know, it's just found a great number of hits after that, and we were gonna get to the big ones, but The Vagina Monologues, which was not too far after that. That was '99. In between these first two shows, I did Full Gallop, I did the St. Lane Diaries, I did The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway with Natalie Portman when she was sixteen, and James Lapine directed that, and then fully committed in The Vagina Monologues were both in 1990.

[8:33] Ken Davenport: Lots of off-Broadway. Why? Why were you about it?

[8:35] David Stone: Because this was when commercial off-Broadway still was healthy, and you and I have talked about this before, but you know, you could make a living, a good living in many cases, doing commercial off-Broadway. And I kept going from off-Broadway to Broadway and then it didn't work, so I run back to off-Broadway and it did work, and then I would be emboldened to go to Broadway and then finally we get out. I haven't been back to off-Broadway in a while. But I miss it and the happiest I think I ever was was doing The Vagina Monologues because it was this enormous financial success, artistic success, it changed the culture that we had a 1.7 companies across the country and no one even knew in the industry that this was happening in this way and we were just under the radar in a way that Broadway can't be.

Broadway, the scrutiny is so high and this was fun and we were raising tens of millions of dollars for charity for eBay and, you know, in a small way changing the culture and changing the world. And I've never had something that was both as much fun and it meant so much.

[9:43] Ken Davenport: One of the things that I really admire about what you do and some of the other top-tier independent producers do in this business is that you are very good at so many aspects of what a producer needs to do. Creative development, marketing, the touring market, what you did with The Vagina Monologues and of course Wicked later. So you have a renaissance number of skills. If you could only pick one of those skills that you had, you were going to lose everything and you could only keep one of them going forward, which one would you keep? In other words, what's the most important thing to a producer today?

[10:16] David Stone: I still think it's making the right show. And I've come in on some shows late in the process where I've just seen something and said, "Great, I'll move it from here to there and we'll just do it." And some I've come in the middle of the process when they were already writing and some at the early stage and commission things. But it's the most fun to shape a show. But you know, the thing that I've always been confused by in within the industry is how many people say to me, "So, you know, well, what are you working on?" And I say, "Well, I mean, you know, I have lots of Wicked all around the world." They're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what, what I mean, what are you doing? What are you working on?"

Well, I work on Wicked. It takes most of my day still. So even when I do these new shows, and I have to, because if I was only running a show and only run Wicked around the world, then it would, you know, I'd fall into a rut. But by doing new shows and using that side of my brain, it helps the Wicked side of my brain, and running the show helps the being in production side. But I think there's not enough respect given. I'm not justifying my day, but I think there's not enough respect given to what it is to run a show. And that's the name of the game. Running a show, that's where the profit is, that's where the people's employment is, the responsibility I feel to all the people who are in Wicked week after week after week around the country and around the world. It's fun, it's more glamorous to open shows, but we've got to pay just as much attention to it.

[11:51] Ken Davenport: That's the big difference, of course, between us and movies, right? They shoot a movie, they put it out there, and then that producer doesn't have to worry about whether the actors show up every day or about the costume replacement.

[12:00] David Stone: Yes. You know, one of the things, and Marc E. Platt, who's my producing partner on Wicked, is primarily a film producer, and he, I mean, he's stayed involved as I talk to him through these details of Wicked as it's gone on all these years, but he has loved the movies, you know, turning the movie in and moving on to the next, and you know, it's sort of, it's exactly the opposite.

[12:22] David Stone: There is never turning it in. If we do our job well, it's never over. So one of the other things that I don't think people realize about producers is the number of other projects that you may be working on that they may never hear about. So over the last 10 to 20 years, how many projects have you had in development that have stopped or have never seen the light of day?

[12:45] David Stone: I've actually not done a lot of things that never saw the light of day. I have had situations where I've done something, you know, I did Dogfight at Second Stage and it got nice reviews and it's certainly been done elsewhere, but not good enough I felt to justify a move to Broadway right then, which broke my heart. I've had shows that I couldn't continue for some reasons that I've uh other people have taken over. I've had, you know, we were gonna play that we were going to do that it didn't quite come together in the way that we needed it to so we made sure the play got done elsewhere and is now been licensed all over. So I've been lucky in that I've not had a lot of things that just stopped and didn't get on stage but there have been a few things that haven't gone all the way to Broadway that you would have heard of in my attitude.

[13:40] David Stone: And you said it right there and that's really what I want to zero in on because it's so important again something you do obviously so well because you're able to separate the emotion and the business. Dogfight broke your heart and I saw a wonderful show and broke your heart but you were able to say this should not go on. What is it that allows you to say okay this project isn't right for Broadway? How do you access that?

[14:00] David Stone: Well, I think it's different for each, and it is trying to be rational when it's an emotional decision. I felt after Next to Normal that I had done something where I said to the sort of the critics, yeah, I hear you, and I'm gonna take everything you say into consideration, and we're gonna fix the show, but I know this show is not done yet, and I'm gonna prove it. I couldn't do that two times in a row. I felt that I couldn't say on Dogfight, yeah, well, I did that on Next to Normal and it worked out, and okay, now you know, you know, the mixed reviews, I'm gonna prove you wrong. I felt like and another person would have been able to say, yes, let's go, let's keep working on it, let's make it better.

But I felt like I actually was maybe too aware of what I had just done with Next to Normal that I felt that I, David, could do it two times in a row. And but I did say to everyone that because of the subject matter being a little making people uneasy, that we had to get this one, you know, really as close to perfect as we could. And while I do think we did get it pretty close to perfect, that wasn't the response. So I didn't think that you know, I you don't want to turn a success and it was a success at Second Stage. You don't want to turn it I think into a failure by moving it to Broadway and knowing it wasn't gonna work. Having said that, you know, I that's what I said on Dogfight, I believe that was the right thing, but you know, Next to Normal, moving backwards for a second, you know, that was a success to a degree at Second Stage, and we took the risk of continuing not knowing if we would actually kill its reputation by continuing to work. That's obviously not what happened, but um but that was a risk at that time.

[15:57] David Stone: Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I was gonna ask you about it because it was another such a unique model of producing that for those of us on the side went, whoa, here they you were at Second Stage with Next to Normal. It got decent reviews, right? But they were they were encouraging. Or at least that's what I read them. I and I remember after the reviews, specifically Ben Brantley in the New York Times, you know, he said this is the future of the American musical theater, but he also said some very critical things, and he was right. And these were things we had been talking about and just couldn't quite get Tommy Bryan to shift fast enough at Second Stage. And so I remember meeting with the cast and the creative team in the rehearsal studio Second Stage after the movies and saying we're not going to go to Broadway, and everyone was sad.

But I said, But I'm I feel like we're not done. We should keep working on the show. And we'll probably never come back to New York, or show it ever, been in New York, left New York, and come back to New York. And I said, So that's off the table. Let's not even think about that. But let's just finish the show and put it out into the world and know that we've made the show that we intended to make. And frankly, only Wicked allowed me to have the freedom to say something like that. If I didn't have Wicked and the security of that, I wouldn't have been able to say, let's keep going on this fool's errand. And in fact, when Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize ultimately by this strange circuitous route and taking the pressure off the first calls I made after Tom and Brian and Michael Bright was to Stephen Schwartz and John Montello and Marc E. Platt to thank them for allowing me to continue to do this sort of work.

[17:43] David Stone: Well, that seems like a perfect segue into the big green monster. And let's let's talk a little bit about Wicked and how it came about. And why you were like, oh, this one, I'm going to do this project. This seems like something that I want to do and is interesting to me.

[18:01] David Stone: Well, I have been friends with Stephen since the late 80s. I was 23, I think that and and I met Marc E. Platt when he was running Universal and I was doing the Dire Venframe. And I met with him because he wanted to maybe do a movie of not necessarily our production, but a movie with using script. So anyway, I met him in the mid-90s. And then when Stephen and Mark and Winnie started working on the show, Stephen and Mark said, as soon as we have a reading, you come. You should be a part of this. And so I knew what was happening, even though I hadn't seen anything yet. But I went to the reading and I knew I would be delighted by the show because it was about the Wicked Witch of the West before she becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and it sounded fun and it was all those things, but then later in the show when For Good was sung, that's where I knew that I had to be a part of that.

Because when something surprises you and when it exceeds your expectations, when you're, you know, it both matched what I knew I would get and then gave me so much more, then I understood that I wanted to be a part of that. And I have to say, you know, I know I've spent a lot of time in my career on marketing, and I think I get a lot of credit, which I'm grateful for for marketing shows, but I don't ever think about how to market a show until much later, until, you know, I just assumed that if we all like it and we're smart people with good taste, and we like it, then everyone else will like it too. And then you start to later say, okay, well, who is this for and how can I communicate this? But first, you have to feel it yourself.

And every time I've done something thinking, oh, this is gonna work, I know how to make money with this. I failed. And every time I've done something that I just love that I'll figure it out later, it's work. And I that has to mean something. Because if, as I said earlier, one of the main things that a producer does is to communicate passion for this show to the world, well, then they have to have a passion for the show. And I've tried now to just follow my gut in the things that I like and feel then that I then will know how to talk to them.

[20:16] David Stone: So I told the story before was at Angus, the old watering hole from Broadway. When you were in rehearsals for the out-of-town tryout for Wicked, yeah, and Norbert Leo Butz like saddled up to the table, I forget who it was, Brooks Ashmanskas, I think was there, it was like a crazy group. And we said, like, hey, what are you doing? It's like, oh, I'm in rehearsals for Wicked, and we were like, Oh, right, how's it going? How's it going? And Norbert said, This is either gonna be the biggest hit that anyone's seen, or the biggest flop that anyone has ever seen. How was that period for you? Was there really a sense of what's going on? How was the development?

[20:51] David Stone: The development was great, and everyone saw the same show, which is the most important thing, was making the same show, and Stephen, Winnie, and Mark and Joe were working really well together. Once we went into actual rehearsal and San Francisco tech and previews and opening in San Francisco, and then the summer between San Francisco and New York, I think it's well known that it was tense. I had the ultimate proof it got, you know, and then once we opened, obviously everyone's loving each other. And I think my job, because I was not as involved in the developing of the material as Mark really was. I was very involved, Joe was my relationship from many years before, and obviously I brought him into this process and was involved in the design and the casting.

But the development of the material was not as much me. But during that time, my job was very much to keep the process moving and make sure that everyone was playing nice and talking to each other and collaborating in a difficult time. And I think that musicals are collaborative, and but they're also often there's great conflict. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I think wonderful things come out of conflict. Stephen was ready for conflict because earlier in his career that's what happened a lot. And, you know, that tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I think also part of it, you know, was just we knew we were close, and it gets even more tense when you're close. And then you really are fighting to make sure we're doing this.

We all wanted it to be the best it could be. And when you're far off the mark, it's not as tense because you know it's just not gonna happen. So I think that some of the bad stuff was because we all came so much.

[22:51] David Stone: When was the moment you knew it was gonna be a big hit? There were really a series of moments. You know, Stephen talks about we started first preview on a Wednesday and then not the very next morning because that's too fast. But by Friday morning, there was this line out the box office down the block and around the corner in San Francisco, and Stephen and I came out of the hotel, was right next door, we were at the cliff, and we're like, what's wrong? And we realized who was the line to buy tickets when this is all in 2003, before everyone bought their tickets online on the internet. And so that was one moment, and but the real first preview when you understood how the audience felt about the show, we knew a lot.

But the moment where I understood that it was something even beyond that was in 2004, New York hosted the Republican National Convention. And I mean, I don't know if you remember this, but everyone ran out of town, no one was here except for the people at the convention, and every show collapsed. And this was, you know, a few months after, you know, the Thomas. This was almost a year into the run, and we went up. And I looked at those, I didn't understand, but no one understood. We went up, but no one was here. And that's where I understood, oh, this is not even something that we can explain.

[24:03] David Stone: How far after opening was that? Almost a year. Almost a year. This was end of August, and we started previews the previous October. And if I remember correctly, you got some good reviews. We got you.

[24:25] David Stone: It wasn't like it was the most amazing set of notices ever. Hardly. We hardly divided the critics, I like to say, but because they're not mixed. They weren't like, oh, it's okay. They were they loved it or they hated it. We all know which ones really didn't like it, but there are a lot of wonderful ones that they came out of important, you know, Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and lots of places loved it. No one was really in the middle. But it was something that took a lot of we you wanted to communicate through the marketing the confidence we had in the show to stoke the word of mouth that was clearly what we have. I mean, we were doing numbers in previews that we didn't expect to do really at all.

And doing that in previews, and then even with those reviews, did $500,000 the next day, and that was when $500,000 was like a million now. And so it was just the advertising and marketing needed to express how confident we were in how good it was and what a great time you as an audience member were gonna have. And so that's what we did.

[25:34] Ken Davenport: Let's talk a little bit more about reviews because you mentioned reviews and moving Next to Normal, like really looking at those. How important are they for shows in general and how much weight do you put on them?

[25:47] David Stone: I think reviews are still very important for non-star plays and smaller musicals because those things have to get a critical consensus. Each individual review may not be as important, but when there's a consensus from the press, that can really help discover better shows. Next to Normal would not have existed on Broadway as long as it did without what Ben Brantley wrote in The Times when it opened on Broadway. For larger shows, branded kind of titles or star-driven things, slogs or musicals, they matter. It's not that they don't matter, it's that they become, I think, tools that you can use to create an entire campaign. But they're not the end of the discussion. They're the beginning of the discussion.

[26:41] Ken Davenport: You know, so few producers out there will ever work on a show that runs for 10, 15, 20 years or more. What's that like? How does that differ for you? Like what kind of thinking do you do when you sit down at an ad meeting now?

[26:55] David Stone: It's not like thinking, like, how are we gonna get to next week? We actually, I know this sounds vaguely Stalin, but we have five-year plans, which they had in the Soviet Union in the 50s. But we will talk about this is what we're gonna, this is the sort of message this year, and the sort of big ideas for this year, and the kind of media to buy, the kinds of things we want to communicate in the television, and then this is what we would do next year, and this is the year after. We're not thinking we don't have a 10-year plan right now. That's too far; the world changes too fast. But we have general ideas of the kinds of campaigns we're gonna do for the next few years, and have had that since about two or three years in when we understood that we needed to think more than just what was right in front of us.

And yet when I do other shows, you know, I certainly didn't have longer-term plans for Spelling Bee, Next to Normal, or If/Then or Paint. You're just opening the show and going to run it as long as you can, but here we know we're gonna be here, so we have to, it's a different kind of thing.

[27:55] Ken Davenport: So, David, you've been working in the business for about 30 years now. As you look out over Broadway, how do you think we're doing?

[28:04] David Stone: I think we're in like a second golden age. You can call it something else; we can call it a platinum age. But, you know, I mean, it's not that I take for granted the, you know, 1943 to 1964 from Oklahoma to Fiddler or Dolly. That was extraordinary, and there were all these shows coming out year after year. But if you look at, let's start it with Rent, Chicago, Lion King, and go these 20 years with a couple of years that are exceptions. Every year we have one, two, sometimes three things that are for the ages, not either wildly successful, like Mamma Mia, or things that are gonna be looked at and studied for years and years, like Spring Awakening and Fun Home and Next to Normal, and things that change the form. And sometimes you have things that are both wildly successful and change the form, like, you know, like Rent and Hamilton. So I think many years from now we will look at this and say we were lucky to be a part of this time.

[29:07] Ken Davenport: And you're very active on the road. How's the road doing? What do you think? How's that synergy going?

[29:11] David Stone: The road is very healthy right now, and I think that The Lion King and Wicked and Book of Mormon and now Hamilton's gonna start touring are the cornerstones of that. And they're always, you know, the big shows on the road. You know, I think the problem on the road is the middle. The big shows do phenomenally well, numbers that I weren't even imaginable when the Tour of Wicked started. And the smaller shows tour very well. Next to Normal, Spelling Bee, Avenue Q, Fun Home is touring well. The problem is the shows that aren't really branded, that aren't blockbusters, that cost a little too much, and that's why this tiered system has and the set contract have gone into effect, and they're the only way those kinds of shows can get out because the economic structure of the road is not really built for kind of middle-of-the-road shows.

[30:12] Ken Davenport: So I don't know if you remember this, but when you were at Barry and Fran's office, I think you had your own independent. Did you have an office there for one?

[30:21] David Stone: At a little tiny office next to Frank.

[30:23] Ken Davenport: Next to Fran.

[30:23] David Stone: Yeah. I know that because I was Charlotte Wilcox's management assistant. I used to walk by and I was like, oh, that guy is doing it right there. What advice would you give to someone like I was back then trying to get going today, which is very different than it was when I started, when you started?

[30:38] David Stone: Well, I still think, and I know this is controversial because I know that a lot of people think that the best way to start producing is to be on these producing teams of 60, 70, 80 people. And yes, what's good about that is that you can develop investors and get them into successful shows, and then they'll be loyal to you when you have your own show. Except that I think it just puts off having your own show. And I, you know, it's easy for me to say this if we're for you, because we started, and you still have found a way to make commercial off-Broadway work, but it's getting harder and harder. But it was easy for us to do these shows because they weren't as expensive, and we could, even at young ages, do them ourselves.

But being in a room of that many people don't learn anything, and billing with that many people doesn't put you forward. So I would say, as crazy as it sounds, try to find your own projects and find a way to get it on. And that may not make as much economic sense and may not make a living doing that, but I think it's the only way you're going to learn. You have to learn by doing. You can't learn by going to one meeting every two months with all these people in a room where people just present to you something.

[32:04] Ken Davenport: Yeah, I just have to, I totally agree with that. You know, I think people are attracted to I may win a Tony Award, I may win a Tony Award, which I know something that you're being on the membership, the head of the membership committee at the league is something that you talk a lot about. Yeah, people are so attracted to, and that's fine if that's what you want, but if you want a career in producing, that's I started doing three off-Broadway shows that I knew I could do myself. Yeah, because I knew there was more upside in the long term for my Broadway.

[32:28] David Stone: Yeah.

[32:28] Ken Davenport: Excited about War Paint?

[32:30] David Stone: Very well, I've been working on it for six years, so I'm happy it's as ready. And you know, again, it's the old-fashioned way to do these, whether it's off-Broadway and then moving to Broadway or commercial tryout into Broadway or regional theater into Broadway. But learning what the show is in front of an audience and saying, oh, all of this work, we were right, these things didn't, we have to fix it, giving yourself time to do it, having the right creative team who knows that, you know, that writing for the theater is really rewriting, certainly for musicals, and then having these amazing stars and perhaps even a moment where people want to talk about powerful women and what they have to sacrifice in order to succeed and how they're judged differently than men. I don't know. That feels timely today.

[33:16] Ken Davenport: Okay, we'll go to my last question on that very insightful note, which is normally you may know is my genie question, but for today, I'm going to call it the wizard question.

[33:26] David Stone: Oh, thank you.

[33:27] Ken Davenport: Just for you. We're gonna imagine that the Wizard of Oz comes to you and says, David, you've made incredible contributions to the theater all across the globe. You've inspired whole new generations to get involved in the theater. What's the one thing that really pisses you off about Broadway? Working on Broadway makes you mad. That gets you screaming into your phone. I've heard you yell a few times. It's not pretty. What makes you do that? That you would ask the wizard to wish away.

[33:53] David Stone: Well, I'm not gonna get mad about this. It just breaks my heart that our greatest creators are some of them, the younger generations. I don't think you see this with Stephen Sondheim or Stephen Schwartz or, you know, they do one show at a time. But I get concerned that our newer creatives are biting off more than they can chew. It's distracting. I know people who are doing nine shows at one time. And I don't think it makes the best work. And I would wish that their agents, by the way, some of whom agree that this is not necessarily the way to go, but that these younger artists would focus. You know, Lynn wasn't writing five other shows when he was writing Hamilton. He was writing Hamilton, and then you do the next show. And I think that's still I think that's the right way.

[34:46] Ken Davenport: You think that's true for producers as well? Should we have more or less?

[34:49] David Stone: Well, I, you know, I do, I mean, I have, as I said, I have Wicked, and then I do one thing at a time, but that's just because I probably have an undiagnosed case of OCD, and I need to know every single detail of everything I'm doing. But I don't know that that's necessarily healthy. And I think it's okay to do, as a producer, to do more than one thing at a time because, you know, if you're putting a lot of eggs in one basket, if you only focus on one show, and if it doesn't get on, then you've spent years doing it. And by the way, same for the artists. I'm not saying they should do only one, but maybe they shouldn't do nine.

[35:27] Ken Davenport: And the same with your visions.

[35:27] David Stone: Yeah, I mean, I will give you a compliment that you won't give yourself there in that I was looking at your IBDB page before this and seeing like, oh, you know, David isn't one of those producers that's got a hundred credits up there, but the success rate is so high, and I think there is a methodology to making sure that you don't spread yourself too thin and you focus because these are, they take a lot of time and a lot of care, and you'll obviously give that to your shows. So thank you so much for doing the hundredth episode of the podcast.

[35:55] Ken Davenport: Thanks to all of you for listening and sincerely thank you for getting us to 100. By the way, we talked about Wicked a bunch; we have podcasts with Stephen Schwartz and Joe Mantello. So go listen to those; they're fantastic as well. Thanks again, David. Thanks to all of you. We'll see you next time. Don't forget, finish your holiday shopping today, save yourself some time, get Be a Broadway Star, the best-selling Broadway-themed gift on Amazon.com. Visit BeABroadwayStar.com today.

[36:22] Ken Davenport: Look out Broadway, here I come.