THEATER KID: A Broadway Memoir
by Jeffrey Seller
Simon & Schuster. 368 pages, $29.99
THEATER KID is a touching memoir of Jeffrey Seller’s journey from poverty to success as the producer of award-winning but unconventional musicals, offering an entertaining, informative recounting of meetings with colorful investors and theater personalities and discussing lesser-known aspects of producing shows, including advertising and ticketing. He also describes his first gay relationship and, having been adopted as an infant, his search for his biological family.
Growing up Jewish in suburban Detroit, Seller felt embarrassed by his neighborhood’s nickname, “Cardboard Village,” for its flimsily built homes, and by his adoptive father, a summons deliverer who had no short-term memory and a quick temper following a motorcycle accident. His parents argued frequently, though his father happily drove Seller to shows. These detailed memories of family dysfunction can feel repetitive.
Theater helped him to escape his home life. Joining a community theater in a murder mystery production, he learned blocking. In college, he directed Grease, helping a performer to connect emotionally with the songs. He directed a witty takeoff of Aesop’s Fables at a summer camp, encouraging the kids to forget their outside worries while rehearsing. Working in a New York booking office taught him the business of Broadway.
Meeting Jonathan Larson performing his “rock monologue” Boho Days, Seller felt the songs resonating with his life and helped bring Larson’s next musical to the stage. Without Seller and his producing partner Kevin McCollum, it’s possible that Rent—a show featuring homosexuals, drug addicts, and homeless people—would never have been produced for lack of financial support. Despite his faith in Larson, Seller suggested significant changes to the musical. Larson’s sudden death after final rehearsals hit everyone hard; that night, the cast did a reading instead of a first preview, but by the song “La Vie Bohème,” they began performing the full choreography. Even while grieving, Seller recognized that Larson’s death would help publicity. The show moved to Broadway, albeit to a decrepit theater (the Nederlander) “one block south of the porn houses.” He devised a $20 ticket lottery, making the show affordable and filling seats.
Attending a reading of Avenue Q, Seller was impressed by how the puppets in this “Sesame Street for adults” uttered unspoken truths. He then connected the creators with a playwright and director to help turn their sketches into a full musical with a plot. Its slow, steady success prompted a move to Broadway, where it was promoted using clever ads to overcome the assumption that the show was for children. Their campaign for the Tonys featured the puppets welcoming each new musical on its opening day and included a new song about voting. Up against the hugely popular Wicked, Avenue Q unexpectedly won Best Musical, shocking Seller.
Seller next became transfixed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and its “eclectic score that wrapped rap music around salsa, merengue, and Broadway pop” and the show’s story, which reminded him of his mother working a minimum-wage job to provide for her family, and he found a book writer for the show. A catchy commercial shot in Washington Heights featuring the show’s best songs helped grow audiences, which were unusually diverse for a musical, including Latinos and bar mitzvah parties. Seller was annoyed that In the Heights was compared to West Side Story just because the latter includes Puerto Ricans (not Dominicans), seeing it as more like Fiddler on the Roof. Taking a cue from Fiddler, Miranda shaped his song “96,000” into its showstopper answer to “To Life.”
Miranda originally wanted to release The Hamilton Mixtape only as an album, which Seller says he was content with, as a producer’s role is to give the artist space to create, then provide suggestions at the right time. Seller saw the work’s potential as a musical and suggested that Miranda “write the whole thing,” not just the songs. For him, Hamilton reflects America’s highest values. When Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a performance just days after the 2016 election, Seller drafted an address to Pence to be read afterward, expressing fears for the forthcoming Trump administration. Anticipating the publicity this would generate, he invited the media. Pence remarked afterward: “That’s what freedom sounds like.” _________________________________________________________________
Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.
