How Did One Producer Turn Two New Shows Into Broadway Hits in a Single Year?

Broadway is more popular than ever, and putting on a musical has never cost more. But if the story is good enough, the tickets will sell.

"Loser!" That was the tagline Broadway producer Kevin McCollum wrote for an ad in The New York Times promoting his own musical, Something Rotten!

Something Rotten! is an original musical. Set in the distant past, it follows two brothers who invent the musical as a form of stage performance, only for a certain "Shakespeare" to turn up and accuse them of plagiarism. Farce ensues... The show earned 10 nominations at the Tony Awards, theater's highest honor, but won just one, for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. That same night, Kevin's other original production, Hand to God, went home empty-handed from five Tony nominations.

Kevin was the night's perennial runner-up.

Now both shows' box office looked to be in danger. An original production has no film or novel to borrow momentum from, let alone a built-in fan base, and with no award to vouch for it, it is hard to imagine audiences buying tickets to a show they know nothing about. By the usual reckoning, original shows are a thankless business: twice the work for half the return.

Kevin doesn't see it that way. He has told foreign media that working with newcomers on an entirely new story always makes communication smoother and coordination easier, and that "first-time writers always come up with something more interesting, something more of the moment." Audiences, he believes, also want to be "surprised" when they come to the theater; people are curious.

"Honestly, if the story is good enough, you don't have to worry about selling it. The hard part comes one step earlier: advance sales," Kevin told QDaily. He also explained how Something Rotten! and Hand to God turned their box office around.

Something Rotten! was "lucky," he said. Although it lost at the Tonys, it was the first musical to perform during the ceremony. "That let audiences see the show and remember it, and made up for the exposure you might otherwise lose after losing." Then Kevin and his publicity team, with nothing left to lose, ran the ad "Loser! Best Musical." The glaring word "Loser" in big type stirred up interest in Something Rotten! The musical took in US$750,000 in its first two days of performances and kept bringing in at least US$1 million a week after that. A little-known original musical had become a commercial success.

With the other show, the play Hand to God, Kevin was even more headstrong: he took down every billboard for it. "I don't believe advertising can sell audiences a product they've never heard of. Most of the time, advertising is wasted money, and the result is the same as unsold tickets and a loss."

He went back to basics: keep operating costs down and build word-of-mouth. "The weekly running cost of this play is very low (compared with other shows). It breaks even at about US$270,000 a week." Running so lean left room to cut ticket prices and draw people in cheaply. It was a risky move: audiences can easily see what a production is up to, and a play can quickly look cheap. Fortunately, most audiences were won over by the performances in Hand to God. As praise and likes piled up online, the show raised its prices once a week, until they had doubled.

"At the start, getting more people into the theater matters far more than making money," Kevin said.

Broadway, New York

In 1994, Kevin earned his first Tony nomination, for Damn Yankees, and his career as a producer began. A production usually has two producers: one who drives the rehearsal schedule, and one who controls and allocates spending. The two roles are like commerce and art themselves; to some extent, one gains only at the other's expense. Kevin took on both and struck a perfect balance. Over more than 20 years, he has put on nearly 15 acclaimed, commercially successful plays and musicals, including Rent, Avenue Q and In the Heights, and has won three Tony Awards for Best Musical.

We asked Kevin how Broadway has changed over the past 20 years, and how he does his job as the "man behind the scenes." His answer, to our surprise, was simple: build good word-of-mouth, because the audience in the seats is the best advertisement. He says this is both the best and the worst of times for producers: theater keeps winning fans but keeps getting more "expensive," and profit margins are being squeezed. "If producers can make use of these (technological) advantages and conditions, the Broadway business will keep growing."

Broadway producer Kevin McCollum

Q = QDaily

K = Kevin McCollum

Q: Your show Damn Yankees was nominated for a Tony in 1994, and that's when your career as a producer really began. Did you want to work in theater from the start?

Before I became a producer, I was actually an actor. But at thirty I was still playing 17-year-old boys over and over, and I found it boring. In 1991 I started a ticket-selling business, and by 1996 it had grown into a ticketing group. We still sell tickets today.

The theater business runs on connections. I had always wanted to help my friends get their scripts onto the stage, so I tried producing, and, to my surprise, I was quite good at it. It suited me.

Q: What does a typical day look like for your team? How is the work divided?

Before we decide to do a show, the first step is talking with the writer, the director and the choreographer. Then the show goes into rehearsal, and different departments start working together: actors, the orchestra, the crew, the general manager, the head of publicity, the PR team and so on. The whole team runs to nearly a hundred people, and the producer is its pivot, coordinating, communicating, leading everyone and keeping the schedule on track.

Of all the stages of producing, developing the show takes the longest. An original production usually takes 3 to 7 years; a revival takes about 1 to 3.

Personally, I require myself to put on at least one show a year, whether it's a touring production or a revival. Right now I'm busy with the London tour of Motown. The Broadway run of Avenue Q just ended, and after that I have two more shows going up on Broadway. By early next year I'll have six projects at different stages to move forward.

Q: As a producer, do you treat theater and musicals more as a business, or do you value the artistic side more? Is there a percentage split between the two?

Business is an art, and art is a business. A producer has to balance the two, so I'd say it's 100% art and 100% business.

Hand to God

Q: Your productions, such as Something Rotten!, Hand to God and Avenue Q, differ enormously in theme and style. How do you choose a show, and what do you look for?

K: Before starting a new project, I usually ask myself a few questions. Can this show fire the audience's imagination? How risky is it? If it's very risky, is that because I'm making something the market hasn't seen yet, answering a question nobody has answered before? Making something different and standing apart from the market matters a great deal to me. When everyone rushes to make tap-dance shows, I have to make something else. It's true that being "unique" can feel like gambling, and the risk is high, but it's still necessary.

Q: Avenue Q, for example, was an "outlier" in the market at the time.

K: Avenue Q is a show about family life. The characters run into a lot of petty, irritating setbacks and difficulties, but life goes on. In fact, my stories generally start from something worldly and mundane and rise to a larger conclusion, showing the big picture through small things. Sharing a show like that with an audience is valuable and meaningful.

Q: And what about the "commercial" side?

K: The "commercial" side doesn't actually conflict with how I choose scripts. "Special" doesn't mean "unsuited to commercial success." To me, the "commercial elements" are characters the audience cares about, plus stakes and a plot that strike a strong chord with the audience.

Q: Your most recent show, Something Rotten!, is original, not adapted from a novel or a film. Does putting a show nobody has heard of on stage hurt the attention it gets?

K: It does have some effect. So when we introduced the "Bottom Brothers," the pair of brothers in the show (the two Shakespeare accuses of plagiarism), we released information about the leads bit by bit, to stir up the audience's curiosity and draw them into the theater to take a look.

In the end, it still comes down to how well you tell a story. Everything is new to the audience; they haven't seen these characters anywhere else. But the "unknown" has its advantages: it gives us a great deal of creative freedom. The characters' looks, costumes and personalities are all up to us.

If the story is good enough, you don't have to worry about selling it. The hard part comes one step earlier, with "advance sales," and that's even harder for a show nobody has heard of. But however hard it is, you can't afford to lose ground at the opening.

Q: So how do you get "advance sales" right? Do you usually run a lot of advertising and publicity?

K: I don't believe advertising can sell audiences a product they've never heard of. Most of the time, advertising is wasted money, and the result is the same as unsold tickets and a loss. I try to budget carefully and make a well-produced show that doesn't cost audiences much to see. Once the price barrier is low, as long as the content is good, the show will find its audience and build word-of-mouth after it has run for a while.

When I did Hand to God, I took down all the Broadway posters and billboards. There was no publicity at all. At each performance, I would talk with the audience in the theater, or let the performance itself get the message across. In the end, the audience became our "advertising." And with less advertising, people didn't know what the show was about, so they got more surprises.

Then there's social media, which didn't exist as a way to promote anything five years ago. Together with the playwright, Rob Askins, we opened a Twitter account for Tyrone, the puppet in Hand to God, and after that we could post videos quickly and promptly. That also serves the play's "word-of-mouth publicity": when people share and like a post, their friends become interested in our show too. A friend's taste is more credible than an advertisement.

Still, this business can't do without print and newspapers. After the opening we ran the "Loser! Best show" ad in The New York Times, and it drew a lot of attention. So print publicity remains indispensable.

Something Rotten!

Q: Speaking of that tagline, it came out after the Tony Awards were announced. Something Rotten! had ten nominations but won only Best Featured Actor in a Musical, which is a pity. How much does winning or losing an award matter to a musical?

K: Winning increases exposure, and to some extent it helps the box office. On the night of the ceremony, we were the first musical company to perform, so a lot of viewers saw us and we got plenty of attention, and naturally ticket sales went up. So in the end, winning doesn't matter that much; the quality of the work matters more. We saw ourselves as glorious in defeat, the loser still crowned king ("Loser is the new winner"), and, as it happened, that idea later became a selling point for Something Rotten!

Q: You like using puppets in your shows.

K: Through a puppet's mouth, people can always say things that politics won't let them say. Puppets are always a bit more honest.

Q: You like shows about ordinary people, and they're almost never big-budget spectacles. Some of those ordinary people even meet tragic ends.

K: True, they're all ordinary people, but in the end ordinary people usually rise above their circumstances, or turn the tables. That might take the form of death, or of life carrying on, or of waking up one day to find happiness right in front of you. I always want to lift people up and tell the audience that everything will be all right. But we all know that in life, we usually lose more than we gain.

Q: Is the American theater market shrinking? How has the industry changed over the years?

K: Quite the opposite: Broadway is becoming more and more popular. People now spend hours every day staring at the screens of their devices. Going to the theater to really watch a show, to have a good cry or a good laugh, has become a welcome break from daily life. This is Broadway's most creative and vibrant period.

But from another angle, Broadway is also getting more and more "expensive." Costs have risen: staff salaries, ticketing, advertising and publicity, and venue fees have all gone up. Ticket prices are rising too, but nowhere near as fast as costs. Ten years ago Broadway began to grow rapidly, and its 40-odd theaters were sold out at almost every performance. Audiences had plenty of choice, and shows could adjust their prices according to how well they were selling; popular tickets could cost more. But venues became much harder to negotiate for. You can no longer put on a show whenever you want, and competition has grown. That forces us producers to get smarter and smarter.

The pressure on producers is greater than ever. Mounting a show is very expensive, especially the cost of the theater, and making money is getting harder. This is an "inventory" business: once the curtain goes up, every unsold seat in the house is a loss. It's like selling airline tickets: once the plane takes off, the unsold seats can never be sold.

Q: Would you compromise, or look for a middle path?

K: Absolutely no compromise! Of course, you do have to bring in more money and spend less. A production usually has one producer who manages the budget and one who tracks the show's progress, and I've taken on both roles. Ticket sales are the industry's main source of profit, but there are other ways to make money now, such as licensing, film adaptations and touring.

Ticket prices can only rise so far. Raise them too much and you drive audiences away, because they're very price-sensitive. And as far as I can tell, for a large part of the audience Broadway tickets aren't cheap; you could even call them "pricey." If a show can't get audiences from every walk of life to buy tickets and come in, it has no point.

Fortunately, technology can help solve part of the problem. We have ticket-selling strategies: how to sell tickets at different times, how to set prices, how to release tickets in waves and so on. "Dynamic pricing" gives us room to try different pricing plans. If producers can make use of these advantages and conditions, the Broadway business will keep growing.

Q: How do you attract the younger generation and get more of them into the theater?

K: Young people on Broadway naturally attract young audiences. Rent premiered 20 years ago, and since then Broadway has become entertainment for all ages.

Q: China has also begun importing some foreign shows and staging them in Chinese, such as your Avenue Q and Mamma Mia! Have you seen them? What do you think of the Chinese theater market, and do you have any advice?

K: I haven't seen them yet, and I'm really looking forward to it. So is this a formal invitation?

We're working with our partner China Media Capital on bringing shows in. I think it's wonderful that Chinese audiences can enjoy the funny moments in these shows and grasp what the creators intended.

As for developing a theater market, my view is rather "academic." I think the most effective way is for experienced people to guide the less experienced, learning through a "master and apprentice" relationship. So China should keep learning from abroad.

Q: What are the strengths of the American musical market? And its weaknesses? Does the musical industry need to compete with, or learn from, the film industry?

K: I think people always mistake film and theater for the same thing. Although they share some commercial elements, they are really two very different industries. In theater, for example, "participation" and "being there in person" are critical; a show succeeds only if the audience comes to the theater to see it.

In the film business, though, the way to make money in the end is to make something audiences can watch at home. Film doesn't have to create something new every day the way theater does; it's more about transmitting a signal.