25 Things I Still Believe About Broadway

Twenty-five years ago, I accidentally found my way into Broadway.

What started as a first job eventually became a career, then a company, and ultimately a calling. Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of working with producers, marketers, investors, artists, theatre owners, ticketing executives, press agents, general managers, and countless others who have dedicated their lives to this industry.

A lot has changed in those twenty-five years. Technology changed. Consumer behavior changed. Ticket prices changed. Marketing changed. Entire business models emerged and disappeared. Broadway has navigated recessions, a pandemic, and more predictions of its demise than I can count.

But some things haven’t changed at all.

As Situation celebrates its 25th anniversary, I found myself reflecting on the lessons that seem just as true today as they were when I started. Some are observations. Some are frustrations. Some are compliments. Most are probably a little bit of all three.

They’re certainly not universal truths, and reasonable people will disagree with some of them. They’re simply things I’ve observed over twenty-five years of working in and around Broadway.

Here are twenty-five things I still believe about this industry.

How can something that does so much good leave so many seats unused? Every night, we have remarkable confidence about which seats are likely to go unsold, yet thousands still sit empty while people who would genuinely benefit from being in those seats never get the chance. The more I think about it, the crazier it feels. I also don’t believe solving this problem should fall entirely on the backs of producers. This is bigger than Broadway. It’s a city issue, an access issue, and a community issue. There is an enormous opportunity for public-private partnerships to connect unused inventory with people who otherwise couldn’t afford these experiences. The more work I do through Situation Project, the more convinced I become that this problem is solvable.

I often joke that I accidentally fell into Broadway. Looking back, it was one of the luckiest accidents of my life. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve met an extraordinary group of people who were willing to help, mentor, encourage, and support me as I built Situation. So many people opened doors when they didn’t have to. So many offered guidance without expecting anything in return. For all of our industry’s flaws — and every industry has them — I’ve always believed Broadway attracts people who genuinely care about one another. BC/EFA, The Broadway Green Alliance, Black Theatre United… just look at all of the amazing community-driven organizations. It’s awe-inspiring. As I played poker at this year’s fantastic Broadway Bets, I watched two things: 1) my chip stock quickly disappeared faster than I could have imagined, and 2) so many of the amazing folks that make up the industry all in one room together, and how special this community really is.

This is a people business, and people are wonderfully complicated. They show up to work carrying all the same things the rest of us do: family challenges, health concerns, career ambitions, personal victories, and occasional heartbreak. None of that disappears when they walk into a meeting. None of that disappears when they have millions of dollars on the line with an upcoming show they are producing. The stress is substantial; we all need support in one way or another. A friend of mine, Charlie, once told me, “There are relationship people and transactional people. Find the relationship people.” Twenty-five years later, I still think that’s some of the best advice I’ve ever received. The people who play the long game are the people worth building with. They will have your back when you need them — and trust me, we will all have moments when we realize who’s really in our corner and who isn’t.

Given the depth of this industry as a relationships business, if you’re not legit, you’re gone. The good ones don’t simply endure, they have a proven track record of being straight with people, which is how and why doors keep opening for them. That is one of the genuine benefits of working in a relatively small industry: the bad apples tend not to last long.

If Broadway is a relationship business, then trust is the currency that powers it. To this day, many of my most meaningful business relationships were built long before lawyers became involved. That’s not because contracts don’t matter — they absolutely do. It’s because trust matters more. The moment a conversation starts with “what does the contract say?” is usually the moment a relationship has drifted off course.

I have always had deep respect for the work producers do. It has never been harder to produce on Broadway. The economics are tougher. The risks are higher. The number of stakeholders continues to grow. Every production feels like an increasingly complicated puzzle with more moving pieces and greater financial exposure. With labor costs on a one-way path upward and ticket prices having already taken a significant leap over the past decade, we need to find ways to alleviate some of the risk, or I fear the next generation will seek new canvases to play on. What I try to remind producers on opening night: you should be so proud of what you’ve done. Against a stack of ever-growing headwinds, getting a show on its feet on Broadway is an event unto itself to be celebrated.

If you look objectively at the data, there is very little evidence that critical praise guarantees long-term commercial success. In some cases, it doesn’t even guarantee short-term success. Yet we remain obsessed with critics. Their opinions continue to occupy a disproportionate amount of emotional and strategic real estate in our industry. Constructive feedback during development is incredibly valuable. Treating opening-night reviews as destiny feels increasingly outdated. We give this conversation far more oxygen than it deserves.

We often talk about Broadway as a collective industry. In practice, we frequently behave like a collection of competitors protecting scarce resources. Limited growth tends to create limiting behaviors. Everyone protects their lists, their customers, their data, and their opportunities. Some of that is understandable. But it can also prevent the collaboration necessary to expand the overall market. Sometimes we spend too much energy fighting over slices and not enough energy baking a larger pie.

People often ask what it takes to succeed on Broadway. Talent matters. Hard work matters. Intelligence matters. But one factor gets overlooked: staying power. Can you remain in the game long enough for opportunities to find you? Can you survive the years when the rewards don’t yet match the effort? For many talented people, the challenge isn’t ability — it’s affordability. The economics of building a show or a career in this industry over a long period of time remain one of the biggest barriers to attracting and retaining great talent. You can’t win the game if you can’t stay in the game. I wonder how many remarkable artists we’ve lost, not to a lack of passion or ability, but to the financial realities of making a living.

We talk endlessly about ticket buyers. We spend surprisingly little time investing in them. A colleague once told me, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your values.” Too often, Broadway allocates resources as though portions of our most loyal audiences are simply expected to show up. We spend a tremendous amount of energy talking about productions, investors, critics, awards, and industry dynamics, but not nearly enough time understanding and nurturing the people who make all of it possible.

Somewhere right now, a young producer is trying to raise money for a project. Somewhere else, an entrepreneur is pitching an idea that’s going to get rejected more times than they’d like. I wish I had a more glamorous answer, but success on Broadway is mostly discipline. It’s persistence. It’s professionalism. It’s surviving failure long enough to learn from it. This industry is built on legacy models and long-term relationships — injecting new ideas into it takes time. There are no overnight successes in Broadway business, outside of a handful of outliers. I’ve seen some amazing disruptors in this industry who took a long time to break through, longer than they should have. Most people don’t fail because they aren’t talented. They fail because they quit too early. Broadway needs the next generation more than it realizes. Keep your costs low and your aspirations high. Stay in the game.

Broadway has many more have-nots than have-lots. Just like the American political system, the have-nots think the have-lots should give more, while the have-lots think they already carry too much of the load. I’ll stay out of this argument because just like the American political system, conversations on religion, politics, or sex never end well, so I’ll just leave this point here.

One of the things I loved during the pandemic was the willingness to challenge assumptions. With the lights of our theatres turned off, we were thrust into new conversations about new business models, new audience experiences, new partnerships, new venues, and entirely new ways of thinking. Then the lights came back on — and so did our habits. The gravitational pull of “this is how we’ve always done it” remains one of the strongest forces in our industry. Some traditions deserve protecting. Others deserve questioning. We aren’t always great at telling the difference. The world has changed, and we must too.

A relatively small group of people continues to shape much of Broadway’s future. That’s not unique to theatre — that’s modern capitalism. Most industries operate the same way in one form or another. The difference is that many of Broadway’s power brokers genuinely care about the future of the business because they’ve spent decades building it. I respect that. What concerns me more is the growing influence of short-term financial forces. Private equity and long-term stewardship don’t always share the same priorities, and Broadway’s future depends on people thinking beyond the next quarter.

One thing I’ve always found fascinating is how much people outside the industry enjoy talking about Broadway. Mention theatre at a dinner party, and suddenly everyone has a story. I often joke that I like people more when they like theatre — similar to how I trust people who like animals. There’s something about live performance that sparks curiosity, conversation, and connection. I wouldn’t necessarily call Broadway cool — in fact, I’m not sure anything with an average audience age of 45 is allowed to be called cool. But theatre? Theatre is sexy. And while some will point to the ATP as a sign of health, I point to the DTT metric — Distance to Theatre, which I totally made up — as a far more telling sign. Our theatres are full of people from around the world at levels we’ve never seen before, which shows the lengths people will go to experience theatre.

There’s a quote from Warren Buffet that goes something like, “It’s good to learn from your own mistakes. It’s better to learn from others’ mistakes.” Broadway is, in many ways, a transparent business for two key reasons — we publish our weekly grosses and we share a common labor pool that carries historical industry knowledge. It’s not that hard to find the underlying truth in our collective mistakes and failures. Most industries don’t have this advantage. Yet even with that insight in hand, we continue to repeat behaviors while expecting different outcomes.

For all the conversations about budgets and economics, Broadway still recognizes excellence. I’ve seen clients hire the better partner instead of the cheaper one. I’ve watched talented people earn opportunities because of the quality of their work rather than the aggressiveness of their sales pitch. That’s healthy. It reinforces something an old friend, Ira, once shared with me: “Do what you do, do it better than everyone else, and the rest will work itself out.”

You can’t predict a hit. If someone tells you they can, they’re lying. What you can predict is competence. You can identify producers, executives, marketers, and operators who consistently make smart decisions. Experience matters. Instinct matters. Judgment matters. Producing remains a craft, and the people who have mastered that craft tend to create opportunities for success more often than chance alone would suggest. Any investment carries risk — that’s why it’s called an investment. But risky implies you don’t know the risk. The fact that you can look back at decades of publicly reported show grosses says a lot. The risk is centered mostly on who is leading the ship, not the industry at large.

Broadway’s heart is often more inclusive than its systems. Most exclusion isn’t born from bad intentions. It’s born from economic realities, institutional habits, and survival instincts. But the outcome is often the same. We can simultaneously celebrate how far we’ve come while acknowledging how much further we still have to go. I’m confident progress will continue.

I’ve never worked in an industry with more creative people. And I don’t just mean artists. I mean producers, marketers, investors, operators, designers, and entrepreneurs. Broadway requires constant problem-solving, adaptation, and invention. It’s real-time creativity operating at scale. For an industry that appears relatively small from the outside, its cultural influence is enormous — and that’s a function of its people.

There is no easy path to success on Broadway. The people who consistently succeed are usually the people willing to do the uncomfortable work. They have the difficult conversations. They negotiate the complicated deals. They solve the messy problems instead of avoiding them. As my friend John likes to remind me, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

The larger the room, the less likely it is that the smartest idea wins. More is not more when it comes to effective meetings. Big meetings often reward confidence over insight and volume over thoughtfulness. I’ve always preferred smaller rooms and smaller teams as they create more candid conversations. That’s where trust gets built and better decisions get made. I’m not advocating for fewer people involved — I’m advocating for a more strategic approach to how we collaborate and make the most of the extraordinary talent all around us.

Of course financial success matters. It should. But some of the most meaningful outcomes I’ve witnessed had nothing to do with weekly grosses. I’ve seen productions influence culture, shape public policy, inspire careers, strengthen communities, and change lives. Broadway creates impact that extends far beyond a financial statement, yet we often evaluate success through an incredibly narrow lens. The Broadway ecosystem of impact is significant and meaningful in so many ways.

One of the most consistent patterns I’ve observed is that successful producers tend to have successful teams. That isn’t accidental. Great leaders attract talented people. Talented people attract other talented people. Over time, those relationships compound. The loyalty and trust within the strongest teams are often a competitive advantage all their own.

The uncomfortable math is that the cost of creating theatre has grown faster than the audience’s willingness to pay for it. Many of the challenges on this list ultimately trace back to that reality. When growth is limited, competition intensifies. Collaboration becomes harder. Risk tolerance shrinks. Success starts feeling like a zero-sum game. My success shouldn’t require your pain. Broadway’s future depends on growing the pie, not simply redistributing the slices. That’s been true for twenty-five years — and it’s still true today.

Thank you to an industry that has given me far more than I’ve been able to give in return.

Here’s to hopefully twenty-five more.