Theater producer Jeffrey Seller has been a key behind-the-scenes figure for some of Broadway's biggest hits including, Hamilton and Rent. But he got his start on a much smaller scale with a play called Popcorn Pete.
Seller was a 13-year-old kid in Michigan when he landed a role in a local theater company's production of Popcorn Pete. But audiences weren't interested. The theater was only half full, and so Seller made the case to the adults in the company that they had chosen the wrong play to perform.
"That was the first step I took toward becoming a producer, because you know what the most important decision I ever make is as a producer? What play to produce," he says. "And I started reading plays every weekend. I would read all these different plays. And that's where I started to learn what makes a good play and a bad play."
Seller went on to work as a booker, putting touring companies performing popular musicals into theaters around the country. He says that work led to where he always wanted to be: producing musicals. All the while, his taste was informed by an interest in human stories.
"The first shows that meant something to me were, like, A Chorus Line, where ... they're telling stories of their lives," he says. "It was a genuinely contemporary musical with a sort of contemporary score. And that I knew right then and there, that's what I love."
In his new memoir, Theater Kid, Seller writes about his work on Broadway and coming out during the AIDS epidemic. He also reflects on his early years, when his family lived in a low-income neighborhood outside Detroit referred to derisively as "Cardboard Village" due to the construction of the houses. Looking back now, he says, he's grateful for where the theater world has taken him.
"I guess it became the greatest new world I could have ever discovered," Seller says. "This world where we make plays and invent dialogue and create characters and build sets. I took it very seriously and I was incredibly rewarded by the audience reactions."
Interview highlights
On knowing he wanted to produce Hamilton early on
I wrote a letter to both of them [Hamilton writer Lin-Manuel Miranda and director Tommy Kail] saying, if you want to get going on a musical, I want to be your producer, and I'll clear the decks. I'll be your cheerleader, I'll be your nurturer, I will be your critic if you want to go. I had a new company at that point. I named it Adventureland and I said, "Let's go on this adventure together." And that was early 2012.
On hearing "My Shot" for the first time
Lin shared with me the first songs, probably around 2010, 2011. And when I heard "My Shot" for the first time, I was like, whoa. Like if In the Heights was this warm Caribbean embrace, "My Shot" was lightning. It was a wallop. And I knew he was taking this form to a deeper place that had even more impact. And I knew he was on another creative tear.
On helping make cuts to Hamilton so it wasn't too long
[You have to consider] how much can we as audience members take in? We are not equipped for three-hour musicals. And our musical already had a first act that was an hour and 15 minutes. And believe it or not, the second act was even longer, which actually breaks the rule that Oscar Hammerstein once said, which was that the … second act is going to be half as long as the first act. … And one of our jobs is to really try to feel how the audience is gonna stay with the show through every moment of the show.
Because we give our greatest amount of energy to the show for the first act. That's where you're establishing character, plot, the rising dramatic action, that big dramatic question, what is the major dramatic question? And then in act two, we just really wanna see it resolved. And if you look at West Side Story, that's a show that has a 90 minute first act and a 45 minute second act.
On Rent writer/composer Jonathan Larson wanting to make contemporary musicals – which was a new thing in the '90s
[At the time] you had the four mega musicals from England. You had Cats, Les Mis, Phantom and [Miss] Saigon. And basically, that's it. Like, we were not making musicals during the '80s and the '90s on Broadway. … In 1995, the year before Rent there were only two musicals nominated for best musical. One was Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, and one was a show called Smokey Joe's Café that was a review of songs by [Jerry] Leiber and [Mike] Stoller. So Sunset Boulevard actually won best score and best book by default. Two musicals. And that's where the industry was in the late '80s into the '90s.
I think one big reason was AIDS. Look at the number of artists we lost, Howard Ashman, Michael Bennett. The artists we lost that we don't even know. And I think it was also about economics. And for some reason, Broadway was having a hard time attracting investment dollars in the '80s into the '90s.
On Larson's death the night before the first preview performance of Rent
I woke up that morning, euphoric after the dress rehearsal, and I had huge praise [for] Jonathan after the show saying, "You did it. You made the show. It's great." He was happy to hear that praise and he described that he wasn't feeling well to me. But that morning after … I took the R train to the office. And when I got there, everybody's head was down. And my own general manager said, "Jeffrey, I have something terrible to tell you. Jonathan Larson died last night." And I was in shock, and then I was immediately struck by the fact that he wrote his own life and he wrote his own death. This is a man who wrote the song for Roger, "One Song Glory," [with the lyrics] "one song before I go." And I thought, Did he know he was going to die? Did he know he was going to die? Maybe I wasn't shocked. Maybe it all made its own dramatic sense, but I was sad and I was crushed. And I also somehow knew in that moment he would become a legend.
On Rent winning the Pulitzer Prize while everyone was grieving Larson's death
Oh, it was the best of times and worst of times, because the show's success was potent and thrilling and changing my life. I was also filled with the loss of Jonathan and I think a little bit of guilt that he didn't get to go with us because it was going to change his life. He had only just quit the Moondance Diner as a waiter two months before we started rehearsal. He still lived in that fourth floor walkup and he didn't get to enjoy all of that.
On Larson's legacy
The one thing that I look back on with Jonathan and his goals to write stories about our characters, our stories, our music, is that, that value — our music, our characters, our stories — started with Rent and it continued on from Avenue Q and In the Heights to Hamilton, but it also continued on through so many other shows that I didn't produce, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Next to Normal or Dear Evan Hansen, and even in its own fun way, Maybe Happy Ending, which is now about two robots who fall in love.
So when I look at Broadway and I see all these contemporary musicals, I say, "Bless you, Jonathan." Because every single one of these musicals is standing on his shoulders in some way, shape, or form. And I think if we keep making musicals about who we are today — and by the way, Hamilton does that too, even though it's telling a story that's 250 years old — if we making those musicals, I think we're gonna be in great shape.
Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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