Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Actors, writers, and directors rightfully receive the most attention for a Broadway production, but the producer is just as crucial as ensuring a show's success or failure. Jeffrey Seller is one of the most prolific Broadway producers of the last 30 years, behind shows that now define their respective eras. Jeffrey was an early believer in Rent, back when it was just an idea that his friend Jonathan Larson had. Jeffrey's also been the producer behind Avenue Q, and he helped mentor a young man called, oh, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and produced In the Heights and Hamilton.

Jeffrey Seller has written a new memoir ranging from a difficult childhood as an adopted kid in the Detroit suburbs to why theater was the first thing that really gave him purpose. He saw a way for it to give purpose to other people. He helped start Rush tickets for theaters so that more people could see Broadway and maybe get inspired. The book is aptly named Theater Kid, and there are so many great stories in this book. Jeffrey Seller is here now in studio. Welcome to WNYC.

Jeffrey Seller: Oh, thank you, Alison. It's so fun to be here today with you.

Alison Stewart: You wrote in the book that your experience with theater started in the fourth grade. You performed in a Purim play at a temple in Detroit, and you write, "Being in a play changes my life. I am filled with purpose for the first time." Why do you think this experience filled you with purpose?

Jeffrey Seller: Because we make something. Because it's so hard to bring together dialogue, music, dancing, and when a group of people come together and they rehearse that show, in the case of a Purim play, every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and then feel the joy and the cheering of an audience when they get to watch that finished product, it's like nothing else I've ever done in my life. It's the funnest activity, but it's also the most rewarding activity.

Alison Stewart: Was it ever frightening or challenging?

Jeffrey Seller: Certainly when I was in plays, if you're not nervous, then you're not serious enough. Everybody, including some of our greatest performers today on Broadway, would say that they're still nervous every night when they go on. That nervousness is the need and the desire to do well, to fulfill the mission of the work.

Alison Stewart: In this book, there are so many stories of your childhood, and you lived through a lot. You lived through poverty, an ill parent, a tough neighborhood. As you wrote the memoir, what revelations did you have about your childhood that maybe you wouldn't have realized if you hadn't sat down and wrote them out?

Jeffrey Seller: I grew up with A very challenging, loving, difficult father, and writing this book both held him accountable, but it brought forward a love for him that I don't know that I had ever experienced in his life. He died 11 years ago. My father did not support the family, betrayed my mother, suffered a motorcycle accident, and bankrupt two businesses. He impoverished us, and yet, anytime I ever said to my dad, "Hey, will you take me down to the temple to audition for the Purim play?" You know what he said? "Get in the car. " He said that over and over when I wanted to go to the next play in Royal Oak or the next play at Michigan Opera Theater, the next opera, when I auditioned for the children's chorus. Writing a book like this was a way to get to know him better.

Alison Stewart: That must have been challenging for you to have those. Two ideas can exist at the same time in your head, but sometimes it can get crowded in there.

Jeffrey Seller: Oh, my gosh. Yes. I was led with the notion that I have to show what happened, tell the story. Tell the story of that awful camping trip, and tell the story of him taking me to that audition at the community theater when I'm in seventh grade, and then I get the part.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jeffrey Seller. The name of his book is Theater Kid. You tell a story about coming to New York as a teenager from Michigan, and you get to see Dreamgirls starring Jennifer Holiday. You went to Joe Allen for the first time. First of all, what were your first impressions of New York?

Jeffrey Seller: I will still tell you that the single best experience I ever had as an audience member was watching Dreamgirls in June of 1982, about four weeks after almost every single cast member on that stage won the Tony Award. Coming to Times Square for the first time, I remember, oh, walking from the Port Authority with my cousin Marty and then finding ourselves at 46th street and Broadway, and you're like, "Oh, this is it?" because it was grimy and fabulous all at the same time. There's a Howard Johnson's that look crappy, and then there's big ads for Sony and Iowa and Annie and Woman of the Year didn't exist yet.

Then there's also a theater that's right next to the Howard Johnson's called the Gaiety. I'm 17 years old, and I am not yet out to myself or anybody else, but I want to know what's going on at the Gaiety.

Alison Stewart: I remember going to that Howard Johnson's and having really cheap drinks on 45th Street.

Jeffrey Seller: Yes. I knew Howard Johnson's from home in Detroit because I loved their chocolate chip ice cream.

Alison Stewart: When did you decide that New York was going to be the place for you?

Jeffrey Seller: By the time I got to college at the University of Michigan, that was where I transitioned from being in plays to directing and producing plays. Making that leap to become a producer was all about me saying, "Who picks the play?" I realized then and there that the most important decision a producer will ever make is what play to do, what musical to do, and is that musical a reflection of my values, of my wants and needs, and desires, and my aesthetic?

Alison Stewart: Is being a producer something you can teach someone, or is it a matter of taste?

Jeffrey Seller: I think you could teach someone, yes, but I also think it's very instinctual. What is taste? Is anyone's taste any better or worse than anyone else's? In my process, all I try to do is please myself. I loved Rent. I loved Jonathan's characters, I loved Jonathan's music, and it made the hair on my arm stand up. That's why I did it. I didn't know if anyone else would be as pleased. I think a good producer pleases themself, himself, herself, and then hope that the audience joins them.

Alison Stewart: A good chunk of the book deals with Jonathan Larson. You wrote him a letter that you wrote to him after seeing him perform his rock monologue Boho Days. What do you remember about that?

Jeffrey Seller: Oh, I can see it. He's at the piano on this empty stage. There's a piano, bass, and drum player, and he is ferocious at this piano. He's attacking the piano and he is singing these songs, The Green Grain Dress, and Oh, What a Way to Spend a Day, and his Sunday in the Park parody about brunch. He is joyous, furious, and somehow he's a 30-year-old composer of rock musicals that nobody wants to produce. He's living in the fourth floor walk up of an apartment down on Greenwich where the bathtub is really in the kitchen, and he's asking himself, "Should I keep writing these rock musicals that nobody wants to produce or should I go take this job as a copywriter and maybe finally make a living?"

As I'm a 25-year-old who's a booker, I make a living, but I don't like my job, I want to be a producer, I just broke up from a six-year relationship, and I'm afraid I'm going to be lonely for the rest of my life, and I'm wondering, "Will I ever be a producer?" I'm watching this man, and the hair on my arms is tingling, and I'm filled with emotion. I'm crying, I'm laughing, I'm cheering, and I'm saying, "How does this man, who I've never met in my entire life, tell my story?" He was telling my story.

Alison Stewart: I think all 20-somethings in the '80s and '90s felt that about what Jonathan Larson did and what Rent did.

Jeffrey Seller: Yes, and I want to qualify that, of course, Boho Days gets a title change, and it becomes Tick, Tick... Boom!, because, of course, what Jonathan heard in his head as a 30-year-old was this tick, tick, boom that he thought he was going to explode if he didn't succeed soon.

Alison Stewart: I did want to ask you about what you did before that point, because you were working as a booker for the Weisslers. Is that how you say it?

Jeffrey Seller: Yes, the Barry and Fran Weissler, the great producers.

Alison Stewart: You write, "Working for them was like getting a PhD in Broadway production." How so?

Jeffrey Seller: Oh my gosh. The Weisslers became famous for doing these big star revivals at a period on Broadway where there weren't a lot of new musicals. In quick succession, they did Zorba with Anthony Quinn while I was still in college. Then, when I got to join them in 1997, they were doing a revival of Cabaret with Joel Grey. They were doing a revival thereafter of Topol in Fiddler on the Roof. My job was to be that guy who plans the tour that's going to go from Columbus to Chicago to Minneapolis, Denver, all over the country. It's a sales job, it's a negotiation job, and it's a coordination job.

What they did in their office is all facets of production. They had their producing arm, then they had their booking arm in-house, and they had their general management arm that does all of the day-to-day nuts and bolts. They even did their merchandising in-house. They did it all so they could conceive, "We're going to do this show, and then we'll take it right through our entire office, and that's how we're going to make it happen." That's where I lived and worked. Not lived, but you felt like you lived there.

Alison Stewart: You felt you lived there.

Jeffrey Seller: That's where I worked for three and a half years, learning every facet of how you make a show and then how you tour it all over the country.

Alison Stewart: You make a joke that your last name is Seller.

Jeffrey Seller: I know. Isn't that eerie? It's like if you're a baker and you're a Baker, but I'm a Seller and I sell stuff.

Alison Stewart: What do you sell? What do you think you sell?

Jeffrey Seller: The most important thing I sell is the ticket. If I can't sell the ticket, I'm out of business, but on the way to selling that ticket, I have to sell so many more things, because if I fall in love with this new rock musical that's based on La bohème and takes place today in the East Village in which Mimi has AIDS instead of tuberculosis, I got to go sell it to investors who are going to give me money to do it. I had a lot of investors who I tried to get a little bit of money from, that said, "I don't even understand this. No, thank you." I've got to sell it to a not-for-profit theater company, maybe, who wants to join me to partner.

I have to sell it to the landlords on Broadway who control those theaters and decide what they want to put in. I have to sell it to the group sales agents, who I'm hoping will buy tickets not one or two at a time, but 20 or 30 or 100 at a time. I have to sell it to you, Alison, because I got to try to get Jonathan Larson. Sadly, I didn't, and we know why. I have to try to sell it to the press so the press can help publicize it. Once I make that commitment to do the show, I am selling from the day I start all the way until the day we end. When do we make that tough decision to close?

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask that because you have Rent, you have Hamilton, these shows that sold immensely well, but you must have had a show you really believed in that didn't make it. What do you do then?

Jeffrey Seller: It's so painful. You have to walk in that theater and tell that company on Tuesday before the show that we're closing. Maybe we're closing on Sunday. Maybe we're closing in two weeks or in four weeks, and that's part of the job, too.

Alison Stewart: We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Hamilton. I've got a kid who's 17, he's a Hamilton kid. Seven, eight years old, he went as Lafayette because he thought Daveed Diggs was cool, that was a cool thing to do.

Jeffrey Seller: Daveed Diggs was cool and is cool, just for the record, and cooler than I'll ever be.

Alison Stewart: When you think about it, it was a cultural phenomenon, Hamilton was.

Jeffrey Seller: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When did you realize it was going to be a cultural phenomenon, not just a great show?

Jeffrey Seller: When I'm working on a show, and when a team of artists, writers, directors, choreographers are working on a show, all we're trying to do is make a good show. Lynn laughs at me because sometimes I can be caught saying, "Can we do better?" Which is one of the jobs as the producer, cheerleader, nurturer, and sometimes critic, and sometimes the guy who says, "Can you do better?"

Alison Stewart: Nudge.

Jeffrey Seller: Nudge.

Alison Stewart: "We can do better?"

Jeffrey Seller: Yes. We were just trying to make a good show. What was happening is every time we would invite a few people to watch a reading of a workshop, the responses were getting stronger and stronger to the point where we did our final workshop, and two people who meant something to me and had nothing to do with each other said, "Well, that's the best thing I've ever seen." I was like, "What? I'm just trying to make a good show. I'm just trying to figure out how can we compress Act 2 a little bit more." They're like, "It's the best thing I've ever seen."

We never know at the time. Only when we put it in front of the audience does it start to reveal itself. We don't know. It is the magic of adding the audience to the play, to the musical. What we certainly saw as soon as we started performing in front of an audience is that it was affecting people in a much bigger way than a normal good musical.

Alison Stewart: I did want to say this before we wrap. I want to talk a little bit about how you helped Rush tickets come about.

Jeffrey Seller: Oh, it's probably my favorite topic.

Alison Stewart: It's an important topic because Broadway can be so expensive for people, and it can really move people if they could just see a show, and you saw a way to help people see a show.

Jeffrey Seller: Once again, it started with the notion that when my then business partner, Kevin McCollum, and I were producing Rent, I was 31 years old. I was a booker, and I could barely afford a full-price ticket to a Broadway show at that moment. I'm like, "If I'm going to go put a show on Broadway, I got to take care of my people, of young people, of all people who can't afford that ticket." We said, "We're going to have to have some sort of a cheap ticket." We knew that.

There had been some student tickets and stuff like that on Broadway at that time, but they were only for students, if you had an ID, and they were always putting them in the back of the balcony or the second balcony or the heavens. We thought, "Well, number one is it has to be for everybody because you get to New York at age 22 and you still have no money, or maybe you're a retired librarian at 65 and you don't have enough money to go to a Broadway show. It's everybody."

Then we thought, "What if we said, it's 20 bucks, cash only, first two rows in the orchestra, and that group of $20 ticket buyers is going to create an enthusiastic wave that starts in row A and goes all the way to the back of the last row in the balcony? The fact that they're lining up at 6:00 PM means we'll have people outside the theater align and a great marketing tool." What is so amazing is that the first performance of Rent that we ever did was on April 15th, 1996, and we sold all 34 seats, but there were only 34 people there to get them.

Of course, a year later, on a Friday night, there would be three lines, and there would be one for Friday night, one for Saturday matinee, and one for Saturday night, and kids were sleeping overnight on West 41st Street. It was at that point that Kevin and I said, "Someone's going to get hurt. We need to change this." Then we converted the stand-in-line policy to the lottery. That's what we've lived with ever since. Of course, every single one of my shows has used the lottery. When we got to Hamilton, Lynn said, "Well, it's got to be an Alexander Hamilton." Now we took it down from 20 bucks to 10 bucks.

Alison Stewart: Perfect. There are so many good stories in this book, Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir. It is by Jeffrey Seller. Thank you for coming to the studio today.

Jeffrey Seller: Alison, it's so nice to be down here with you. My pleasure.