Build, Manage, Sell with Thomas Kail, Director of Hamilton the Musical

good morning i'm marcus shaw the ceo of colab and i'd like to welcome everybody to build manage cell conversations with our guest today tommy kale i hope everyone's having a great start up week today tommy will share with us how he helped build one of the biggest startups in broadway history we have a great treat after the broadcast tommy will join us for q a where you'll get to ask him questions about what it feels like to be one of the best directors in the history of broadway and what that process looks like we also have an incredible opportunity to share hamilton with some lucky winners that are listening today so please click in the link for the survey that will allow you to enter a chance to win an annual subscription to disney plus where you can see hamilton for yourself we'll join back here at about 12 o'clock for q a with tommy enjoy the show and have a great day [Music] build manage cell conversations is a series of podcasts with creators innovators and entrepreneurs from all walks of life [Music] hello my name is marcus shaw and welcome to co labs build manage cell conversations where we talk with entrepreneurs and innovators about what it takes to be successful today i have award-winning director thomas kale who's going to tell us about the pathway to success tommy it's a pleasure to meet you the pathway to success all right i think i got the wrong email i don't know i don't think i'm the person for you but i'm happy to be here you've had a little bit of success right where would folks know you from tommy you know from uh from going to seventh and eighth grade to latin class with you that's right well we we've known each other for a long time and um it's incredible to see the success that you've had over the years um tommy obviously folks know you as the director of hamilton the smash broadway hit it set records uh really across the world uh for broadway but you've been at this game for quite some time and you've earned it in the way that a lot of people probably don't understand or appreciate tell us a little bit about how you got here and uh what your why was when we talked talk about entrepreneurship well you know it's interesting i mean we've all heard this expression right it's like you're a 20-year overnight success and uh no one really wants to look at the first 10 years where you're just like underground and eating eating dirt and working for free um but i i started doing theater really late in life i mean respectively for it i didn't start when i was 21. um we went to high school together and i played sports my whole life and you did one or the other you they practiced at the same time as it were so i took one acting class in in high school which was compulsory you know and then ended up taking one more but not as any means to express or you know look into the future but more just i guess i have to do it because of a core curriculum and then i like this one class i teach in john elko who i like very much uh when i was in high school and then i went off to college i went to western university really not knowing anything about what i wanted to do other than um i was excited to start over i felt like leaving dc and leaving the dcr i grew up in northern virginia went to school in dc was going to be a fresh start for me and so i think i just found myself with a kind of openness and i think really for me and this is something that we can probably trace through this i was a kid where uh the first 10 12 years of my life everything came very easily and then when i got actually wrong when i met you in seventh grade i had to deal with challenges in a new way like i i couldn't just you know not study for the tests i couldn't just show up at practice like i started to be confronted by a lot of other people that were really good at what they did and what i did as a compensating victim was uh compensating mechanism was i stopped trying because if i didn't try then i had an excuse then there was distance between me and the why yeah but but if i had studied but if i had worked harder if i had and i and i was really i feel like that was my high school year like you know like all throughout like um i just i didn't i i hadn't had that thing drop in that really um i think made me aware of the the privilege that i was afforded of the opportunities that i was given and when i went to college i had a very clear moment my sophomore year um my parents went to college my grandparents did not um one of them did and one of them went back later but i remember walking across campus on a really clear blue sky day and um i was going to remember i was going to do my first english class um my sophomore year and i just thought your grandparents came from somewhere else you know your great-grandparents you know traveled from poland to russia my grandparents were first generation you know were born here like who are you to not take advantage of this opportunity and make the most of it and so just for this one class lay into it see what happens and i did and i found myself really kind of sparking it was around that time that next year that i started working in the theater but in the student-run theater what i liked about the student-run theater wesleyan is it basically was encouraging entrepreneurship they'd say here's 200 and here's the gym on april 1st through 4th go make a show and you had to go do everything you had to market the show you had to cast the show you had to produce the show you had to um you had to advertise the show you had to build the thing and so i took that and when i moved to new york the new york area i lived in new jersey about a year and a half i felt like i was behind because i hadn't been doing this a lot and i didn't have any real formal education so i worked as an asm like a pa sort of like very low level this little theater new jersey and i can currently start my own company and i started my own company which is called backhouse productions which existed really between like 2001 and 2006 because no one would hire us that's the big secret when you're a young director no one's going to hire you if you're a young actor you can get hired if you're a young writer there's a chance but no one's going to really say here's thousands of dollars go make a production except for maybe your silly friends and so so that's what i did i had a couple buddies from college one of whom was a writer actor one of them was a writer director actor and the other was uh you know a writer and actor and none of them uh you know sort of tried to do what i did and i didn't try to do what they did we all just compliment each other beautifully they all were interested in directing and producing the same way i was but they also really had a performance bug that i didn't have and so it allowed me to be outside of the thing and we just had this little lab on 40th street at the drama bookshop based on the drama bookshop and that's about when i bumped back into you i think there's 2004 um i went to the same college as lin manuel but he was a freshman when i was a senior and as i like to say i wasn't talking um so i'd heard about him but didn't know him at all and then started this little company but i heard in the heights in 2000 so before i'd even actually started my company and i said when does he graduate and my friend said 2002 they had they had seen this really early proto version of in the heights that he had written and he had directed in the student the same student theater i worked and i said let's go meet him you know in may of 2002 when he graduates and that's what we did and we'd start our little company to kind of get the you know get the wheels greased a little bit and then we invited him down to this basement and said we want to work on your show and and you know he didn't everything better to do so he said yes and we just sat in that basement for years making this thing and in that in that laboratory i think that's where we got our ten thousand dollars so there's obviously a big jump from here to the next thing but that's it that's what that really thing was i liked storytelling i liked collaborating and what happened for me was sports i think is directly related to this because i was i was really good until i was like 12 or 13 and i could see the game very clearly and then i i was able to really kind of grapple with my own mortality in some way because at 12 13 i saw other people excel and move way past me in terms of their physicality but i could still see the game clearly so what i had was information here that i couldn't use myself but i knew how to communicate with my teammates i did a lot of coaching sort of on the field even when i was on the sideline i was a camp counselor which is a similar kind of thing can you take a disparate group of people and unify them so they're all moving in one direction which i think is what leadership and what directing is and those were that was sort of like the mr miyagi me learning it until i started directing and realizing oh coaching and directing the same thing pre-season is pre-production rehearsal is practice the game is the show the post you know the post-mortem is the post-mortem and that really i think it made me feel accessed and and useful and i think i was always seeking utility when you think about the four of you back in 2004 and you think about the role that everybody played on that team what kind of friction did you have early on we see that a lot with entrepreneurs right it's hard the the norming of the team can you talk a little bit about what that looked like and where you guys were in 2001 through 2004 and then you know where you are today yeah it's interesting because i was someone and i definitely when you play sports you have hard ass coaches you know and you have you have coaches who are comforters and then you have coaches you realize that are code switching and by necessity they shouldn't be talking to me the same way they're talking to my teammates my left or my right i think you have to be able to talk to a group and be clear for everybody to receive the message and then you need to know who you put your arm around who do you talk you know who you talk to only about their family who wants to only talk tactics you know who needs you to push them a little harder to you know encourage them in a different way and i think that with that initial group my friend my friend john miller and neil stewart and anthony vanciale we all believed in each other so there was enormous faith and i think that it was the first time i'd been around a group where because there was no coach right it was just us like we know in a way we were peer supervised there wasn't an adult watching and i think because we felt this kind of responsibility for each other i think that's probably where i learned in some way that you make you make the best things with harmony and i've sort of dedicated my career to trying to make high quality things with the removal of the cauldron of pain and this idea that great pain creates great art i think is i think it's mythology i think it might for other people but for me it's a personal mythology and so i tried to disabuse you know anyone that i worked with of that notion and and debunk that theory which means like when you come into this room i want to make it safe and i want an environment where whatever you say especially when you're in in the process of making theater which is so iterative and there isn't one way to do anything i think getting out of the sort of math and science brain that i cultivated was really helpful healthy for me because i think what it allowed me to do was realize that there's a lot of different ways of them out so you know again that doesn't say it doesn't mean excuse me there were times when we didn't have a disagreement but a disagreement didn't happen to to elevate to discord and i think the other thing that we did really well is we talked about the things we were feeling and i think that came from this sort of baseline of love like we cared about each other and we wanted the other person to succeed and i think even early on this doesn't mean it doesn't get more complicated as things go that i i never thought that success was binary this idea that there's only enough for you know this group of people not this group of people or if you have it that i can't have it i just never subscribed to that and in a way like you know one of the lines in hamilton the world was wide enough for both hamilton and me was lynn and i identifying a line in chernow's book something that burst said directly it really spoke to our feeling about what it meant to be a part of the theater which is someone else's success doesn't preclude ours in fact it's just making the doorway a little bit wider or teaching us a new way to work so so there wasn't a lot of pain in that time you know there wasn't a lot of um there was i think there was a lot of growth and there was you know by necessity stretching but we were always for each other you know and i believe that you make the best things because of it not in spite of so tommy there's something that you mentioned about kind of prototyping in broadway and i think a lot of people don't understand the process for developing um a broadway show or really any kind of theatrical uh process but we do talk a lot about prototyping for ventures and for startups can you talk tell us a little bit about what that process looks like in theater and are there any similarities to the lean startup model that we hear so much about kind of that iterative process um are there any analogies there between theater and a tech startup even i think so and you know and you and i spoke about this sort of you know off camera about the idea that i feel like in some way my job is to start companies and to build them strong with a team and then make sure that they can function fluidly without me because if i build something and it needs me to be there i feel like i failed and the nature of making theater is most of the things you make have a very you know steep slope to zero they close really quickly you know you can you know you can work at the the arena stage in dc or at the public theater in new york city and you know your show is going to run for eight weeks and like that's it like that's success success is mounting the show having it run for eight weeks if it's a straight play so a non-musical maybe it gets published which means that it can be done in atlanta and san francisco and in toronto and in berlin but that's a license of that that's not necessarily your production someone can license your production but often what they're doing is licensing the clay and making their own so the process of making a straight play is is much more compressed now the elements are are the same there's the gestation there's somebody coming with an idea whether it's an article or story that happens to them sometimes people have handed me a script it was 100 pages long and we went to work on that sometimes someone came to me with a scene um sometimes i went to a writer and said hey i think there's a story here do you want to get in there like i like to begin the process i like to be in there early it's very rare that someone hands me something that's completed and then i just go and stage it and cast it that's that's not particularly interesting to me so i would say this is there are you know a everything i say is completely subjective and there are lots of anomalies to this but if you're working on a straight play usually for me if i've maybe i've done 25 of them in my life from inception in conversation if it actually gets to production it's like two or three years whereas a musical is usually between five seven eight years that's pretty common it's very hard to do a musical faster than five years to wit and just to speak about some of the ones that i've done i first heard a a cast recording from a student production of in the heights in 2000. i waited two years for lin to graduate i worked with lynn from 2002 to 2007 which was our first production off-broadway there were lots of workshops so we just did a little piece of 20 minutes here maybe not stage just sitting around a table reading or up at music stands kind of trying out the text a lot of it is about making sure the text is solid because without the text there really isn't anything else so if you look at that we went to broadway the next year so i first heard it in 2000 i started working in 2002 it went to broadway in 2008 and that was pretty fast people were like wow that happened quickly for you and i was like yeah well you weren't in the basement with me from 2000 2007. um but i think that each you know each director or producer have different ways of developing the way that i like to do it is in pieces um so in that particular instance lynn had a full college version of this show it was 80 minutes long it had 15 songs or so the characters existed it took place in washington heights and we sort of just pulled it apart and put it back together and i'd say maybe one song remain lots of melodies did lots of characters uh did but we brought in other collaborators choreographer one of the first people there was a music director right up you know right around the same time as we found another um librettist a book writer who is the person who doesn't just write the scenes but is the person that works with the the composer lyricist in our in our case with lin that was the same person lynn was writing book music and lyrics at first for the heights and we brought in someone to write the book that's not just the scenes in between it's also the story through the songs so that's like a really close collaborator hamilton was a very different experience lynn wrote one song he didn't think it was from a show he thought it was from uh an album from a mixtape and that was the the song that he did at the white house um for the poetry game that obama hosted in 2009 it took lynn two years to write another song which became the song my shot and it was at that little sort of fundraiser we were doing in 2011 where he performed my shop where i went up to him afterwards i said it's taken you two two and a half years to write two songs we're going to be very old by the time you're done with this why don't we pick a date six months from now and let's work towards that let's work on two songs a month for five or six months and just see what happens we did that from 2011 to the beginning of 2012 when we came into this concert we did at lincoln center in 2012 there were 11 songs 10 of which are in the show now so things that really existed but at that point again just working with a music director arranger alex lackamore who's the dear and close collaborator of ours and then that show opened off broadway in 2015 and later that year you know on broadway so the first song was written in 2009 it opened in 2015 six years and has continued from that day until today when i had a call about it this morning and that's five years later so what people don't tell you is if it goes well it's in your life for a long time because most of the things we make are gone in eight weeks or twelve weeks you know when i was first doing shows we only did three shows they were gone in a weekend um so hopefully that speaks to some of that process and again just with the stuff that i've worked on but but that's that those are sort of two i think relatively uh normative examples so really interesting um you talked about the the public theater and that was kind of where you you get your first shot right and from that point people decide whether or not this thing has the legs to go you know to the next level what was the reaction to hamilton i know you've told me this story but i think it's one of the most fascinating stories i've ever heard what was that process like and how long did the show run there yeah so you know and to step back and just contextualize a little bit we started working in 2011 to 2000 in 2012 and it was just me and lynn and a couple friends in 2012 we did this concert in january uh of 2012. and a producer named jeffrey seller who was one of the producers of in the heights so we had known him and gone through a lot of stuff with him and really trusted him he said i would like to enhance this and help you develop this and find an institutional theater like a public theater to develop it and stage it but until then it's just going to be out so the public didn't actually enter our conversation until 2014. we spent two years developing it with jeffrey and he was the person who was doing the hiring he with me you know in terms of who we were bringing into it he was the person who was financing and he was the person who was looking for outside investors and or using his own funds um to to put up these little workshops right these um 10 actors in a room for a week and then another time it was 20 actors in a room for five weeks and out in a band you know so you're it's a lot of sunk cost if the thing doesn't happen um by the time we were doing the staged workshop which again is basically this it's a developmental it's like a beta test right you're inviting in maybe 50 people to come and see it 100 people to come and see it we didn't have costumes that are reminiscent of what we have now there was very little set there was no lighting um and then the next time we did it okay let's add in some costumes okay let's try a few set pieces so again that iterative process um it is how we would learn there was no turntable which is very big part of the show but we were doing this you know on a taped out you know rehearsal space um in fact the big one we did in 2014 right when we were working with the public we didn't even stage the second act we only staged the first act and we sat around and did the psychonectic music stands but an audience got to hear the art from from start to finish after that the reaction to that was very enthusiastic and in fact what it caused us to do this was in may of 2014 and we were slated for production in january of 15. is it actually caused us to batten down the hatches and say okay no more giving it away for free like let's not invite people into the kitchen let's wait till they're sitting at the table we serve the meal and that was a really crucial decision for us because expectations were starting to get elevated and i'm all about managing expectations there was a lot of enthusiasm because of in the heights and in heights fans where the show had already sold out at the public when we went on sale so in a good way you're not really thinking about ticket sales you know there will be an audience and you know you'll learn now the public theater has 290 seats and we were gonna run there for maybe six weeks initially or something like that i can't remember five six weeks maybe maybe seven eight weeks so a very limited amount of people you know 300 times eight shows a week you know that's not a lot so you're talking about 2500 people roughly times you know times eight you're talking about ten twelve thousand people maybe seeing this it's a very small number um you know that's just think about it it's one hundredth of the people to listen to this podcast right mean that's you know that's how small that number is um so we really we we did one long lead article with the new yorker and we didn't do any other press we just went to work and so when we opened for previews at the public on january 20th of 2015 the show was just like an anticipated rumor you know oh did you see that thing eight months ago oh i saw a little bit here but no one really had anything to to gauge it by and so in that way i think it kind of allowed us to to take the expectation level and put it back down was there excitement for it absolutely were people were enough people talking about it that there had there was that buzz that that you look for because i think everything ultimately is word of mouth whether whether it's an app whether it's a tv show whether it's a movie whether it's a piece of theater whether it's a book the question is will i talk to you about it in conversation well i tell you about it on the subway if we go out to eat food by the time the appetizer comes let's say you have to read this thing you have to watch this thing and i feel like that's actually what gets you know that gets us beyond the noise and sort of pierces that you know that static because there's just so much coming at us and when we did that first performance at that point you know a few hundred people had seen a workshop nine months earlier and maybe a year before that a few hundred people had seen something so nobody had seen it and then 290 people at a time the drum beat began and i you know i had a feeling early on there was a statistical thing which i'll tell you which you might enjoy the public theater would um they would do this app that was like uh they gave away two tickets for free for every show like the first preview or something like that and they would do this historically for their shows over the last five or six years and maybe it was more than that because less than that and i went to the head of marketing because i'm very interested in numbers and data and statistics and things like that and i said how many people usually sign up for you know the first preview when you're giving away these two tickets and they said oh like if it's a show that people are looking forward to and i'm i'm making this up slightly because because i'm old that was a long long time ago but i remember she was said maybe 700 people like 500 700 is a lot um and we had 12 000 people sign up to get a pair of tickets and i remember just hearing that and it was just it was just like a pain something pained for me it's like oh there's an energy around this that is unlike anything that i've experienced where it was already pretty loud outside the theater and so my job was to keep it quiet inside the theater to keep it safe inside the theater because that actually was the safest place we could be and then once the show started and the next time we went on sale i think was five or six days later a big new yorker article had come out that we worked you know with this one writer on um and the phone lines of the internet crashed at the public you know it's like it's like in the cartoons when like the thing is going through the wired it's just too big to get in um they just they couldn't keep up with demand and so by the time we opened on february 17th 2015 there were no tickets to be had so it it kind of created this um you know this frenzy around it you know can you see it have you seen it and it became this you know sort of center of conversation for a very small part of the world but for a part of the world that can give you an indicator whether you have a chance to move to broadway but that was still a kind of gamble because by the time we announced we were going to broadway we stayed at the public to answer your question until i think may 3rd so january 20th to may 3rd and we opened on broadway august 6th a really interesting dynamic here is in the heights 2007 is that correct seven off broadway 2008 yeah 2008 broadway pre-social media to a large degree i look i said i didn't really get on facebook until 2009 it was my 10-year college reunion and the only way to find out about it was through facebook um but certainly not the type of jet fuel behind in the heights on social media as you did with hamilton right hamilton yeah you know i mean 2017 it is all over facebook right and it's you got to go see it you got to go see it um that's actually when we we got an opportunity to go see it how do you think about social media in the realm of theater right and also television which you're doing a lot of work in um but broadly how do you use social media for marketing well someone who's not on any social media you know my relationship to it is through my friends and some of the projects that i work on and look i happen to be incredibly close to someone who is probably in the broadway space the most effective and impactful user of twitter i mean lynn understands intuitively i think how twitter could function which was it was a way for him to create transparency and i think i remember when lynn and i don't remember exactly when lynn joined twitter but when in the heights went to broadway for instance in you know open on broadway in february of 2008 you know lynn was making youtube videos in a way that like most people in the theater weren't like if you look you know and they would get 50 75 000 100 000 views that's a lot of people remember only 2500 people can see the show a week and so what you're doing is you're creating other access points to it and you're getting it beyond just the people that live in new york beyond the people that can afford a theater ticket beyond the people who even care about theater and so he was always really savvy about that but he didn't he didn't do it with the kind of intentionality that's like now that people couldn't see my show he did it because he thought it was fun i think there was a purity to that which people also responded to because you know as well as i do people can smell an ad from from a long way away right and that was not sponsored content in any way like we weren't pretending we didn't have a show that was happening off broadway on broadway and you know we're going heights but it just it it was also early enough in that you know period of social media where it just wasn't as saturated right so i remember when lynn got to 25 000 followers i remember when he got to 96 000 followers and then i remember when he got to 500 000 in a million and a million five and two million and all of a sudden you realize also the people that were following that on twitter were a lot of people in the entertainment business that uh help people decide what to see you know help people decide where to spend their money um help people decide um where to take their you know their extra their extra time um that if you go to new york and you're only going to see two things what's the you know and it's too expensive and it's hard to travel with your family and maybe maybe you get one trip there because again it was only in one place it was only serving 1300 people at the richard rogers theater on broadway both for in the heights and hamilton they played the same theater so by the time you know we started working on hamilton you know there's clearly a correlation between what the internet did for that obama video which completely went viral and millions and millions of people watched it and it was brought into schools and teachers were playing it for kids but then there was nothing released except for that for six years the only way to see it and interact with it was to go and and actually be in the theater and so again to kind of continue to the metaphor that i was using i feel like directing is is very similar to being a chef and running a kitchen and so some things are defrosting some things are in the oven some things are in lots of different parts you know out on a countertop but you have to make the meal every time if you make a movie it's exactly the same for everybody who sees it their experience of how they encounter it a screen a theater you know a tablet might be different but the material is the same theater someone gets sick theater some you know it's a matinee versus an evening it's a friday versus a saturday so you have to make the meal each time and again in the same way that i i didn't want people in the kitchen watching us cook and i wanted them to sit and actually just like have the meal when it was ready i think that in the heights taught me a lot about how to try to protect the process how to try to protect what that is and i think that what lynn did along the way of the process was let people feel access you know to hey like i stay up late because i didn't do my homework too you know like when isn't the guy who was turning it in six months early he was like not sleeping tonight i gotta write a song and i think it made people feel included and i think that had a big impact on on hamilton's ultimate reach and a lot of the things we ended up doing with this ham for ham series which were these videos because we on the very first day we moved to broadway it was july 13th 2015 and we used to have this little lottery downtown and the lottery was uh ten dollar tickets ham for him down at the public and about 150 people would show up you know for a 290 c theater like that's a lot and they were all aiming for a limited amount of seats you know calling you know four pairs five pairs like that and they would literally have like a like a bingo thing and they call marcus shaw you know like two tickets and the person would scream they never would high five and we went to broadway the first day first performance we stepped outside it was me and lynn and we wanted to see people showed up for the lottery and we looked in front of the theater we're at the stage door and there was a group and then the stage the guy at the stage door jimmy said look that way and we look down 46th street and there was a line to 8th avenue 4d and we closed the door it's like in the cartoons when you're like um and we looked at each other and lin said i have to go out there i have to go and say hi to all these people that came like that of their own free will they you know through their you know their uh you know their lottery you know their lottery ticket was submitted here it's like i should go say hey he went out there people were so excited when he went out and this is actually on online too a lot of people filmed it and as i was watching him i thought if there were 700 people here and 10 of them get selected you have 690 people who said oh i didn't get in it wasn't for me that's their story and i was like we have to change that story we have to give something to everybody that shows up and lynn walked back in and i said lin i don't know how many people that was it turned out it was like 750 or something like that i said someone has to go out every preview and like say hi sing a song you know bring a ukulele do whatever it is and let that be the experience so then instead of what you didn't get what you say is what i did get is chris jackson doing this i did get pippa doing this i didn't get leslie doing this or lynn did this or w did this that becomes part of the story and those hand for hands became so popular the cops had to shut down the street and we eventually had to stop doing them 2 000 people would show up well 2 000 people would show up constantly just to see who would step outside and then we started bringing other members of the broadway community hey that person from the show across the street here's a platform for you it was very much you know uh you know if the tide was rising let's all go up and not trying to make it just about hamilton but trying to make it about the you know the breadth of the broadway season so that's a very long answer to your question but that's one of the ways that i think social media also impacted because those hand for hands became ways for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to also say that's my connection to it and though i wasn't on the street did you see what they did yesterday did you see that little you know did you see the sketch they did did you see that song they sang and i think it made people feel connected you once characterized this it was going to sink or swim with the team that we had tell me a little bit about how that all happened who all you know what type of people were trying to get involved and and how you made the decision that you had to close the doors on the process and really focus internally well i think you know you know the team was put together that this sort of the uh it was lynn our friend alex who had worked on in the heights with us so we knew alex is 2003 2004. uh andy blankenbueller who we met in 2005 we ended up choreographing uh in the heights so that was uh the sort of you know that was choreographer music director composer and director that's sort of like at the center of the target and then right outside that our designers you know the people that i hire to you know take the blueprint and build the house so costume designer paul taswell i think this was my sixth or seventh show with him i first started working with him on in the heights lighting designer hal binkley who recently passed uh about a month ago he's kind of the first member of our of our group to not be here to witness and if it's something we've been really struggling with and how was about he was 64 years old when he when he died so when i met him he was already 30 broadway shows in when i met him in 2008. that was my fifth or sixth show with howell nevin steinberg our sound designer and david korens was our set designer right on many shows so i built my team with the support of jeffrey and with lynn from people that i've worked with uh that's really the responsibility i have put that group together they then hire their own staffs their own respective staffs and that's on them like i don't hire the band alex does um paul hires the associate costume and the dressers and the way you know like i have consultation on that but that's really you know his jurisdiction and then the you know casting is everything and if you have the right people you have a chance and if you don't you ain't got a chance and i really slowly put this company together many of the people i've worked with uh chris jackson i've done in heights with and was in my group freestyle supreme i've known him since 2002 he ended up playing george washington w dicks who played thomas jefferson was in freestyle supreme i'd known him since like 2009 2010 um you know then lots of people that i met through casting um renee goldsberry i met through casting who played angelica uh jasmine cephas jones who played mariah and peggy i met through casting um anthony ramos who ended up playing philip lawrence i met casting heights years before and we hadn't cast him and he came back in for this um a lot of the you know the ensemble the dancers were from the heights too and so i we just we took time that's the thing is i always say to my casting directors i'll probably take 30 percent more time but i feel like our company will be 100 better for it so it's so important to me that i'm as the person responsible for who's in the room if you're an actor in my show marcus and you show up and you're supposed to be in love or uh you know a sibling of character x you have to trust you don't have any say in that right so you need me to look out and be like okay this is someone i think you would vibe with i think it's something you're really gonna be able to connect with because we're gonna spend some long you know long days and nights together over this next month two months six months a year if it's a musical you sign a year contract and i feel i feel that responsibility very deeply so you know i i was taking care of that jeffrey was looking for other producers other lead producers and then investors for him to raise the capital necessary for the show and that was his purview like that was i had faith in jeffrey i knew he was going to have good people jeffrey had a track record he produced rent and avenue q and a lot of other things so he had his people that he could go to and and i don't want to speak for him but my sense is the people that were there with you at the beginning or a lot of the people that you end up bringing the people that believed in you and it wasn't so popular um that's certainly something that i know has value uh you know for me you know as i look and see if a lot of the people that i collaborated with 15 or 20 years ago are still in my life i think for that same reason um so that was like that was really where i kept my focus you know being really certain that everybody who walked into the room energetically would be on the same page and would just be additive you know i just wanted people who could come in and do things that i couldn't do and trust that and then you know with the press of the shows there was so much demand for press you know and i was very involved with jeffrey and with lynn and just determining where you know where you wanted to give access there because once the press is in the room our camera's in the room the alchemy changes you know just you're being witnessed in a different way so we really tried to again keep the theater as safe as possible and that allowed us to keep our focus on what was in front of us which was making the show better one thing that that stuck out to me is you know you talk about your cast the whole group of people that you work with it's called a company in theater and when we think about a company most times we think about you know shareholders and some type of business enterprise but when you talk about talent um there seems to be a really uh clear role between talent and theater and the company there and the need for talent in a business enterprise do you have any real words of wisdom um that you share with folks about recruiting actors and dancers or recruiting people for business well i mean i think you're absolutely right that that there's a a deep connection and similarity there you know some of the other people that are important sort of on the maintaining of the show which is really what you're doing once the show opens you're trying to maintain you know those impulses um and let the show evolve your stage manager and your company manager so in the theater those are really important hires and the person that opened the show for me on broadway jason bassett i'd done three or four shows with and he's the person who's there day to day because once the show opens i'm not and so jason is responsible for hiring the other stage managers who are the people that are backstage that are helping both run the show put in new actors if someone gets injured you know all of that day-to-day stuff like i'm not there eight hours a day 10 hours a day 12 hours a day anymore and it's it's a lot of you know it's a it's a lot of necessary faith in the people that are going to be helping you again maintain that's that's the word that i think about so those are essential hires there's also company management who are the liaison between the producing entity and the cast everything from tickets to doctors to taking care of family to bringing people um you know backstage after a show to um doing payroll all of those like very company-based things and one of the challenges that you have is in theater it's not set up to exist for years and years and years and the way that if you make a company a lot of the companies you make outside of the entertainment industry you're hoping you're probably going to be there for a while so you think about how to structure them in a different way and what happened with hamilton is we we scaled our business very quickly so we have you know obviously we're you know here in the midst of this pandemic and you know the middle of september or 2020 but when we shut down our productions we shut down 10 excuse me six productions with two being planned so you know so it's it's eight total six that we're running so it's hundreds of employees um we have five in north america and one in europe and uh in london and we're you know other other shows have had that many companies you know lion king and jersey boys and wicked have had many many many shows have mormon but we went from zero to five very very quickly and so from 2015 when there was one place in the world to 2018 i think that was when our fifth company opened so to multiply you know it's really it's not multiplying it's actually excellence um you know and so that i think was something that we didn't have a real precedent or playbook for because people had done that and our producer jeffrey had you know rent had that many companies for sure but not that quickly um so that was you know that was something too like again if it's supposed to exist without me on the day-to-day basis then there's going to be these road companies where i might cast them and rehearse them and then not see them for months and months so again you're trying to create environment around them to you know to to keep things clear to keep things um fluid and focused and and also know that i'm only going to intermittently be able to physically interact with them so a lot of that management uh which which is um i think inheritance and healthy company outside of the entertainment business is also within tommy this has been incredible brother it's been over 30 years we've known each other um if i look back to where we had dinner back in 2004 we knew that this day was coming but we didn't know how it was coming and that's you might have known it i don't know i was just i was probably just hungry no man you've always had it um you are more than just a director you're more than a creative you're a true leader in entrepreneurship um thank you for spending time teaching us about how you've built managed and sold not only hamilton but a number of other projects that you've been involved in and we think that we're all better for it um learning what this entrepreneurial process is like and i think the words that i take from you on this are make something that doesn't require you to be there all the time and that's what legacy is about and you've done it um at the highest level so i appreciate it man godspeed and um i think we're gonna have some time to talk with a few folks here in chattanooga and do a little q a and so we'll get prepared for that i look forward to it thank you for having me and i appreciate you inviting me to have a conversation that started 30 years ago for us so it's fun to keep on talking all right well there we go what a great opportunity to learn about the product in the process of building an incredible and incredible production like hamilton um we've had a great opportunity to learn the history and the story of how tommy got involved and now we have the man himself joining us uh for some q a tommy how are you doing brother i'm doing very well thank you your background is much better than mine my bad my background is also much better than it was before uh during the interview i'd like to try to keep my consistent just so people aren't gonna don't worry i'm in the same place no evolution well look man we've got an incredible group of people um that are on this webinar and they're listening just heard kind of how you built managed and sold hamilton and the success that you had with that um and so we've got a lot of questions man people um we've got business people we've got artists we've got creators uh we've got entrepreneurs adults and children um that have just absorbed that material and so one of the things that jumps out with you is the biggest question people have is when did you know what was the point that you knew you had a hit you talked a little bit about it um in in the interview but do you remember that feeling like is it like hitting the lottery one distinct moment where you know you have a hit and and what did it feel like no i you know it's um it's like four quarters that add up to a dollar you know it feels like it was that moment that i spoke about uh you know in that first preview you know there were some signs when um the show started selling well downtown and then it really wasn't until we went on sale in uh in march of 2015 we were still playing at the public theater but we put a block of tickets on sale for broadway and we had a really good first couple days which showed the enthusiasm was also translated um people not only wanted to see it but they were willing to um travel to new york they were willing to to to purchase tickets so i think that was probably the third of those that was you know kind of a couple times in january with those indicators and then in march and then you know once we got to the the first preview on broadway which was july 13th 2015. i remember looking outside the first preview and there was a about three hours before the show there was a line of 700 people down the block they were just there to play the lottery just there to try to get 10 tickets and i i had a sense then that something was happening um so those are some other early indicators but you know we never could have imagined that it would be something that was so sustainable yeah that's incredible um a lot of people have questions about you and you know that moment where you fell in love with theater you talked about the fact that you know you were 21 which in the world of theater is uh you know a veteran i'll say you're seasoned um that you're you're getting into it at that age you talked a lot about uh your history it's being a great soccer player coming up through middle school and high school but maybe it's stopped in high school um but you know what what did it feel like what what were your inspirations as as somebody in theater you know what what pieces did you would really enjoy that inspired you to move on and find your creative juices in theater well you know i was someone who grew up i watched a lot of movies on a lot of television i didn't go to see a lot of theater but it never occurred to me to look at the beginning or the end for the credits and study who made the things that i liked in the television shows that i liked or you know some of the movies that i would watch over and over again and it really wasn't until i got into college that i started really thinking a little more broadly beyond just the actors um and the writer but thinking about who produced it who directed it who designed it um so you know frank capra was a big hero of mine the name of my production company is old 320 sycamore and it's a wonderful life is a really seminal movie for me and i watch my family all the time uh you know like a like a good jewish kid watching a christmas movie um and uh the the address of the house that george bailey buys it's kind of dilapidated that he turns into his dream home the address is 320 sycamore so frank capper the spirit of possibility with you know was always coursing through the work that he made um you know and i was someone like as a kid like and i wasn't watching hugely sophisticated things but i was watching you know indiana jones and i was watching uh you know all the spielberg movies and then my mom would uh introduce me to some other filmmakers uh billy wilder um who made the apartment which was a really important movie for me he sort of showed that you could use comedy to talk about serious things so that was something that was really resonant with me and you know and then on the sort of theatrical side you know i just i went to a lot of the those big mega musicals like they would come through town the lay mizzes the cats you know the starlight express a lot of the british imports and it really wasn't until my my early 20s when i started studying theater that i became more aware of uh you know the american idiom you know um you know jonathan larson who wrote rent was not someone that i knew about when that show came out in 1996 obviously it was really informative for so many people in my life including lim who's now making a movie tick tick boom about the creation of jonathan's first show so it's you know jonathan is someone who's really related to a lot of the work that i did but it was really you know my experience over those years those early years of my 20s um i did a lot of research i went to the lincoln center library where they have the film and tape archive and my mother is an archivist so i spent a lot of time in libraries and they have almost every show that's been on broadway that ran for a certain amount of time recorded but you can only watch it there and i decided to watch the last 25 years of every play that won the tony award and every musical that won the tony award and that's really where my education started i went there so often they actually gave me an award i went to the library i was such a nerd that the library said we would like to give you a citation for spending way too much time here so that was really where i kind of found a lot of those um you know those treasures shows like dream girls um you know chorus line uh you know that sweeney todd you know a lot of the shows that really informed some of the stuff that i ended up making that that's pretty amazing and that's a story i actually never knew but the the fact that greatness studies greatness i think says a lot about what it takes to be an entrepreneur what it takes to be somebody that's going to do something well i mean to sit and look at 25 years of award-winning broadway productions and plays and movies in order to understand what that path for success looks like is is pretty incredible um i also had no friends clearly so i mean let's let's be honest i had i had some free time it seemed so the early 2000s were tough years for everybody so you know another question that that folks were really um i would i would say was a surprise to people is that it takes five years you know to put a musical together um right yeah what's happening during that time i mean are you how do you stay encouraged and engaged in the process uh you know five minutes for for a lot of people today is a lot five years as a fast uh bar is pretty difficult for anybody you know it's interesting and i think it's something that a lot of your entrepreneurs as well as you know the artists will understand which is you're not getting paid to develop and so things take time because we're all doing side hustles you know i was a personal assistant from 2001 until 2005. that was how i made my money i worked for somebody and helped support them in whatever way i could and that gave me you know that the amount of amount of money i needed to pay my rent and eat some food so i could go and do my other stuff so you know we were all doing two or three jobs at the time and so these things these development process are often protracted because you're not working 40 hours a week on that's impossible um especially in your early days but even when i was doing hamilton we were pretty established in our respective careers but it was just me and lynn for a year and a half there was no producer attached two years there was no producer attached so you're you're really doing it on your own on your own dime and on your own free time and so if you think about it that way you know from linworth the first one in 2009 the show premiered in 2015 but it took him two years to write the first two songs not because he was trying every day to write them in that writer's block but because he was finishing the last year of being in the heights and had a day job six days a week 50 you know 50 weeks a year um you know when we we started working in the heights he was a substitute teacher so we could only meet after school or on the weekend so a lot of that has an impact because we don't have a system where our government or often our theaters are able to give us a sustainable living wage to just focus on the work so you're you're almost always stirring one pot while you're defrosting something else while you're putting something in the oven so the life of a director and a producer and a writer you're always working on six to eight different things some of which will never come to fruition some do but you know you have to accommodate for um the creative process also you can't have sit down with your writer and say great we need two songs to do this this and this that's not coming back the next day that could come back in a month and you don't know when the muse is going to tap him on the shoulder um and tell her here's the song you were looking for so those are also the things that you have to try to build space for create structure um for uh for you both to and those early days are you know the three or four of you in the center of it to have something to march towards but also you have to leave room for inspiration to him so one thing that that also stands out about hamilton in particular for me is you guys found so many ways to innovate and do things you know not just the show being innovative but things around the show uh you talked a little bit in the interview about some of the ways that you set up compensation for the first company uh you talked about the fact that you did eduham and ham for hamilton right i mean ways of utilizing social media that never been done before um obviously and i don't know if i told you this we have secured a couple of uh annual subscriptions to disney plus for some of the folks in the crowd so we'll have three lucky winners that get to get to see hamilton um on disney plus but again another method of bringing your art to people that really hadn't been done that way before what are new opportunities to innovate in the theater space and you know which of those are you most excited about well you know it's interesting i was talking to uh a bunch of people this week about all of the shows the broadway shows the west end shows and off-broadway shows that are figuring out how to capture and deliver the experience to people at home um so hamilton was one but margaret's black bottom is coming out there's a an adaptation of a broadway musical called prom which ryan murphy is making into a movie in the same way that in the heights was a show and now will be a movie next year um and so many of these shows are having a translation to a film adaptation but then more and more are having a big desire to capture the experience of being in the theater and try to deliver that to audiences and i'm excited about that because you know i was saying this to someone the other day i think that your first experience with anything and especially the theater is what cultivates your interest in it as a long-term theater goer if you go to the theater and don't see something that reflects back uh a feeling uh or a story that feels like it connects to you that might be your last trip to the theater but if you see something in that first time that makes you feel seen or makes you feel hurt or makes you feel like you are with your people you're going to come back and you're going to go see five shows you know and and give them all a chance um and maybe one of those shows sparks with you again and you go see another five shows again the cost of theater can be really challenging on broadway but in the regions in the communities it can be a much less expensive ticket right so that that theater's theater is theater it doesn't just have to happen on broadway that's not the only legitimate theater far from it um so i think i'm excited that some of these folks that are sitting at home um forced there because of the pandemic as so many of us are that we can't go to live theater but yet can have theater delivered to us i think they work in tandem i don't think that that means we don't go see live theater when it comes back i think they're companions and i think they can live alongside each other and i think it gives us a chance to develop a new generation of theater goers young people maybe seeing hamilton right now that are five eight twelve years old who might say oh that's what theater is okay i'd like to participate as someone who makes it or someone who wants to sit in a seat and absorb it so that's something that i'm really looking forward to so i mean to that point how did you guys figure out the the disney deal i mean for most people they hadn't seen anything like that you know does disney approach you do you guys kind of say we want to share this with a broader audience what does that process look like and i know you're involved but there are a number of other people on your team that are involved with that what does it take to make that happen i mean it takes a lot of deep conversation within the group so within our group you know jeffrey seller is our lead producer so he's my partner in all of this lin manuel obviously um john bozzetti who represents me and lynn who's our agent is very deeply involved and then there's obviously other producers and you know other members of the creative team that we'll have conversations with um but but really you know i'm trying to think when the first conversation happened we knew we wanted to capture it because remember we captured it as an independent venture we didn't know where it was going to go and i think it gave us a lot of freedom so we captured it which meant we financed it and we then got a chance to go and make it and then take it to the marketplace and so what we did was we made something uh between 2016 and 2018 that we were proud of we then invited different studios to screen the film and decide if they wanted to uh partner with us and then we narrowed that and ended up you know pretty quickly um figuring out what we thought the best path forward was and and so you know we you know in that way we kind of like created um like our own little festival you know some people will make a film and have a chance to go to a festival this is what happened with this documentary i made a freestyle of supreme we made it independently we got into sundance people saw it at sundance and decided that they wanted to make an offer so the festival served as a place for people to come together and it became a marketplace we sort of created our own marketplace with hamilton and that's that's how we arrived at disney and really you know from our meeting with them we we said a sense of the partnership was going to be collaborative and uh you know sort of open uh open and deep conversation about everything they obviously are incredible stewards of brand you know everyone is aware when disney makes a disney property but when you think about marvel when you think about lucasfilm when you think about you know pixar i mean like they're actually incredible stewards of brands and they they have a real track record that letting the the art that they acquire and then distribute remain the art that they acquired you know and so that was that that was our instinct and that was absolutely our experience with working very closely with them so i've got a fun one here um we we had a buddy last year that talked about shaquille o'neal missed uh investing in starbucks and so ended up investing in fordo coffee because he said he never wanted to miss a coffee investment again is there a person without naming names if if you know we gotta maintain the innocence of the people that miss the opportunity but uh is there anybody that wanted to get on the hamilton ride and you know decided that it wasn't the right thing for them and turned around and is kicking themselves because they missed an opportunity to invest i don't know you know i have to say and this is one of the things that was actually really great about the position that i was in because i was not a producer of hamilton those conversations were happening in other rooms you know i was i was trying to make the show with with my friends um and jeffrey and jill furman and sandy jacobs the other two you know main producers they were having a lot of those conversations so maybe when you podcast uh and then q a them you might get a different answer but um i i only know that i was trying to figure out act two and see if we could make it work well if they wanna bring their uh roadshow for the deals for anything you're involved in through chattanooga i think you'll have a few folks that would like to put a few shillings in um one question that's also come up is the pandemic right corona has changed broadway do you have thoughts are you having conversations about when people think broadway will come back um and and what will look different is it permanently impaired or do we think that uh we get back sometime in the foreseeable future you know the short answer is i i don't know a lot more than what's being reported you know obviously i have long conversations with jeffrey we have a production in australia which is going to be going up as planned starting rehearsal in january they've obviously had a very different relationship to um their their own cities you know sydney and melbourne some of the bigger cities there and how they've been able to handle the outbreak um so we are we're planning on that production proceeding um so that that's live theater that hopefully will be up in march of next year um in terms of broadway you'll probably just announce that they're they're not going to be selling tickets for anything through may of next year and that's sort of what i know as well you know i think that what i do know is my sense is it'll be different potentially for when shows come back if it's a new show versus show that existed you know right now there are theaters where wicked is where mine came where hamilton is where the set is there everything's built and when it's safe to go back it you know you you know make sure that the theater is as safe as it needs to be if there's any ventilation issues but the set is built you know you're not having to start you know from scratch and build things which a lot of other shows that we're planning to be in you know and then you know shops are shutting down you know construction shops where they're making things so so the ramp up is a little different but i i don't know i don't know what the protocol precedent will be what i do know is there are very significant conversations many many times a week happening with the broadway league and with the producers and with the unions you know especially now that so many films and television shows are back to work that there's a lot being learned about protocol and i feel like our job is to listen and learn from from those experiences we obviously have a live audience to also you know navigate which is a incredibly significant um and an essential thing that we need to get right so the key is you know don't get back until we're ready um and and i i wish i could say it was this date or that day i don't i don't know that but i know that it's not going to be before um the end of may for broadway that's that's what's been announced and you've directed television as well um do you see a lot of talent both actors directors and producers are folks you know moving shifting from broadway back to tv and and movies or most people specialists that really act only are only really involved in in broadway no i think that you know especially if you're talking about actors actors often enjoy working in film and television it's long hours for shorter periods of time there's a lot of benefit in terms of how widely the thing can be seen there's residual income so there's passive income which which comes through their unions which is not always the case in a broadway show where you sort of have to for the most part go and do the show um to earn your money um and you know the the challenge is like it's just there's only x amount of jobs you know it's just it's very very competitive um and so it's usually not out of lack of desire that people that work in the theater um don't work in film or television it's about opportunity um and about making those opportunities so i think that there's a lot of people who have made their life in the theater uh you know in a very intentional and um sort of full way over the last five 10 15 20 years who now might be able to uh you know only focus on putting their energy into um trying to you know make some inroads and phone television but you know it's it's a it's tough it's a lot of people trying to get in the door so it's a it's a very crowded and competitive marketplace um and there's there's not a lot of people that hold the key to these these places so um the desire to do it might be um at a high level um the amount of opportunities just in the sort of supply and demand is i think something that will also determine um how feasible that is but my hope is that people can find work if they can't make their own work that they can um try to find places you know obviously using their craft um to make their livelihood um right now it's just it's it's a real challenge um and so there's a lot of our friends um you know that that are struggling with that yeah so i got a question from a 12 year old here in the audience that's about like you're ready for two years more advanced than i have um an actor wants to know you know how do they shift from an actor to a director you know for middle school or high school production and then also wants to know what is the process and when will they be able to produce a high school version of hamilton the high school version of hamilton has to do with the rights and licensing so that's um that's a decision that's in a room that i'm not in um and i don't know the answer to that uh but i look forward to seeing all those productions um i'm excited about that when it does happen uh and you know i think it really depends on who you are but i learned best by doing so one of the nice things that you know that's true about being in school whether it's middle school or high school or college is that there's a lot of the producing which is taken care of it's not that hard to get space in college it's very hard to get space to produce a show when you're not in college when you're in a city whether it's cleveland or boston or chicago or new york city it's a very very uh competitive and an expensive part of producing there's only so many spaces and it always costs more money than you think whereas in college you can go to your professor and say hey is anybody using the gym from eight to midnight or you go to the you know the facilities uh manager and say that like we were doing our shows in like in the gymnasium sharing it with the volleyball team when i was in college we were using rehearsal rooms that weren't being used as classrooms and we just thought if we lock up and keep everything clean can we use them so that really helped us practice and home because that's how we got our 10 000 hours so i think it's it's really great to learn by studying um by reading what you can by watching other people do it and then by doing so if you're in you know middle school or high school and there's an opportunity to maybe assist uh one of the directors if it's a teacher or a visiting professional i think that you know can have a lot of utility i think it's also important to try to make your own work outside of school so you can with your friends you know anything can be a theater you know you can do a lot of stuff outside now um that's obviously getting colder but you know do your version of shakespeare in the park but write a play if you don't want to do shakespeare and and get your friends together and recruit them and if you listen to a lot of people that make theater a lot of their childhood was and then i grabbed three neighbors and two dogs and my sisters and we made a show so i think it's about doing and doing and doing so 20 years you've been doing this now was there ever a point where you said you know what like i'm just going to go be a lawyer or you know never no never so how did you you know granted you've had a couple of the biggest hits ever but when there was a point where you were challenged or a point where you were down how did you get through that was it friends was it internal um was it keeping an eye on the bigger picture what was your method for getting through the troughs uh the trough of despair i love talking to entrepreneurs i listened to a lot of how i built this so by guy roz so i'm pretty hip to this startup listen to all those podcasts you know i think friends are really important i think your collaborators the people that you're with a day in and day out that understand um i think it's really nice to talk to people that just implicitly get what you're you know what you're expressing because they're where you are um it's nice to talk to people that have gotten out of that spot just like it's nice to be with people that haven't yet entered that so i think the people around you provide a real ballast um and for me it was just the work just i could always go back into the work i knew i could always be better i knew i could always do more um and you know there there's a lot that you can't control markets and i think it's something that we all experience in our in our lives and certainly feeling that you know in a moment of you know sort of global pandemic so what can you control and in the work i could control my attitude and i could control how much time i put into it that was up to me what happened was not up to me but i just thought well then i won't be outworked and i'll have the best possible attitude and those are two things that have gotten me a lot of my subsequent jobs people didn't mind being with me and they knew that i was going to come early and i was going to stay late um and so if you can decide that you don't want to be outworked you can get you can get ahead it also then gives you something to do and it gives you community and for me my work really only exists as a director and a producer an occasional writer but really director and producer when i'm with other people so that also then connects me back to the first point which is be with other people be creative be making things because i wasn't getting paid in my 20s i mean really any of my 20s to direct so if you were to work another job where they said you're going to work eight years and not get paid and when i say not get paid i mean maybe i made a thousand dollars or 2500 a year from this like i really was not getting i was doing it for free i was making my living doing other things and you know that's a that's what it's going to be like you know you have to anticipate that as a young director in your in your 20s you're going to be hiring yourself it's going to be really hard to get other jobs there are anomalies of course but that's the reality and if you want to go into a job where you know you're working five six seven eight years and not making any real money so you have to have another job along with it there's also not a lot of time to be in any trough because you got to go bust your butt to you know try to earn the dough so you can do what you want to do all right so i've got kind of a popcorn three popcorn questions here kind of rapid fire um you ready all right you gotta brace up man here we go if if you could go back in time and work in any player musical that you have not worked in what would it be and why what show would i like to have been around maybe a chorus line you know which was really the first workshop musical which took stories of the real people of the dancers and created a show out of it michael bennett was complicated to work with um and the process of that was not one that i would have handled in the same way uh but that show really put broadway on you know on a on a different map um and and it was a story about people looking for work and i think that's why the show resonated and ran for 15 years on broadway and toured for for so long um we all know what it's like to want a job you know the first number is i hope i get it god i hope i get it um that's a show that i think was was quite uh meaningful and seismic in that way and it would have been something to be around that and then and also and i'm you know i'm i think the original production of fiddler is also something that i would have wanted to be around jerome robbins again very difficult man to work with but the spirit of that show is something that i i feel like really addresses so much of what i care about you know community and the challenge to a community when things change which is effectively what that show is so that's not too popcorny but it is two answers that that that's pretty good man pretty good um i was worried for a second there all right number two are you waiting for too long or that i didn't i didn't have an answer i don't know you were thinking there for a while man i was like those 25 there's a lot of shows there's a lot of shows it's 25 years of watching film man um all right number two for the introverts in the room right and who would think you could be an introvert and be in broadway right it's literally the biggest fear for almost everybody but there are i assume of course what what's your what's your recommendation for people particularly young folks overcoming some of those uh introvert fears and and being either director actor producer whatever look most people's greatest fear is not death it's speaking in public and to stand in front of a group of 10 people 100 people a thousand people and express yourself either in character or as yourself is terrifying and most of the people that you see perform have at some moment had to overcome that and climb you know climb over that hill and some of them it happens 10 years into their career some 15 some some people work through it but it's a real challenge but i think that there's a lot of introverts you know that that work in in the theater you know there's also different positions that you can have right there's you know designers who are not necessarily in front of huge groups of people writers are often not in front of huge groups of people they're often on their own uh you know actors obviously have to uh you know take on a different task in the storytelling but i think it's you know you you know what your interests are and what your passions are and if you're doing something that is completely terrifying to you constantly you need to assess if it's the best thing for your well-being but i do think it's important to put yourself in situations if you can where you're not comfortable and and that's how you grow so if it's something that causes panic and it is lasting for you know months and years of your life maybe that there's a moment to reassess that but i think embracing and knowing you're going to counter some uncomfortability means you're actually doing the work if you're doing things that you don't ever feel unchallenged by or you always feel safe you might not be pushing yourself in the in the fullest way which is not to say that introverts need to be on broadway but it just means think about what it is that you care about and and try to do that awesome and so you know one last question just around this any any book like is there a dummies for for theater like what what's a book that did you really think really represents a way for people to learn more about the the guts of the industry a there's a great book called a sense of direction by bill ball which i really liked um he was a really good director in the regions um you know worked a lot at the old globe in san diego and wrote a really beautiful book about directing which i always thought was very meaningful and then i also loved reading directors talking about directors the two other books i recommend one is by walter merch i think it's called conversations with merch and it's incredible he's a film editor and the other one is another conversation book called converse my conversation our conversations with wilder which is billy wilder and cameron crowe cameron crowe made jerry maguire and singles and almost famous and his hero was billy wilder and he sat down for these interviews that's mostly and more about film directing but it's an incredible book and i've given it as a gift to many many people well tommy that's a an appropriate end because we're going to give a gift away now to three lucky winners who are uh you want a drum roll for me man and i'll call them out uh uh you're the director maybe i drum roll and then you know we just go from there right we'll figure that out we'll just call them out all right so the winners the winners you've heard the story you've met the man and now you'll get to see the show uh via a year-long subscription to disney plus where hamilton has featured darren edwards claire crunk and shayna haynes if you're there throw your name up in the uh throw a congrats up in the uh in the chat and we're super excited um tommy this was incredible not only the interview but taking a bunch of questions from our folks here again uh you've you've done it at the highest level man and provided a lot of insight for our folks here in chattanooga and really around the world that are listening to this um on what it takes to be successful whether you think you have or not i think the world definitely thinks you have um and keep pressing on i appreciate it thank you for having me a part of this and i'm happy to to see all the work that you're doing and all the good you're doing so thanks for including me all right take care brother okay thanks bye bye everybody all right well everybody thank you so much again for for joining in with thomas calen and the team here uh colab build manage cell this was the first of a series of conversations that we're going to have with innovators and creators and entrepreneurs of all types and so again thank you to our winners we'll connect you for the disney plus subscription for a year and hope that you watch hamilton and understand what success looks like in theater take care we're here [Applause] you're doing great i'm right here [Music] being here matters now more than ever as a tennessee not-for-profit with a mission to serve we've made a promise to be right here for you today and tomorrow evening else we'll be right here [Music] consumed by constant online activity pushing the limits of unlimited bandwidth in the it's devices to know that there is one internet provider with no data caps or added fees as we all cross over into the device age [Music] [Music] where are you are you here are you there are you on this planet are you on the way on the verge on the brink are you leading the pack or just getting started are you stuck did you decide somewhere along the way that this was the only place you could be that everywhere else was out of reach it's a simple question we ask ourselves constantly where am i where am i going where am i going to end up but that's the wrong question it misses the point entirely so let me ask you the right question where would you rather be now that is a question for the bold where would you rather be it's a reflection of self it centers us and sets the course it demands a calibration to what's important that's the question that brings us to clarity because knowing where you are is one thing but knowing what you fight for and what you believe in is everything where would you rather be it points us to the larger questions that will define us what will you dare do what does winning mean what will you leave behind we know that by uncovering the answers we can navigate from where you are today to where you want to go together on your side by your side so with that i ask you this one more time where would you rather be we won't stop until we help you get there so let's get started are you coming for more than 170 years working people have trusted the financial protection benefits provided through unum group businesses we protect tens of millions of individuals and families worldwide with benefits and services provided through the workplace our businesses including unum us colonial life and unum uk offer a range of valuable products including short and long term disability life dental vision accident hospital and critical illness insurance uh you

Channel: The Company Lab

Views: 348

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: dQFzErZgOQI

Length: 82min 35sec (4955 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020