This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Ken Davenport: As opposed to with a Broadway show, what you're trying to do is figure out who's that next audience, and that next audience and that next audience is gonna come and see this one thing that you have on offer.

[0:11] Ken Davenport: I wanna be a producer with a hit show on Broadway.

[0:18] Ken Davenport: You're listening to the Producers Perspective Podcast with your host, Tony Award winner, Ken Davenport.

[0:24] Ken Davenport: My children, my children, why do we build the wall.

[0:24] Ken Davenport: Why do we build the wall?

[0:33] Ken Davenport: We build the wall to keep us free.

[0:38] Ken Davenport: That's why we build the wall.

[0:41] Ken Davenport: We build the wall to keep us free.

[0:44] Ken Davenport: That is why we build the wall from the Tony Award-winning Best Musical Hadestown.

[0:49] Ken Davenport: And today on this podcast, we have the lead producer of that show, Mara Isaacs.

[0:56] Ken Davenport: She's been with the show since the beginning. She's gonna tell you all about the incredible road to Hadestown on Broadway.

[1:04] Ken Davenport: Uh and that very timely song, Why We Build the Wall, still echoing in the background here.

[1:09] Ken Davenport: It's such terrific, led by the incredible Patrick Page from My Death West Spring Awakening, actually.

[1:16] Ken Davenport: Uh so keep your ears tuned for today's podcast.

[1:21] Ken Davenport: But before we get there, I want to thank Terry Knickerbocker Studios for once again sponsoring today's podcast.

[1:27] Ken Davenport: They offer a two-year acting conservatory, workshop, studio rentals, one-on-one coaching, beginner acting classes, and frankly, some of the best actor training in the city.

[1:38] Ken Davenport: Based on the Miser technique, but it offers a holistic approach to actor training with a commitment to nurturing the total actor, mind, body, and soul.

[1:48] Ken Davenport: Very, very important these days. They've worked with superstars, Oscar winners, Sam Rockwell, and tons of others.

[1:55] Ken Davenport: Chris Messina, Boyd Holbrook, Natasha Lyonne, Leslie Bibb, Emmy Rossum, and more.

[2:00] Ken Davenport: For more information, visit Terry Knickerbocker Studios.com.

[2:04] Ken Davenport: That's Terry Knickerbocker Studios.com. Tell them the Producers Perspective Podcast sent you. They will take good care of you.

[2:13] Ken Davenport: And now, let's get to Mara Isaacs and more about the story of Hadestown.

[2:38] Ken Davenport: What do we have that they should want?

[2:42] Mara Isaacs: My children.

[2:43] Mara Isaacs: My children.

[2:45] Mara Isaacs: What do we have that they should want?

[2:48] Ken Davenport: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Producers Perspective Podcast. My name is Ken Davenport.

[2:51] Ken Davenport: It's a very exciting day for us today. We have a very recent Tony Award winner in the house.

[2:58] Ken Davenport: The Tony Award-winning producer of Hadestown, Mara Isaacs. Welcome, Mara.

[3:01] Mara Isaacs: Thank you so much for having me.

[3:03] Ken Davenport: So Mara is the founder of Octopus Theatricals, a leader in the field of new play and new musical development. She's produced over a hundred productions that have been seen all over the world, Broadway and off-Broadway, like Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

[3:17] Ken Davenport: That's actually one play, not four. Translations, Anna in the Tropics, Fiasco Theater's Into the Woods, The Brother/Sister Plays, The Laramie Project, which is one of my favorite shows of all time.

[3:27] Ken Davenport: She's done stuff at theaters all over the country, like BAM and La Jolla, Berkeley Rep, you know, those regional theaters that are really just a bunch of hacks.

[3:35] Ken Davenport: She was the producing director of the McCarter Theater Center for 18 years. That's a long tenure.

[3:44] Ken Davenport: She teaches all this stuff at CalArts in Princeton, tons more. Learn more about her at Octopus Theatricals, or just listen to this conversation right now.

[3:53] Ken Davenport: So tell me, where did you fall in love with plays and musicals? How did this start for you?

[3:56] Mara Isaacs: Well, I think I'm one of those kids who I don't remember what my first play was because my parents took me to everything—plays, musicals, symphony, dance. I was an arts kid as a patron, not as a performer.

[4:11] Mara Isaacs: Although, of course, like many people who've ended up in the theater business, we had our fair share of training and amateur hour things. I certainly had my fair share of those.

[4:20] Mara Isaacs: But I actually had no aspiration or intention of going into the performing arts. That was not the path I thought I was headed on.

[4:27] Ken Davenport: What were you gonna do?

[4:29] Mara Isaacs: I have a degree in medical anthropology.

[4:32] Ken Davenport: Of course.

[4:32] Mara Isaacs: Right. Yeah, that's one does. And, uh, but while I was, I mean, there's multiple parts of that story. While I was a very serious academic student by day, I was singing in some extracurricular singing groups at night—a Glee Club, a chamber choir, a jazz vocal jazz group, a women's octet, you know, over my undergraduate career, a bunch of different groups.

[4:55] Mara Isaacs: Somebody had to organize the concert, somebody had to put together the tour, somebody had to do this, do that, the other thing, and everyone else seemed really stressed out by those activities, and I thought it was kind of easy, but I didn't understand what the big deal was.

[5:09] Mara Isaacs: And by the time I graduated from college, I was singing in and managing a chamber choir that was going on tour to Scandinavia and the Soviet Union, and I was running an amateur musical theater company, and my cousin, who's six years older than me and was like a big sister to me, was working as a professional equity stage manager in Los Angeles, which is where I grew up.

[5:33] Mara Isaacs: And she said to me, you know, I've been paying attention to what you've been doing, and you should apply for an internship at the marketing forum.

[5:40] Mara Isaacs: So I thought, well, okay, I'm gonna take some time off before I go back to graduate school in public health or anthropology. So that sounds like fun.

[5:48] Mara Isaacs: Um, and here I am almost 30 years later.

[5:51] Ken Davenport: You have to be one of the probably the only singing anthropologists, medical anthropologists, probably in the world.

[5:59] Mara Isaacs: Yes, no, I'm not sure.

[6:01] Ken Davenport: You disagree. You think there's a whole slew of you out there, I can see it on your face.

[6:05] Mara Isaacs: Okay, so you start as an internship there. And when did you, in this internship, did you shift or like, oh no, no, no, this is what I'm really supposed to do. This is my career. Did it happen early for you?

[6:14] Mara Isaacs: It happened pretty quickly. I think that the internship was just a three-month thing. It was during the New Work Festival, which at the time, this is now 1990, was other than the Humana Festival, sort of the flagship new play festival in the country.

[6:32] Mara Isaacs: And I didn't even know what new play development was when I started. So I got this sort of crash course in what it meant to support artists and make work, and it was, you know, all the light bulbs went off.

[6:45] Mara Isaacs: And I thought this is kind of great. I like this. It means something to me. These are people who have something to say, um, who are speaking to this community and doing so in a way that's artful.

[6:57] Mara Isaacs: I mean, one of the projects that was being workshopped that year was part two of Angels in America. So, like that, that was my introduction to new play development. How could you not fall in love?

[7:09] Ken Davenport: And as a fly on the wall there and watching these things develop, do you remember any pearls of wisdom that you got that you still think about today as you were watching these things be developed? Any great mentor advice about development?

[7:23] Mara Isaacs: It's funny. I don't have a specific pearl of wisdom, but there were people who were very influential at that time. Gordon Davidson, who was the founding artistic director of the Taper, being first among them, as somebody who demonstrated to me what vision-oriented and mission-oriented leadership was about, that how important it was to make work that was in conversation with the times and with your community.

[7:56] Mara Isaacs: Um, Oscar Eustace was on staff there at the time and taught me a lot about how you build trust with artists and get them to trust you in order in the service of their story.

[8:07] Mara Isaacs: Um, Corey Madden, who was a producer there at the time, was probably the person who most helped me see what being a creative producer was specifically. There were a lot of people in that time.

[8:21] Ken Davenport: So, what is a creative producer to you? This is a question I think that everyone has a different answer to. I did a blog and asked like a hundred producers what they thought that meant. It's one of the most read blogs I've ever had. Hal Prince wrote a very famous article in the 90s, how there weren't any more creative producers. And then I remember saying, I thought I'm one, I'm one. I said the same thing, frankly, and I show you a letter afterwards he wrote me after a meeting, which he talked about The Laramie Project, talking about how we do that. What do you think that means today in 2019?

[8:54] Mara Isaacs: A creative producer. I think that the term is sort of in response to this artificial division that people think there is in the way artists made that there are people who are artists, and there are people who are good with budgets and numbers of being organized. To me, a creative producer is someone who approaches it much more holistically, who has all of the capacity to handle what you know, the business acumen part of the job, but also understands what the creative process is, how to support artists.

[9:26] Mara Isaacs: Different creative producers are gonna do that slightly different ways with slightly different approaches. But the idea is I'm a storyteller, I'm not the one in the room directing the actors, I'm not the one writing the plays, but in the way that I assemble artists and the way that I guide projects, I am doing so in service of a creative process.

[9:45] Mara Isaacs: And it looks different on every project, which is one of the reasons why even I have a hard time defining it, because the artist I work with on project A is gonna describe my work differently than the artist I work with on project B because I also shift depending on what the need is.

[9:59] Mara Isaacs: And then some projects they don't need that sort of hands-on creative voice, and so I'm a little bit more in the background.

[10:07] Ken Davenport: Yeah, that's something that I've only realized actually in the last couple years. There are some shows where I seem to be in the rehearsal room almost every day, and there are some shows where I'm like, yeah, you guys have fun, just call me at the end and show me what you got.

[10:19] Mara Isaacs: Exactly.

[10:21] Ken Davenport: You talked about assembling creative teams. What is that process like for you? Like what how do creative teams even get your attention? What do you look for? Do you try is it about oh, I'm gonna put together people that I think will really get along?

[10:36] Mara Isaacs: It's very intuitive. I don't know that I have a thing, except that sometimes the creative teams find themselves, and sometimes they need help. And so I spend a lot of time seeing a lot of work and meeting with artists so that I understand not just what the result is of the work that they do, but how they talk about it, how they think about it, what their process is, what questions they ask.

[11:00] Mara Isaacs: Because two people might make work that looks on the surface like it belongs together, but their ways of getting there might be completely contradictory. So it's just as much about understanding how they work as it is what they make.

[11:13] Ken Davenport: How many new plays and musicals do you think you've read in your entire life?

[11:18] Mara Isaacs: Absolutely no idea. I mean, it's gotta be four digits, right?

[11:21] Ken Davenport: Thousand problems, right?

[11:22] Mara Isaacs: For sure. Yeah, yeah.

[11:23] Ken Davenport: So, in thinking about all those and then all the playwrights you've spoken to about first drafts, what's the most common note you've given to playwrights about a first draft? What's the thing?

[11:35] Mara Isaacs: It's really I hate to frame it this way, but it's the most common quote unquote mistake or the thing that, oh, it's always this thing.

[11:44] Mara Isaacs: Boy, what an interesting question. I don't know that.

[11:51] Mara Isaacs: Well, so the first thing I'll say is I don't usually give notes to a play or a playwright unless I love it. So the first thing I will say is if I read something that I just don't respond to, I'm not the right person to give them notes because I don't actually see what they see. So then that limits the pool quite significantly.

[12:12] Mara Isaacs: Um, and then I would say the plays that I would quote unquote give notes on or give a response to or give feedback to, I usually start with a conversation to make sure I understand what the intent of the writer is, and then I'll usually either poke holes in that.

[12:32] Mara Isaacs: I'm just thinking of a show which will remain nameless for the moment, which I am not involved in at all, but someone who is involved in it asked me to go see it and asked me for my notes. And I went, and the show is a mess, but there is a kernel of a brilliant idea in there.

[12:52] Mara Isaacs: But I, you know, my opinion for whatever it's worth is they it took them until the second act to actually figure out what the story is that they're trying to tell. And I just thought, just start there. That's actually the play.

[13:07] Mara Isaacs: Now, this is a show that's been produced twice and hopefully will be produced again, and who knows if anybody's willing to do anything that drastic. But sometimes my notes are really drastic, and sometimes they're, you know, um, you're getting ahead of the audience, or rather of saying you're letting the audience get ahead of you, or um we don't know yet, you know, it takes too long to understand why we're in the story.

[13:31] Mara Isaacs: I would say that's probably the biggest note I give is why am I as an audience member here and engaged in this event.

[13:39] Ken Davenport: So it's so funny. The two things you just mentioned are the two things that I find the most common. One, the show doesn't take off fast enough, I don't know why, and two, I find that a lot of people feel like they need to, oh, the audience really needs to get this, so I'm gonna drive this home.

[13:55] Mara Isaacs: And the audience is like, I picked up on this like 30 minutes ago. You don't have to keep going at this.

[14:00] Mara Isaacs: Yeah, I mean, I would say I do often hear myself say, don't underestimate your audience. That part of the fun of seeing a show is the act of trying to figure something out. And if it's spoon-fed to you, it's not as interesting.

[14:14] Ken Davenport: Right. It's that whole I call it this like uh whispers whisper syndrome of an audience, like, oh guess you know he did it. Like they love to feel like they are ahead of us.

[14:24] Mara Isaacs: So why and the other thing I think is that authors who are writing forget that audiences are seeing.

[14:29] Ken Davenport: Right.

[14:30] Mara Isaacs: And they get so much from the visual aspect as well. I love your first part of that answer because you you said I don't give notes on shows that I don't respond to, which wasn't that shows that you don't that you didn't think were good.

[14:43] Mara Isaacs: It's just that you don't respond to.

[14:45] Ken Davenport: Correct.

[14:45] Mara Isaacs: So how what do you as a producer respond to? What kind of stories do you like to tell? What makes you sign on to something? I it's it's hard to put it, there's not specific, it has to have this, this, and this. I would say is I tell stories that matter.

[15:05] Ken Davenport: What does that mean?

[15:06] Mara Isaacs: Right? It it's not it not doesn't have to be like edgy political in order to matter. It could be delightful and joyful and matter, but I take the time I take people's time really seriously, and I don't want to ask somebody to take two hours and however much money out of their day and spend time doing something if it isn't somehow going to be meaningful to them. So I look for things that are meaningful, however one defines what that is. I look for things that belong in the theater that can't be told in any other way or form. So I'm not a huge fan, obviously, of the movie adaptation, but I make an exception if somebody made a case for me about why this is like that this is a really theatrical idea.

Great, can totally support that. You know, I'm a visually oriented person, so I look for people who aren't just writing ideas but writing three-dimensionally. I look for um I I respond the language, um, but not exclusively, because I also work with a company that makes shows with no text. So anything's possible.

[16:13] Ken Davenport: You're one of the few people that actually have run big nonprofit institutions and then have jumped over to Broadway to run big commercial institutions, if you will, Broadway shows. How are the two similar, running a nonprofit and running a Broadway show like Hadestown, or different? Or are they?

[16:34] Mara Isaacs: Um, I think the similarities probably have to do with you know, organizational size, number of people, but uh, but in every other way it's different. When you're producing a Broadway show, it's a single, you know, you have a single show, a single cast. Everything is about how you keep that thing um fresh and going. I'm really talking about once a show is open and sort of running the operation, how you keep it alive and running and fresh. In all of my years working on the not-for-profit, I never had a show for longer than six weeks. So it's a completely different mindset, and you're and you're playing a show in the same building for the same audience who's coming back over and over again to see the next thing, as opposed to with a Broadway show, what you're trying to do is figure out who's that next audience, and that next audience and that next audience is gonna come and see this one thing that you have on offer. I would say that's probably the biggest difference.

[17:38] Mara Isaacs: In terms of the back end, the financial structure. Um, I actually quote Joey Parnes, and maybe he was quoting somebody else, I don't know, but he said this once to a group of students that I had invited him to talk to, that the difference between the not-for-profit and the commercial is that in the not-for-profit, money is the means by which you make your art, and then the commercial theater, art is the means by which you make your money. And it's a it's a kind of crude reduction on the one hand, but it does capture the difference in mentality of the two, you know, structures, except that I would say I believe that art and commerce don't have to be in opposition. And I hope what Hadestown stands for is actually proof that in fact, when you are focused on making a great piece of art, you also can make something that is commercially viable.

[18:30] Ken Davenport: Yeah, you've proved that uh a hundred times over, and actually the industry has proved that over the last five or six years. All the Tony Award-winning musicals, and by the way, the statistic is something like 80%, you know, we have this one out of five, 20% of shows recoup, but 80% of Tony Award-winning best musicals recoup. And our last bunch of Tony Award winners are Hadestown, Dear Evan Hansen, Fun Home, Gentleman's Guide, Hamilton, like band says. So why aren't we focused more on the art? Because that's what's working, what you this model that you've had.

[19:12] Mara Isaacs: Exactly. Correct.

[19:14] Ken Davenport: And a podcast, no. Uh so despite the obvious tax deduction difference in donating to a nonprofit versus investing in a Broadway show. Did you find raising money, the process of it the same when or different? And how so?

[19:34] Mara Isaacs: Well, it's different, but part of why it's different is because I've learned some things and I've changed in my transition from the not-for-profit to the commercial. And the biggest thing that's changed for me is my relationship to the ask. That I used to be embarrassed to ask people for money, or I used to feel like I was asking them to do me a favor. And somewhere along the line, I realized that actually I was doing them a favor, and that I was creating an opportunity for people to have a relationship to art that they would otherwise not have. And that is true whether it's a philanthropic gift or a commercial gift. It just happens that I figured that out as I was making this shift into the commercial world. And I have to tell you, it's been a lot easier for me to raise money than it ever has been.

[20:21] Ken Davenport: And what do you do and what do you say when those investments don't turn out to be quote unquote commercially successful?

[20:31] Mara Isaacs: Well, so far. So far, so good. Right. Um, but also what I would say is what I say when I'm talking to potential investors, is I talk about my passion for the show and why I think it matters. And that most of the time I say to people, you should think about your investment. It's really expensive opening night tickets. Because that's the one thing I can guarantee that you will get. Everything else is gravy. Don't invest in this show if you are doing it purely for financial reasons. You invest in it because you believe in the artists, you believe in me, you believe in what the thing has to say. Um, and my belief is if all of those things are operating well, it will be financially successful. But that's not actually my expectation, or I, or that is not, that should not be the expectation of the investor. That said, since I've been independent, um, my first show out the gate commercially was Hadestown. So my investors are very happy, and I hope my future investors will continue to be as happy.

[21:40] Ken Davenport: Are they all asking you what's next?

[21:41] Mara Isaacs: They, in fact, many of them are very fun. It is a nice feeling. It is a nice feeling. But let's scroll back a little bit and I mean Hadestown, I want to talk about the path to Broadway that it had, which is I think very unique, but you've had these different developmental productions along the way that you've had to raise money for each time, right? And with no end in sight, right? You it's not like years ago you you're hoping you're gonna eventually go to Broadway, but you didn't know that was gonna happen. How does the ask change when you're raising that developmental capital and you're like, hey, support this enhanced production, and God knows what's gonna happen?

[22:23] Mara Isaacs: Because that was basically the I was it was basically, I mean, here's the thing with this particular piece, and I actually believe this about each of the pieces I've been that stage with, there's a really special thing happening. There's amazing artist at the center of it, there's amazing music. So that early ask is get on board early and help support this artist for this piece of work that I believe has real potential, but I don't know yet what that potential is. And and either you're just on board for that that particular ride, um, or you're not an early investor. There are there are some people who get it and understand what it means to take that early risk, and they're doing it for a whole slew of reasons.

And there are a lot of people who just need to be on more solid ground when they're writing a check for a show, and that's fine. And then they're over in this other pool of people. And um, and I've just been lucky enough to find a group of people who share a set of values and vision and are excited about the huge risk that they take when they support something in that early stage.

[23:31] Ken Davenport: I just love that it seems to be a lot about honesty and transparency, actually, in all of your asks.

[23:36] Mara Isaacs: 100%. That's the only way I know how to operate.

[23:41] Ken Davenport: Let's go back to the non-profit commercial comparison because you, like I said, you're one of the few people that have popped out and really started to develop and obviously had amazing success in the other camp. And I just believe more nonprofit leaders should because I think actually the development, the skills that you learn in developing and working with artists, you're so skilled, you're so ready, prepared to be a commercial producer. Because I had those hundred plus shows that I did in the not-for-profit where I got to kind of figure out actually how do you build trust with artists when you have a limited amount of time and limited resource, which you have in the not-for-profit, how do you use that to the best of your ability?

There is no question in my mind that part of the successes of Hadestown is that it's kind of fueled by a non-profit way of looking at things. You don't solve problems by throwing money at them, you solve problems by being resourceful without necessarily more financial resource. And I think the not-for-profit is really great training for that.

[24:47] Mara Isaacs: Yeah, listen, this is not the way I came up, and I think I will say for the record now that probably the best training around for a creative producer is the nonprofit world because all you're worried about is the creative, and that what an insightful comment. You're not throwing money at things like we do here, like, oh, and and we throw money at things people hear because people ask us for lots of money. Because they think just because I'm involved, I'm a commercial theater producer, I've got just trunks of money lying around, so I'm gonna ask for this. That frankly, I wouldn't even think about asking the McCarter for.

[26:15] Ken Davenport: Um and you and you seed a lot of security. I also think that in the not for profit, the the founding ideals of the not for profit were really that this was the place that was safe where you could take artistic risk, where you could do the things that you couldn't do in a commercial setting because of all the financial pressure. And I think there are a lot of people who still believe that that's the case. It's been my experience, ironically, that I've been able to take more risk and do more experimentation since I've become an independent producer, precisely because I'm not beholden to a building, I'm not beholden to a board, I'm not beholden to a particular set of subscribers, so I can take chances, and failure actually is not as costly to me in as an independent producer as it is when you're within an institution.

[27:08] Ken Davenport: Yeah, I had an artistic director say to me very recently, oh, I won't do another show like that so soon after a similar show, and I'm not proud to say that. You could sense that there was like I just my subscribers, my board, my people won't let me. There's a there's a kind of I I mean, I will say I felt constrained. And it wasn't about any one particular not-for-profit. I was being recruited for artistic director positions and other not-for-profits, and so I was meeting a lot of boards and looking at a lot of theaters, and I thought, oh, actually, my issues are not with any one place, it's actually with the model. And the only way for me to to actually do the very eclectic range of things that interest me is to create my own model because it doesn't actually exist in an institution that I'm aware of.

[28:00] Mara Isaacs: So tell me about how you found Hadestown and your first commercial one out of the box, which is obviously a big fat hit in so many ways. How did you find it and how did you start to develop it?

[28:12] Mara Isaacs: So I have to credit Dale Franson, who's one of the of my partners on Hadestown, who was uh when I first started Octopus Theatricals, Dale was the director of the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, which is a beautiful 500 seat performing arts center in Santa Monica, California. And she had actually found the material and had developed a relationship with Aeneas and had optioned it for development at the Broad. Ironically, the Broad was a presenting organization more than it was a producing organization. And Dale had the self-awareness to realize that she needed to bring in some people from the outside to help her figure out how to develop this piece. And it happened just at the time that I was leaving McCarter and starting on my own and was looking for consulting opportunities to, you know, support myself, as per the previous conversation with the um lack of steady paycheck, uh, to as I went on.

And so I started consulting for the Broad, and it was through the Broad that I and through Dale that I was introduced to Hadestown, and I first started working on it as a hired gun on behalf of this other institution, and started working with Aeneas, and that's about the time that Aeneas and Rachel started talking to each other.

[29:27] Mara Isaacs: So the three of us, you know, really started moving the piece forward. I recognized that the Broad needed an institutional partner. They were really going to pull this off, at which point I went to New York Theater Workshop with whom I've had a deep relationship with in my time at McCarter, and kind of match made them. And then through a series of events, Dale ended up leaving the Broad. The Broad let go of their option. Dale and I formed a partnership. We re-optioned the show, went back to New York Theater Workshop, and the rest is history.

[30:01] Ken Davenport: How different was the first time you saw Hadestown to where it is today?

[30:06] Mara Isaacs: Oh, it's remarkably different. I mean, when I first, you know, my first encounter with it was just with the music. And it was a, you know, 70-minute album that was very theatrical. Um, but it didn't ha it had a lot of missing parts, a lot of the story was left up to the gaps between the songs. And what we began to do when we started working together on it was to try to identify what was missing from the story and what needed to be filled out. And Aeneas wrote a tremendous amount of material between 2013 when I first joined the process and 2016 when it premiered at New York Theater Workshop. And then even then at New York Theater Workshop, it was a cast of eight. There was no workers' chorus.

You know, we identified things that needed to be fleshed out, more character stuff that needed to be flushed out. We really wanted to add this workers' chorus as a way of raising the stakes for what happens in the underworld. Um, and then the changes after that were just lots and lots and lots of small incremental changes. But still, even in that early stage, you were like, oh, this could be something super special.

[31:22] Mara Isaacs: Oh, I tell everybody the story. I had what I call a classic driveway moment with Hadestown. Dale had sent me the album. I didn't know anything about it. She's like, listen to this and tell me what you think. And I'm, you know, like, okay, great. I've been stuck it in my CD player in my car, and I'm off to the next thing, and I get to my destination, and I sat in my car for 40 minutes, waiting for the album to get to the end. I could not stop listening to it. And I was absolutely transfixed and knew that this, like I didn't know it was going to go to Broadway. If you had asked me then, I would have I was imagining like a site-specific, immersive, you know, installation somewhere with this kind of funky, strange thing, because it didn't sound like a Broadway show, it was its own thing, and then as it evolved, it found the form that it is now.

[32:12] Ken Davenport: Since it's arrived on Broadway, and since you've arrived on Broadway and are now past the six-week mark, right? So you've now been running a show longer than you've ever run a show before. What's the biggest surprise to you about working on Broadway?

[32:26] Mara Isaacs: The biggest surprise the surprise. Have I really been surprised by anything? I think what's surprised me is the passion from the audiences that I didn't expect night after night after night to see people galvanized. I mean, I shouldn't say I'm surprised by it because it was my greatest, you know, hope and dream, but I had never experienced that before, and that's been incredible. I don't know that I've been, I mean, I guess I'm actually surprised. I didn't expect we would be quite as commercial as we've ended up being. I always thought Hadestown was a really risky show. I thought it was gonna have its kind of niche place, and so to see it embraced in the way that it's been embraced, and I don't mean just by the community, but I actually mean by an expanding pool of audiences. I think that's surprisingly. Our weekly grosses have surprised it.

[33:33] Ken Davenport: Well, I said to you, I think the night I saw it that it look, it surprised me as well. And what I love about the job that you have done on the show is that you saw in something that so many other people, including myself, just couldn't see. When we saw this show coming down the road, I remember thinking, like, how is that gonna work? That Broadway isn't that place right now. And the fact that your passion for the piece and your continued work, you've found a place for it, you made your own place for it, and the fact that audiences are responding the way they do, both in the theater itself and with their wallets, is just such a great testament to the work of producer you've done. So well done.

[34:10] Mara Isaacs: I think you said something though that just sparked something for me, which is that I think when you have the benefit of building a career outside of Broadway, you see Broadway differently than the people who spend most of their career building work within Broadway, and so I actually don't see the limitations because I haven't experienced them. And I wonder sometimes if the people who have been working on the street for as long as they have have almost self-imposed those limitations instead of, you know, coming as an outsider. So I'm gonna try to maintain my outsider status as long as I can so that I can keep seeing things that aren't there.

[34:53] Mara Isaacs: I think I've started to feel like this podcast is like career therapy for me because I spent, you know, 10 years as a company manager and general manager in this business, and as an actor before and a writer and things, but thinking only about the box of Broadway and have studied, oh, this works, this doesn't work, and this is the Broadway model, and instead of thinking like, oh, I'm just gonna think about whatever, although my first show was certainly not a Broadway model, and it's one of my most successful, actually. So that is so fascinating to forget where you're producing for in a way, and just create great art. That that's my approach. I work on a lot of shows that will never go to Broadway because they don't belong here, but they're great pieces of art.

So as a producer, I don't think about the destination, I think about this very special thing that I have to care for, realizing I'm doing a podcast and I'm talking with my hands. But um, but I think about what is this piece of art, what's the relationship to the audience? Who is that audience? Where does it belong? What's the scale of it? And then I figure out what the path is that supports that thing, and sometimes along the way I'm surprised, and the path shifts, but it's in reaction to the actual relationship between the work and the audience, as opposed to I didn't set out to become a Broadway producer. I just set out to make great work, and some of it will end up on Broadway, and some of it will go to all these other strange places that my work goes to.

[36:27] Ken Davenport: You're one of the few lead producing females on Broadway. How has that experience been for you? Have you noticed a difference? Or is it getting better? What's been your experience as you'd enter this world, which doesn't have as many of you as they should?

[36:44] Mara Isaacs: I say multiple things, some of which will contradict each other. One is I have spent my entire career apparently being one of the few women who's done X, Y, or Z. Um, I just don't think about it. I just set out to do I mean I never it's it's about not seeing those limitations. No one if if someone thought I couldn't do something, they never had the courage to say it to my face, and so I didn't know they were thinking it, and I just went and did it. Or if they did say it to my face, I must not have been paying attention right at that moment, and I didn't hear them. So I feel I have the privilege, and also I think there's a generational thing. I'm I don't know, second wave, whatever them is. You know, there are a lot of people before me who were facing much more hostile and direct discrimination.

And by the time it came around to my generation, it was much more subtle, and I think I had convinced myself that it was a thing of the past. So I just refused to see it. So for me, it's a non-issue. Are there moments when I think, hmm, you know, I bet you if I was a man that I would not have had that particular hurdle? Absolutely. And my response in those moments is, well, do I want this or do I not want this? Then I'm gonna jump over that hurdle. And that's been my approach. I do think it's getting better. I think as I look around me, I have so many colleagues who are women. There are so many people who paved the path before me who are women, who I think haven't been fairly celebrated and shouted out, but who clearly opened the door that I am walking through for sure.

[38:29] Mara Isaacs: Um, and I'm just interested in leveling the playing field now for more people of color because I feel like that is the ceiling that we are nowhere near breaking in terms of the producing world that we really need to figure out why that is.

[38:47] Ken Davenport: And anything we can do to encourage that, come up with any ideas as of yet?

[38:52] Mara Isaacs: Something I think about all the time myself. As we were listening you're actually speaking on a panel for us at our conference coming up, right? One of the challenges we have is filling, and we always looking for them are people of color to fill those panels, especially on the producing side, and it's challenging. I think that we this particular industry is an industry that has a tradition of going with the people who have the most experience or who have been around the longest. And when that happens, you perpetuate the demographic that has always been. Because otherwise we're never gonna break the cycle.

[39:43] Ken Davenport: Yeah, it's so funny is attorneys every year there's a new set of the top law firms. They hire the best folks who have never tried a case before, right? But they invest in them, they actually seriously invest in them in training programs and et cetera, but we just don't do that.

[40:01] Ken Davenport: Okay, my last question, which is my genie question. I want you to imagine that the genie from Aladdin comes to visit you and honors you for the incredible work you've done in Hadestown and everything else in your career by granting you one wish. What's the one thing that drives you crazy about Broadway. That makes you angry, frustrated, wants makes you want to flip up a table, smash this podcast mic that you'd ask this genie to wish away in an instant.

[40:31] Mara Isaacs: And we've gotten everything from, of course, theater availability, high prices to sippy cups. That was Tim Rice's comment, by the way. One of my favorites. Um, scalpers. That for me, the one of the challenges as a values-driven producer, is figuring out how to make a show accessible to the broadest possible audience. And normally the way you would do that is by having price points at all different places on the spectrum. But when the brokers buy up all your cheap seats, the people who you're trying to make a space for don't have access. Um, and so if I could change one thing, that would be it.

[41:13] Ken Davenport: A very good goal. In fact, it was one of the reasons why the Broadway League was actually created almost like 75 years ago, was to battle this problem that we're still battling with today. Thank you for being here. Thanks for all the work. Congratulations on Hadestown again.

[41:24] Mara Isaacs: Thank you.

[41:29] Ken Davenport: Thanks to all of you for listening. Go see Hadestown and go support the live theater. Thanks so much for being with us. We'll see you next time. Thanks again to Mara Isaacs for sitting us down and telling us the incredible story of her success with Hadestown, the Tony Award-winning Broadway music from 2019. Go check it out if you haven't already. Guess where Mara's gonna be on November 16th and 17th. That's right, our super conference, because that's where everyone who's cool is going to be. I hope you are cool as well. I hope you're gonna be there. Just a few weeks left to get your tickets. We are getting very close to selling out, so please come and hear from all these Broadway A-listers, including Mara.

[42:08] Ken Davenport: If you're enjoying this new podcast season, please do us a favor and review us on Apple Podcasts. What that does is just let everyone else know what we're doing here on Broadway and helps amplify the conversation about the theater, which is one of my primary goals in life. If you want to keep up with Hadestown, follow Hadestown on Instagram, simply at Hades Town. And now this week's songwriter of the week, hashtag songwriter of the week is Niko Tsakalakos. I probably butchered that name, but give him a shout. He'll tell you how to do it right. Uh today we're listening to his very simple to pronounce song "Alone" from his new musical Into the Wild. I love, I love, love, love the concept of the show.

I haven't got a chance to see it, but I have heard it, and it's a terrific one. Music and lyrics by Niko and book and lyrics by Janet Allard. If you like what you hear next in "Alone," learn more about Hadestown by visiting NikoSongs.com. N-I-K-O-Songs.com. Okay, check it out. Support these new writers. Let's get them some traffic to their websites. Let's get them some inquiries about their shows and their songs, and let's help them get their shows off the ground. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode.

[43:26] ♪ Musical number: "Alone" — performed by Niko Tsakalakos ♪