How Is Live Theater Still Alive?

Making something out of nothing is hard. In the beginning, all you have is your imagination; it’s your only tool, your only muscle. But if you are determined — and lucky — that thing in your imagination can become real. And then, if you’re very lucky, people will pay to see it.

Rocco LANDESMAN: There’s been theater since the beginning of man, really. What is theater? What is going to theater and being in a theater — what is it? What happens? What transpires at that moment? It’s the same as the oldest human endeavor of all, which is gossip. Theater is gossip. This is a crazy idea, I know, except that it’s true. What do you do when you go to the theater? You overhear conversations. It’s staged, but people are talking to each other and you’re listening to them. You’re making assessments about their moral character, about their intentions, about what’s going to happen. This guy’s not trustworthy. She’s ambitious and is concealing it. He’s got designs on this. There’s nothing more human, and more basic to what human beings do, than observing people interact and talking about it among themselves. Gossiping. So, theater is the most fundamental art of all.

That is Rocco Landesman.

LANDESMAN: I’m a Broadway producer and the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.

I’ve known Rocco for a long time. He was one of the first “important” people I got to know when I was starting out as a writer in New York, and he was easily one of the most interesting too. Very sharp, and also … very blunt, with a reputation as a bit of a rogue, which he seemed to enjoy. When he was starting out, the thing in his imagination was a musical that he wanted to call Big River. The plan was to take an American literary classic …

LANDESMAN: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It was my favorite novel.

And set it to music, with new songs by the country legend Roger Miller.

LANDESMAN: I thought and still do think that Roger Miller is the greatest songwriter in American history.

When Landesman heard that Miller was playing a club date in New York, he went to the show, and afterward, he talked his way backstage.

LANDESMAN: I said, I’d like you to write a Broadway musical. He basically didn’t know what I was talking about. Not only had he never written a Broadway musical, he’d never seen one. So, he kind of pawned me off onto to his wife, Mary. And she said, “Well, write a letter.” I wrote him a letter and didn’t get a reply.

Stephen DUBNER: And your credentials as a producer at this point were what?

LANDESMAN: Basically nil. I had been a professor at the Yale School of Drama for a number of years. I had no producing credential of any kind. My credibility was zilch. So, I write a letter and don’t get a reply. I write another letter and don’t get a reply. I write another one, and months go by and nothing’s happening. I keep writing, and finally I got a note — call, actually, from one of his managers, who said, “You seem to be pretty insistent about this, and pretty serious. Why don’t you meet with Roger, and tell him what you have in mind?”

So Landesman flew out to Reno, where Miller was performing, and once again he went backstage afterwards.

LANDESMAN: It was one of the thrills of my life to be backstage with Roger Miller, with his guitar and singing his songs. He didn’t remember the lyrics to all of the songs, but I knew them all. So whenever we would come to a point where he couldn’t remember a line, I knew it. And he said, “So what’s this about a musical? How does that work?” I said, “Well, you have a book, and you have a score. Someone writes the story, and you have music and lyrics. And you’re going to do the music and lyrics.” And he says, “But there’s a book, right?” I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Well, get me the book.”

DUBNER: Now, there was no book yet, I assume.

LANDESMAN: There was no book. There wasn’t anything. That’s the show that I’ll always love the most. It’s like your first child. It’s special to me, and it was also a show that I created. I came up with the idea. I put the whole team together. And luckily it worked. It was a hit. It won seven Tony Awards and Best Musical, and ran over 1,000 performances. I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for that show. I wouldn’t have a career at all.

But of course Landesman did have a career, a big one. He produced several more hits — a Guys and Dolls revival, Angels in America, The Producers — and he wound up running Jujamcyn Theaters, the third-largest Broadway landlord. So, when a Freakonomics Radio listener wrote in to say they’d always wondered about the economics of live theater, and that we should make a series about that — Rocco was one of the first people I thought of. Not just because he knows things (there are plenty of people in the industry who know things); but because he is willing to say them (which many people are not). For instance, I asked him about a couple of recent Broadway disasters — $25 million musicals that bombed.

LANDESMAN: It’s a terrible investment, the Broadway theater. It’s about like horseracing. I’ve owned racehorses, and I’ve owned theaters, and I’ve produced Broadway shows. Fifteen to 20 percent of the shows that are put on Broadway earn their money back. And it’s the same with racehorses, 15 to 20 percent of the racehorses that race at the tracks earn their oats.

DUBNER: Okay. So, with such a terrible R.O.I. for Broadway production —

LANDESMAN: Why do people invest? They can’t help themselves. They fall in love with the shows.

So, today on Freakonomics Radio, investors who fall in love with shows, performers who fall in love with the stage, and audiences who fall in love with the whole enterprise. There is of course one huge problem:

LANDESMAN: The problem is that it’s very, very expensive. There’s no economy of scale. And there’s no economy of mechanization. It’s hand-made, live every night.

So here’s the question: in a time with so much entertainment — including an infinite stream of digital and virtual entertainments — how can it be that this very expensive, hand-made, live-every-night thing even exists?

Debby BUCHHOLZ: Theater isn’t going away. People telling stories is not going away.

We take a hard look at theatrical finances.

Hal LUFTIG: Are you trying to get me killed?

We try to figure out what drives these creators.

Christopher ASHLEY: I feel like every theater-maker has a secret desire to change the world.

And we follow one new musical, from the very beginning …

Richard WINKLER: One wrong decision, you’re dead and you don’t know it.

To what will someday be the end.

Crystal Monee HALL: There’s a long way to go. Yes there is, there’s a long way to go. I guess I should be knocking wood.

Please take your seats; our show is about to begin.

*      *      *

The live theater industry in the U.S. is estimated at under $6 billion a year, with around 27,000 employees. So: not very big — but there is a lot going on beneath the surface, that most of us don’t see when we buy a ticket. You could imagine a pyramid, with Broadway at the top; Broadway is both a goal and the engine that drives a lot of the activity further down the pyramid: in regional and repertory theaters, most of which are non-profits; in community theater and high-school and college theater; and in any number of church halls and garages and living rooms where someone decides to put on a show. But the Broadway economy is by far the most visible, and the most influential. Over the past couple decades, it has gotten much more expensive to produce shows on Broadway, and ticket prices have also spiked: the average now is around $130. This leads some people to conclude that Broadway is unsustainable, that it is sick and perhaps dying, but keep in mind people have been saying that forever. One of Broadway’s many nicknames is “the fabulous invalid,” which comes from a Kaufman-Hart play first produced in 1938. Lately, you may have seen encouraging headlines about Broadway box-office — like when George Clooney decides to star in a play for a few months. This led one producer to complain that “throwing movie stars” at the Broadway model is just “a way of cauterizing the bleeding. By the way, that producer was Scott Rudin, who had been sent into exile for throwing a stapler at his assistant, among other allegations. One thing about Broadway: it is not dull. This series won’t be dull either. We will tell you about … the real-estate cartel that controls Broadway; the theatrical unions that get good wages for their members and drive producers absolutely crazy; the performers and other creatives who, in pursuit of their dreams, are willing to scrape by on relatively low pay. We thought the best way to tell this story was to follow one show. So that’s what we’ll do, with plenty of tangents. The show we’re going to follow began five years ago as nothing but an idea. It is now significantly through its gestation period, but not yet on Broadway — and with no guarantee it will ever get there. So let’s start with the writer.

Joe DiPIETRO: My name is Joe DiPietro. I write plays and musicals, and on the new musical 3 Summers of Lincoln, I am the book writer — meaning, I write the script, and the co-lyricist.

DiPietro remembers exactly how he started down this career path. His parents took him to see the musical 1776 on Broadway.

DiPIETRO: It was the first show I saw as a, I don’t know, ten-year-old. I can still remember where I was sitting in the mezzanine, and the lights came up on the Continental Congress. I was like, Put a fork in me, I’m done. I’m going to be a part of this somehow.

He has now been writing for more than 30 years. His credits include the musical Memphis, for which DiPietro won two Tony Awards; and All Shook Up, an Elvis Presley jukebox musical. So what is this new show he’s working on, 3 Summers of Lincoln?

DiPIETRO: 3 Summers of Lincoln picks up in the second summer of the Civil War, when things are going terribly, and there is no end in sight. It is a brutal, bloody war. Lincoln needs to figure out how to end this, and he just can’t. The South is fighting stronger than he thought.

DUBNER: Where did the idea come from? Was this sprung from the brain of Joe DiPietro?

DiPIETRO: It did not spring from my brain. Quite the opposite. I was sitting at home in the first December of the pandemic. Theater was dead. I make my living as a writer on royalties from my productions all over the world, and there were exactly zero productions happening. It was a scary, uncertain time. And I got a call one day out of the blue from two producers I know, and who’ve invested in my shows, named Richard Winkler and Alan Shorr.

Alan SHORR: Alan Shorr. I am the general partner for 3 Summers of Lincoln.

Richard WINKLER: Richard Winkler, general partner of 3 Summers of Lincoln.

SHORR: This was our idea, from the very inception.

WINKLER: It all has to start with the idea, and the art. And then you figure out how to finance it.

Richard Winkler worked for years on Broadway as a lighting designer.

WINKLER: I met hundreds of producers who I didn’t think had very good taste, and spent money in stupid, ridiculous ways. I kept thinking that I wanted to be a producer. When I turned 60 and had this realization that I don’t want to be in the theater ‘til midnight anymore, I said, Well, I’m going to try this.

That was 16 years ago. Alan Shorr, who lives in Boston, spent most of his career in financial services; he started producing around 12 years ago. So what does a Broadway producer actually do? Here’s Shorr:

SHORR: The best way I can analogize it is: the producer, or the lead producer, is the C.E.O. of a company that is producing a piece of live theater. They are ultimately responsible for every decision that gets made.

DUBNER: What have been your greatest hits as a producer thus far?

SHORR: Leopoldstadt was the most recent. Prior to that, Lehman Trilogy. I was involved with Come From Away. I will stop there.

DUBNER: Have you had flops?

SHORR: Flops? Yeah, we had one. It was called Diana.

Diana, as in Diana, Princess of Wales. It was a musical — also written by Joe DiPietro, and it was scheduled to open on Broadway in March of 2020. Then came Covid. All 41 Broadway theaters shut down for what turned out to be 18 months. So what do you do now if you’re a producer who has already spent millions to develop a show?

SHORR: We had a production that we thought was great. So why not bring the cast back in a healthy way and live-capture it on stage, and sell it to Netflix — or, Netflix came to the production, and said, “We’d like to do this.”

And so a filmed stage version of Diana premiered on Netflix in October 2021. Critics hated it, and so did viewers: “cringeworthy,” they called it, and “exploitative” and “tawdry.” The Guardian named Diana “the year’s most hysterically awful hate-watch.”

SHORR: When you have a new musical, and you try to live-capture it, you don’t get the essence of really what’s there, and so although it was a great idea at the time, some great ideas just don’t necessarily work.

The producers did finally bring Diana, live, to Broadway. It didn’t work there, either; it closed after barely a month, and reportedly lost around $10 million. Maybe Princess Diana just wasn’t the right character to build a new musical around. So, how about Abraham Lincoln? I asked Alan Shorr to explain the genesis of that idea.

SHORR: It first started the summer 2020 during Covid, where none of us had anything to do but sit around and think, literally when George Floyd was murdered, our president at the time had mentioned that he had done more for Black people than anybody since Abraham Lincoln. And that started me thinking: “Well, what did Lincoln actually do? Let’s get to the facts.” I had obviously read books about Abraham Lincoln. I saw the movie Lincoln that Steven Spielberg produced. But that only told the story from 1864 through 1865. So the question in my mind is: what happened before that? How did Lincoln get there? So I called Richard, my partner, and I said, “What do you think about doing a musical about Abraham Lincoln?”

WINKLER: To which I said, “Those two words do not belong in the same sentence.”

DUBNER: Because why not, Richard?

WINKLER: Lincoln and musical? I just didn’t think they did.

SHORR: So I said: “Well, I don’t know if it does or not, but what else we got to do? Let’s explore it.” And the first person that I called was an acquaintance, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I thought was the authority on Abraham Lincoln.

DUBNER: That’s a pretty handy acquaintance to have.

SHORR: Well, she lives in Boston, so that helps. So I called her and asked her and her producing partner if this would be something she’d be interested in participating in. And fortunately for us, she readily agreed.

WINKLER: And then we called Joe DiPietro.

DiPIETRO: And they said, “Hey, Joe, we are commissioning some of our favorite writers and we just have a topic we’ll give you, and then you can write anything you want about it.” This was like, a miracle. And I like Richard and Alan very much. So I’m just thinking, like, I’m going to do it no matter what it is.

DUBNER: Juggling mermaids? Fine, I’ll write that.

DiPIETRO: That’ll work, that’ll work. When do you want it? And they said, we want you to write a musical about Abraham Lincoln. I don’t think I said this out loud, but my first thought was, Absolutely not. That is a terrible idea. I’m just thinking like, how does Lincoln sing? What is it about? And the Civil War, it was so awful. I was just thinking, like, no.

WINKLER: Joe said, “No, no, no, this is not a good idea. I don’t want to do this.” We talked him into a conversation with somebody else, and —

DUBNER: That was Doris Kearns Goodwin, was the other conversation?

WINKLER: Yes. And they got along like a house afire. And then Joe said, “Well, let me do some research.”

DiPIETRO: And then I thought, Well, you know, so many great musicals start out as terrible ideas, right?

DUBNER: Name some.

DiPIETRO: A hip-hop musical about a founding father. Terrible idea. A musical about the sinking of the Titanic. That’s a terrible idea. A musical about cannibalism, and it becomes Sweeney Todd. So you’re like, all right, maybe that instinct, you should be a little more open.

The hip-hop musical about a founding father was of course Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton was such a sensation that it seemed to change the rules — for producers, creators, performers, the audience. It opened up new possibilities. But for Joe DiPietro, there was a puzzle to solve. Alexander Hamilton had been relatively obscure to most people. Abraham Lincoln? Quite the opposite.

DiPIETRO: There are more books published about Abraham Lincoln than anyone except for Jesus. And they’re all, according to my calculation, about 800 pages long. I was like, I don’t want to sit in my house during the pandemic reading 800-page books about the Civil War — like, that is not fun.

When you feel like you’re getting overwhelmed by American political history — it must be nice to have Doris Kearns Goodwin on your side.

DiPIETRO: She wrote a book called Leadership: in Turbulent Times, which is about what she considers to be the four most effective presidents. I read this one chapter which said, during the last three summers of the Civil War, Mary Lincoln dragged Abraham to a place called the Soldiers’ Home, which was the first U.S. home for indigent soldiers. It had a little cottage that the previous president, Buchanan, used as a summer getaway from the heat in the swamp of D.C. So he spent his three summers there, and I thought, Oh, well, that three summers gives you structure. And it turns out those three summers were really consequential. Because the first summer, he came up with the idea and then at the very end of the summer, decreed the Emancipation Proclamation. The second summer, one of his biggest critics — though on the same side as him — was the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. And Frederick Douglass, who had been a thorn in his side, one day decides, I’m going to go to the White House and wait on line with all of the other people who are waiting on line to see the president. And I’m going to demand to speak with him, and tell him that he’s moving too slow in ending this war. So Frederick Douglass does that, and they talk. And they quickly recognized that they might not agree with their methods of how to end the war, but they couldn’t deny each other’s brilliance. And then the third summer, when things were really going bad, this time Lincoln calls Frederick Douglass because he has a mission for him that he thinks will help end the war. My question about this show was always, Okay, fascinating historical thing, but how does it relate to today? How is it in conversation with activism today? And how is it in conversation with the presidency today? All of those questions. And once the Frederick Douglass aspect came in, they started to really interest me. Then I was like, You know, I’ll write an outline. Pay me a little money, let me write an outline, and see if I get hooked.

DiPietro did get hooked, but he’s a playwright, not a composer, and a musical isn’t a musical without music.

HALL: A nation on the edge, on the verge. The center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

 *      *      *

The playwright Joe DiPietro had been commissioned to write the script for a new musical about Abraham Lincoln. DiPietro is white, as was Lincoln; but the story is really about slavery, ending slavery; and the other main character is the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

DiPIETRO: Given the subject matter of the show, I was like, Oh, it would be great to have a lyricist who would look at the subject matter from a different perspective than I did. Daniel J. Watts was a star dancer in a Broadway show I wrote called Memphis back in 2009. He was fantastic and has been in probably dozens of shows by now. He also, at the time, was a spoken-word artist, a budding spoken-word artist. I went to see his spoken-word performances, and I was like, Wow, God, he’s really good.

DUBNER: And so you thought, Oh, he can write.

DiPIETRO: I thought he can write. I think I called him out of the blue in the pandemic, when theater was literally dead. There was no hope and no future, and we were all broke.  

Daniel WATTS: He was like, “Hey, there’s this project I’m working on, and I need a co-lyricist. I recognize that I cannot speak for a lot of these people. I’m wondering if you would be interested.”

And that is Daniel Watts.

WATTS: I am a co-lyricist and co-choreographer for 3 Summers of Lincoln.

As a kid growing up in the Carolinas, Watts played sports, he took dance and gymnastics; he has always had a high level of energy.

WATTS: Everyone’s like, Sit down. Daniel. Sit down. I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I got things to do.

Watts has been performing on Broadway since 2006; he was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Ike Turner in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical; he has also appeared in The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple — and, yes, Hamilton. So what did he think about the idea of a Lincoln musical?

WATTS: I was like, “Oh, Lord, that just sounds silly. Like, Oh no, Joe, why is this the thing you’re calling about, you know? I’ve been waiting for years for you to call me, and, like, this is the thing?” But only because how I’m used to seeing Lincoln depicted is what I was, you know, coming from. But the other thing is, that time period, of how America broke, and then came back together, is really fascinating to me.

DiPIETRO: I just was really excited when he said yes because I felt like, Oh, I am actually going to learn so much from him. Daniel is probably 20 years younger than me, and from a very different background. In this particular collaboration, I am very much about story, story, story. How does this song start? What dramatically happens in the middle to change the trajectory of it, and then how does it end in a new way? He’s much more of a poet than I am, and he is much more of a linguist than I am. He loves the origin of words. So he’ll often, like, break down a word, which is what oftentime rappers do. It really opened my eyes. And we went to my house in Connecticut, to start this together.

WATTS: He had written Act One, I think had an outline of Act Two. We read through it first and whatever jumped out at us personally, we kind of just made our own little notes. He was like, let’s maybe try to write two or three songs while we’re here.

DiPIETRO: We sat on my porch, and the first thing we wrote for some reason was a campfire song called “Scarlett the Harlot.” It’s just basically a dirty song that Civil War soldiers used to sing, and then it becomes about Abraham Lincoln, and then Abe enters and interrupts them and they’re singing this filthy song about Abe. So as you’re giggling now, we essentially sat around my porch and giggled for a day and wrote this silly song that we always liked. We kept putting it in drafts, and cutting it and putting it into drafts again.

WATTS: “Scarlett the Harlot.” That got cut quickly and then found its way back in, in the last six months.

DUBNER: Why did it get cut?

WATTS: We just didn’t know where it went. The story tells you what it is as you keep developing it. So how Scarlett ended up back was that we realized we didn’t have any time with Abraham and the soldiers, which we felt was very, very important.

DUBNER: I haven’t heard Scarlett yet. Can you sing me a little bit right now?

WATTS: “Scarlett the harlot, the poor soldier’s whore. Open her legs as wide as a door.” That’s all I can give you right now. It’s bawdy. It’s a very bawdy song that, you know, hopefully it stays. You just never know. You never know.

DUBNER: The music and the lyrics — to me, it seems really, really hard to write lyrics for a musical first without the music. Is that not really hard?

WATTS: No. Well, not for me — I don’t want to speak for anybody else. Or I’ll only say for Joe and I. The poetry comes first, right? Now my musical theater nerd is going off. In musical theater, first you say it, and then once the emotion overcomes you, you sing it. And if it’s too much to sing, then you dance it. So it kind of goes the same way. Once you have lyrics, then you seek out composers that you think might both have music pouring out of them, but also would understand this story, and want to apply their artistry to it.

A composer, perhaps, like this one … and, warning: there’s a bit of off-color language here …

HALL: Mmhm. Scarlett the Harlot. The poor soldier’s whore. Could open her legs, as wide as a door. She’d welcome you in, it wouldn’t take long. She’d pull off your pants, and she’d pull on your dong. Mmhm.

HALL: My name is Crystal Monee Hall I am a singer, and a songwriter, and a performer, and a vocal arranger, and a vocal producer, and a composer, and an educator. My mom has a beautiful voice, and I learned how to sing listening to her sing on Sunday mornings in church. I had my first solo in the choir when I was like, I don’t know, seven or eight?

DUBNER: You remember what you sang?

HALL: I do, I do. It’s a song called “I May Be Young.”

DUBNER: Can I hear a bit?

HALL: The chorus is like, “I may be young, and never get old. Doo doo doo doo doo doo. May not have money. Silver and gold. I have a savior. His name is Jesus. I can feel him down in my soul.” And then my solo was like this, “Oh, how I love him.” That’s how I sang it too, “Oh, how I love him.” It was like that.

DUBNER: Sign me up for that church. And you went to the University of Virginia, correct?

HALL: I did, yeah. It’s a source of pride for me, my dad was in the first class of Black people to ever matriculate there.

DUBNER: You got a master’s in education as well, is that right?

HALL: I went to U.Va. for five and a half years, got my master’s, got two bachelor’s degrees, and I took a position teaching high school English and drama in Charlottesville. And then I resigned on my birthday, which is October the 1st, which means I taught for about a month.

DUBNER: You loved it, huh?

HALL: I loved it. No, I did, but I was like, I am not happy. I’m going to go to New York and I’m going to sing. And I don’t even know if I knew what that meant. I guess in my mind, I was going to, like, lay across a piano in like a shiny dress.

DUBNER: What was your first job?

HALL: I came to New York, I auditioned, I took the first job I got. It was a Disney cruise line. And the next thing that I got was the non-union tour of Rent. And I did that for a year.

DUBNER: What’s that like?

HALL: It’s like really short sits in cities, like we would sleep on the floor of a bus. I mean, like a Greyhound bus. We didn’t feel it at all. Could I do it today? Hell, no. But then I was ready for the world, honey. I was a road dog. After I did that non-Equity tour for a year, I went directly into the Broadway show.

DUBNER: And you started as a swing, is that right?

HALL: I started as a swing. I mostly played Joanne and Mrs. Jefferson, the “Seasons of Love” soloist. I closed it out. So I was there for about the last four or five years.

Rent, like Hamilton, was another huge and groundbreaking Broadway hit, the kind of show that changes how people think about what’s possible. Later in this series, we’ll hear from Jeffrey Seller, a lead producer of both Rent and Hamilton. For Crystal Monee Hall, performing in a Broadway hit was a great gig, but: even a union acting job barely covers the rent when the rent is in New York City. Almost every theatrical performer has a side hustle. Hall taught herself guitar and began writing songs; she went on tour with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, and she released a record of her own. At one point she moved to California, but she soon came back to New York; she performed in the Alicia Keys jukebox musical Hell’s Kitchen at the Public Theater, before the show moved to Broadway. And then she got a call from Joe DiPietro and Daniel Watts about a new musical they were writing, called 3 Summers of Lincoln. Here’s DiPietro again:

DiPIETRO: She had a self-titled debut album, and I was like, Oh, I really like the sound of this. And I love what she does with melody. And so we had a chat, and we gave her the script and we said, Pick two or three songs and write something and send it to us.

DUBNER: What’d she pick?

DiPIETRO: What I very clearly remember her picking is the opening number, which is called “90 Day War.” Initially the Civil War, everyone thought it would last 90 days. And so by the second summer of the Civil War, it was over 400 days. And the big thing is — an opening number, you want to introduce the sound of the show. All of those people sitting in the audience say, Okay, you’re writing a show about Abraham Lincoln. Prove that this is a good idea. Prove that this isn’t Hamilton. Prove it’s not 1776. Prove you have your own voice.

HALL: The first lyrics in “90 Day War” are, “A nation on the edge, on the verge. The center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge.”

DUBNER: Can I hear a little bit of that?

HALL: So, it starts with — everybody goes, “Whoa.” Which I thought was so cute because it sort of sounds like the word “war.” But like goes “Whoa. Whoa. A nation on the edge, on the verge. The center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge. Whoa, whoa, whoa.” You know what I mean? Suddenly we’re in some sort of rock thing, but we’re like, in 6/8, and there’s this military snare under it.

DiPIETRO: The other song that she wrote was “Pounding on the Rock,” which now opens Act Two. That is a song when Frederick Douglass and his son are trying to recruit folks for the first Black Regiment.

HALL: Pounding on the rock. We have the backing of the presidency. Pounding, we must keep pounding, pounding on the rock.

DiPIETRO: They’re up in New England, trying to get young black men to sign up for this war that young black men don’t know why they should be fighting and dying for this country that has let them down at every place imaginable. It’s this sort of rousing number. And I remember listening to her demo, and a minute into it, without realizing it, I find myself standing up and, like, happily bouncing around my apartment and the music was, you know, I wanted to join the Army. It was just so exciting. I was like, I want to be in a room with this person for the next two years, three years, four years, however long it takes to create this musical.

Two years, three, four years — yes, it can easily take that long to create a musical. And who pays for all this? Well, it depends; in this case, the producers Alan Shorr and Richard Winkler were writing the checks. Here’s Shorr:

SHORR: Initially, my partner and I put up all the money. The reason for that — having come from the financial world, I’ve always looked at myself as a fiduciary. I am not willing to ask other people to put money into something that I don’t feel comfortable with, and until we got to the point with 3 Summers of Lincoln where we believed that we had something special, it was only at that point that we decided, “Okay, we’re going to move to the next step. It’s very expensive and we will bring in outside investors.”

DUBNER: At what point was that in the development of the show?

SHORR: That was last November, December, when we did our three-week workshop. Up until that point, essentially, myself and my partner were fully funding the project.

DUBNER: And what did it cost up until that point?

SHORR: Probably mid- to high-six figures. That went into hiring the people to write the show — the composer, the lyricist, the director, actors, actresses for us to hear what it is that the writers actually came up with. That was a year-and-a-half process, where we had several workshops, and all of that costs money.

DiPIETRO: Well, you generally get contracted for a series of drafts. And I think it just depends who you are.

That’s Joe DiPietro.

DiPIETRO: Winning Tony Awards, my price increased, which was very, very nice. I always say, the day after I won two Tony Awards, I wasn’t a better writer, but everyone thought I was. Generally the advances for theater are much less than for movies. You hear about writers getting $50,000, $100,000 for movie stuff. For theater, they’re much more like $10, $20 if you’re starting out. I’m at the point where I can ask for about $50 or so.

And here is Crystal Monee Hall.

HALL: The creative team, you get your up-front to work on the show, whatever that is. And that depends on, you know, how much cachet you have and how long you’ve been in the business, and what you can command. But after that, you don’t get paid. You don’t get any money as you’re going. You hope that it is something that is very, very lasting and that you will be able to get all of that back-end. But that’s not necessarily promised. It’s a hope-and-faith thing. You know, you got to love it. You got to love it.

DUBNER: Are you willing to tell me what you’re making for composing 3 Summers of Lincoln?

HALL: I can say that first-time composers are generally making for an upfront between $18,000 and $25,000.

WATTS: Right now, I am inside of the dream.

And that’s Daniel Watts.

WATTS: Like I literally flew in yesterday morning from Chicago because I’m on a TV show called The Chi. I was like, Hey guys, I got to go, flying back here to jump right into a workshop of a musical that I’m the co-lyricist, the co-choreographer of. Little me is, like, Yeah! Older me is like, Daniel, you’re doing a lot.

DUBNER: How does your salary shooting a TV show compare to your salary and the time it takes also creating a musical?

WATTS: Oh, it’s night and day. It’s just different economics, you know? When it comes to theater, there is a fixed amount of tickets that can be sold. There’s only so much money that can come in. Also in theater, you can only get paid if you’re there. So if you miss a show, you lose pay, you get docked. That’s just the economics of it versus TV/film, I can show up and hit it and then I don’t have to remember anything. I can leave it. I shot my whole episode in two days. That was two days of shooting. And I make a lot more money doing that. And there’s also a residual check on the other side once it airs.

DUBNER: So by the time 3 Summers of Lincoln makes it to Broadway, assuming it makes it to Broadway, you will have been working on it for years by then, right? Years. And the fee that you get for being the co-lyricist and choreographer on the show, you could make that much money in how many days or weeks of shooting TV or film?

WATTS: I can make that in an episode.

DUBNER: Oh my God.

WATTS: I made it this weekend.

DUBNER: So basically, we should be very grateful to TV and film for subsidizing theater work.

WATTS: Essentially. Honestly. Yeah.

The punishing economics notwithstanding, there came a time when the writing team of DiPietro, Watts, and Hall had a real live Lincoln musical, on paper, ready to get up on its feet. But if you’re going to make a musical about a big-time historical figure, you’ll need a performer just as big-time to play that role.

WINKLER: Brian Stokes Mitchell is an incredible star. He is exactly the right person to play the role.

*      *      *

It’s December, 2023; we’re in a big, well-lit rehearsal space called Open Jar Studios, on the 11^th floor of a building near the heart of the Broadway theater district. The theaters themselves are very visible, with their marquees and their huge show posters. But the rest of the Broadway ecosystem is hidden away in buildings like this one — not just rehearsal spaces but production offices, ticketing agencies, P.R. firms and advertising firms, vocal and acting and dance coaches, agents and lawyers — it’s a long list. Today I am seeing, for the first time, a workshop performance of 3 Summers of Lincoln. There are well over 100 people in the audience — some family and friends but also potential investors, producers, theater owners, etc. This workshop is being officially presented not by Alan Shorr and Richard Winkler, the commercial producers who have been developing the show, but by the La Jolla Playhouse, in San Diego. That is where 3 Summers of Lincoln will eventually have its world premiere, as it works its way toward Broadway. La Jolla is considered one of the best regional theaters in the country, and over the years it has been a launchpad for many Broadway shows. Rocco Landesman’s Big River, back in 1984; The Outsiders, which won the Tony last year for Best Musical; also, Come from Away, a big hit that told the story of airline passengers stranded in Newfoundland after 9/11. La Jolla is a non-profit theater that is very much part of the for-profit ecosystem, and their partnership on 3 Summers of Lincoln is what’s called an enhancement deal. Here is the Lincoln writer Joe DiPietro:

DiPIETRO: Generally producers give them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to enhance their production on stage. So their audience sees a really glitzy, impressive presentation. And also it helps the theater to say, Hey, we are producing musicals that are going to Broadway. You saw them here first.

And here’s the Lincoln producer Alan Shorr:

SHORR: The fact that they’re a nonprofit has nothing to do with the quality of the product that they’re going to be producing on our behalf in La Jolla. Artistically, they have no say-so in the show. They’re our hatchery for something that we believe will move on very quickly to the commercial stage.

In the case of this show, the symbiosis runs even deeper, because Lincoln is being directed by Christopher Ashley, who is the artistic director at La Jolla. Ashley won a Tony for his work on Come From Away; he also directed Diana: The Musical, but we don’t need to say any more about that. Ashley’s attachment to this new show, 3 Summers of Lincoln, runs deep:

ASHLEY: One of the things that drew me to it is the relationship between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, these two incredibly well-educated, passionate writers, thinkers, who started out really as enemies. And those two men sort of magnetically drawing each other toward each other’s point of view. I sometimes think about subtitling 3 Summers of Lincoln as The Radicalization of Lincoln, watching how a person moves from a very lawyerly, careful, and incrementalist way of thinking towards somebody who is capable of bold, radical action. That war was not going to get solved without a couple of radical moves being made. There were so many people who were so deeply, economically invested in the institution of slavery, and how you say, I understand that, and I don’t care, that there is a moral imperative here that transcends the economic motive. And that seems to me like it’s got a lot of resonance and applications in the current world.

And now, in this big rehearsal studio, the cast of 3 Summers of Lincoln is spread out in a semi-circle. They have their scripts in front of them on music stands; there will be some standing and some sitting but no real moving about, and certainly no choreography. There are also no costumes, no props, no scenery — this is just a chance to hear and feel the story and the songs with real performers. The show opens on a tap dancer who has a prosthetic leg; his missing leg represents the war-wounded; his tapping mimics a telegraph. For the purposes of this workshop, there’s a narrator to fill in some details.

WORKSHOP NARRATOR: We see text projected on the walls: June, 1862. The war has been raging for 430 days. Estimated casualties: 53,864. Lights rise on white union soldiers and Black field assists, silhouetted within fog rising from the battlefield.

CAST: Whoa. Whoa. A nation on the edge, on the verge. The center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge. Whoa, whoa, whoa …

And seated at the center of all this is Abraham Lincoln, played by Brian Stokes Mitchell. Lincoln has just arrived at the Soldiers’ Home, where his wife Mary has promised that he will find some peace, and a pleasant breeze. For everybody who wondered at the beginning of this project, how would Abraham Lincoln sing? Well, this is how he sings.

Brian Stokes MITCHELL as Abraham LINCOLN: The burden I hold. The coming deaths untold. How to keep this union intact? Once a country loses its mind, can it ever get it back? Where’s the idea? Where’s the breeze? Where is the inspiration to ease these troubles, these tensions, these unmentioned terrors? How to mend these dissensions between men and their errors? Where’s the breeze? La da da da da da … where’s the breeze?

WINKLER: Brian Stokes Mitchell is an incredible star.

That’s the producer Richard Winkler.

WINKLER: He is exactly the right person to play the role, which is why he is playing the role. He is tall. He is slender. He has not been on Broadway in eight years. This will be his return. He is a brilliant performer, and he can stand on a Broadway stage and command 1,500 people without any difficulty.

And here’s the director Christopher Ashley:

ASHLEY: He’s so Lincoln-y. And he’s also the most amazing collaborator. He’s like, game for anything, he will try anything. The most beautiful voice in America, just like an extraordinary voice. Every time I have a conversation with him about a scene or Lincoln or the current world, I feel like I understand our story better. There is no one in the history of performance who I would rather have playing Lincoln for us than Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Stokes, as everyone calls him, is one of the most beloved Broadway performers of his era. In addition to being — as we’ve already heard — tall and slender, with “the most beautiful voice in America” — he’s also a box-office draw. Not the same as a George Clooney or a Denzel Washington or a Hugh Jackman, but for the core Broadway audience, Brian Stokes Mitchell is a name brand. In the 1990s, he appeared in Ragtime as Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a Harlem musician navigating lost love, racial injustice, and violence. In 2000, he won a Tony for his performance in Kiss Me, Kate. Stokes is Black, but doesn’t always play Black characters. Onstage, he exudes both charm and gravity; he doesn’t seem to need attention, the way some performers do, and this makes him even more charismatic. Offstage, he’s known as kind and caring — he was a founding member of Black Theatre United and chair of the Entertainment Community Fund. A leading man in every way. The 3 Summers of Lincoln team was thrilled to have Stokes developing the role of Abraham Lincoln from the ground up. Here’s Joe DiPietro again:

DiPIETRO: When you do a reading or a workshop, you’re essentially saying to the actor, Hey, we’re going to pay you for this time. And the pay, I don’t quite know, but it’s not a lot. It’s probably a few hundred dollars. Not only are we auditioning the folks in it, but a Brian Stokes Mitchell is seeing how it fits with him, if he enjoys it, if he thinks he really wants to play this role.

DUBNER: In the workshop I saw, all the roles were played by Black or white actors with what looked to be pretty much historical accuracy, right? McClellan was played by a white guy, Douglass and his family played by Black actors, and so on. But then there’s Brian Stokes Mitchell as Lincoln. Just talk about that casting choice.

DiPIETRO: I’ll tell you how that came about. We had done a reading of the first act of the show very early on, and it was going very well. And we sort of cast — Lincoln was a very talented white actor. We had talked about Stokes playing Frederick Douglass, because he’s probably the preeminent male musical performer of that age and he’s, you know, just brilliant. So, we’re writing the show and Crystal goes to us, you know, the way I’m writing these characters, the Lincoln character has a much more traditional theatrical voice. And Douglass is much more soulful. And Stokes is super-talented, but that’s not where he lives as a performer. And we were like, He can do anything, calm down, he’s going to be great. And then Daniel and Crystal come to me, and they were really a little gingerly, like, We have an idea, we don’t know if you’re going to like it. I’m like, I have an idea, too. I said, you write down your idea and I’m going to write down my idea. We do that. And we both on a little piece of paper wrote Stokes as Lincoln.

DUBNER: Oh my gosh.

DiPIETRO: So Daniel and Chris, who both were friends with him and had worked with him, said, Hey, we have an idea for a show we want to pitch to you. So they take him out to dinner and he goes, All right, what’s the show? And he goes, well, it’s called 3 Summers of Lincoln, and it’s about Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Daniel said he saw Stokes’s eyes get a little glassy, like, Oh, Frederick Douglass, okay. Then they said, “Well, we want you to play Lincoln.” And he suddenly was like, “Oh, now I’m interested.” And a Black man playing him is certainly provocative, especially if every other role in the show is cast according to the race that historically they would be.

Here, again, is the director Christopher Ashley.

ASHLEY: The Frederick Douglass and Lincoln relationship lives so much at the center of this musical. We’re in three summers of the presidency of Lincoln, 1862, ’63, and ’64. They didn’t actually meet until ’63, in-person. So we have the interesting problem dramatically of how do you have two central characters who don’t meet until after your intermission? So you have to kind of get them into contention and interaction from afar before they finally collide.

And here’s how that happens. Douglass is played by Quentin Earl Darrington, a phenomenally intense and talented performer who appears in the first act, essentially, in split screen with Lincoln:

Quentin Earl Darrington as Frederick DOUGLASS: My name is Frederick Douglass, and let it be known, here I am. Did the man actually say the Constitution gives him no authority to end the inhumanity of slavery? This is what happens when you elect a lawyer president. If the Constitution protects a gross injustice, you don’t equivocate. You don’t hesitate. You change the goddamn Constitution.

Quentin Darrington, who goes by Q, has been performing on Broadway for more than 15 years; his credits include Cats and MJ: The Musical. He is a deeply religious man who sees his talent as something to be shared. Here he is offstage, out of character.

DARRINGTON: It’s a gift. It’s a precious gift from God, and I use it for him and for people.

DUBNER: When did you discover the gift? 

DARRINGTON: Right around eighth or ninth grade. So I grew up in the church. I was in the choir, but I was in the back. I could not sing. They would never give me a solo, ever. 

DUBNER: It’s hard for me to imagine that. 

DARRINGTON: Insane. Listen, this is the truth. I wanted so desperately to sing, so I just started mimicking. I taught myself through copying some of my favorite artists of the time: John P. Kee, who was a gospel singer — amazing, a legend. Jodeci, which was my favorite group back then, R&B group, and Stevie Wonder. I listened to every track they’ve ever made on repeat, and I taught myself to sing through just copying those wonderful, wonderful artists. And I started singing publicly after that. 

DUBNER: Before that, though — I mean, you were singing in the choir. What were you missing? 

DARRINGTON: I was making noise. I was making a lot of noise. That’s all.

And here’s a scene from the workshop. Frederick Douglass is at the White House, about to meet the President for the first time; Lincoln’s valet, William Slade, introduces Douglass.

Donald WEBBER Jr. As William SLADE: Mr. President, this is —

STOKES as LINCOLN: No need for an introduction, William, I’ve devoured Mr. Douglass’s writings. 

DARRINGTON as DOUGLASS: You have? 

STOKES as LINCOLN: Let’s see. “The president sports” — hold on, let me get this right. Ah, ah yes, “The president sports pride of race and blood and contempt for Negroes.” Is that what you said? 

DARRINGTON as DOUGLASS: Yes. 

STOKES as LINCOLN: Well, judging by your verbiage, I assume you’re an avid reader, so we have much to discuss. Sit, please. 

DARRINGTON as DOUGLASS: He threw me off my game. He didn’t seem to judge. He knew me by my fame and seemed to bear no grudge.

The two men talk about their favorite authors. For Douglass, it’s Charles Dickens — because, Douglass explains, he “writes of society’s injustices.” Lincoln’s favorite author is Shakespeare, he says, “for he writes of the burdens of kings.”

DARRINGTON as DOUGLASS: Well, I encourage you to read the novels of Dickens, Mr. President. 

STOKES as LINCOLN: And I encourage you to read the plays of Shakespeare. Mr. Douglass. 

DARRINGTON as DOUGLASS: I have, all of them, at least twice. 

STOKES as LINCOLN: Twice. He threw me off my game. He is not as I’d expect. I didn’t know his aim. So defer, delay, deflect. May I offer you a drink, Mr. Douglass?

The relationship between Douglass and Lincoln — and the interplay between Quentin Darrington and Brian Stokes Mitchell — is riveting. And even though this was just a workshop, the story and songs and performances are undeniably moving. I was sitting next to Debby Buchholz, who runs the La Jolla Playhouse. As soon as the performance was over, a friend rushed up to her and said, “You better start practicing your Tony speech.” Later, I spoke with the commercial producers — Alan Shorr:

SHORR: I think without exception, everybody went away thinking this is really something special.

And Richard Winkler.

WINKLER: I have gone to hundreds of these. Not of mine, but colleagues. At the end of it, if people leave right away and say, “Thank you very much, congratulations, it’s really nice, let’s be in touch,” that tells you one thing about what they saw. If they stay around for an hour and talk to each other and talk to the cast, to the point that the producer has to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m really sorry, our rental of this room ends in three minutes, could you please leave?” Well, that’s what happened on Friday. You were there.

DUBNER: I was there.

WINKLER: I was the one who had to say, “Folks, our rental is over in three minutes.” People don’t hang around at the end if it’s not great. They just don’t.

It was exciting to see and hear so much excitement. To see the coming-together of a story that was just a flicker in someone’s imagination, to see it live and breathe and make people laugh and gasp and grieve. The gestation period for a new musical is so long — and difficult and expensive — that every time it moves forward, it feels like a major accomplishment. But there’s a lot more to be done. Next will come some rewrites, and then more workshopping with the actors, and then a whole other layer of creative work that will feed into the production at La Jolla: lighting design and scenic design, costumes and choreography. The La Jolla Playhouse has a strong subscriber base, and this new Lincoln show has begun to catch their attention; subscribers are particularly jazzed about Brian Stokes Mitchell in the lead role. To have a performer of that caliber star in a new, Broadway-bound musical at a regional theater is a real attraction. But then, one day before tickets go on sale for the world premiere of 3 Summers of Lincoln, I hear from one of the show’s producers: Brian Stokes Mitchell has quit the project. Personal reasons, that’s all anyone is saying. Everyone is shaken, rumors fly. We’ll hear more about that later in the series. Coming up next time, in Part 2: is the theater business actually a business?

Jeffrey SELLER: We’re not a real business. We go up and we go down. We have hits. But in between those hits, we have four flops in a row.

That’s next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This series is being produced by Alina Kulman, and we had research assistance from Julie Kanfer. This episode was mixed by Jasmin Klinger, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jon Schnaars, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Sarah Lilley, Theo Jacobs, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.