Will 3 Summers of Lincoln Make it to Broadway?

In the first episode of this series, we heard about the creation of a new musical, called 3 Summers of Lincoln — as in Abraham Lincoln. The show is set during the Civil War, and it centers around Lincoln’s relationship with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The producers Alan Shorr and Richard Winkler commissioned the playwright Joe DiPietro to write the script; he brought along Daniel Watts as his co-lyricist, and then the composer Crystal Monee Hall. After three years of development, the Lincoln team held some workshop performances in New York that persuaded them they were ready to give the show its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Or at least almost ready.

Joe DiPIETRO: I just felt the narrative at the beginning wasn’t as sharp as the rest of the show. 

That’s DiPietro.

DiPIETRO: The challenge in a musical like this is you’re telling an epic story. I mean, how many different versions of the Civil War could you write? There needs to be a spine to it. How can we have the spine as clear as quickly as possible? We felt, for instance, that the character of Mary Lincoln, she wasn’t in the score as much, especially given the actress who’s going to play that role.

That actress is Carmen Cusack, who has twice been nominated for a Tony Award on Broadway. And so, DiPietro had Daniel Watts and Crystal Monee Hall come to his apartment on the Upper West Side to work on a new song for Mary Lincoln, a duet with Abraham. Hall played a demo she had made on her own, a song called “12 Rooms in Springfield.”

The song has the Lincolns thinking about going back home to Illinois if Abraham loses re-election for the presidency — which, considering how badly the war is going, seems likely.

DiPIETRO: Okay. That was actually good to hear again.

The three of them are sitting around DiPietro’s dining room table. They’ve got laptops open to a Google Doc — and to RhymeZone.com, the modern lyricist’s best friend. They work together with the ease and trust of collaborators who have by now spent hundreds of hours like this.

DiPIETRO: It could be something like, does he envision his life in Springfield like, “and what’s there in Springfield?” Like, you know, “old dusty roads.”

Daniel WATTS: And grief. I’m trying to find a thing he would — what would he be doing? Who would he be working with in the office? 

DiPIETRO: He’d be settling lawsuits with farmers? Right. You know? Like he’s a country lawyer. 

WATTS: Collection law. “Lincoln was a collection lawyer who handled promissory notes, which were common in frontier Illinois.” 

They spend a few minutes searching for the right word, before Watts comes up with it.

WATTS: So, “disputes.” That’s the word I was looking for.

HALL: Disputes is good. 

WATTS: One more country lawyer for farmers’ disputes is great.

HALL: That’s fantastic.

DiPIETRO: Do you want to do like a little sing-through of this, Miss Crystal? See if this works.

Hall now sings Mary Lincoln’s section of the song.

HALL: We still own the deed. 12 rooms in Springfield. That’s all that we need. A side room for sitting where I’ll take up knitting. Pipe in your parlor where you can play scholar. A bedroom for dozing. A statesman reposing. A porch for orations and curbside ovations. 

And then Abraham’s section:

HALL: So, I run back to Springfield. Old Abe’s obsolete. Abandon my post. A coward’s retreat. So, what’s there in Springfield but legal pursuits? One more country lawyer for farmers’ disputes. And what’s wrong with that life? Have some hope. Have some faith. Our home’s in Springfield on Jackson and 8th.

I asked Joe DiPietro how he was thinking about the show’s premiere at La Jolla:

DiPIETRO: The first preview in La Jolla, I will be as nervous as I am in a Broadway opening, because this is the first time the show will meet an audience. Hopefully we got a lot of it right, but there’ll be surprises. There’ll be things the audience doesn’t understand. There’ll be things they don’t react to. They’ll be jokes that I think are hilarious, that the audience does not. I want people who sort of come in with their arms folded, saying, “A Lincoln musical? Prove it to me,” and to leave saying, “Wow, that was a thrilling story, thrillingly told. And it’s made me think about the state of our country.” The anger and the turbulence we feel in this country is nothing new. We’ve had periods where it’s been maybe muted a bit, and we’re in a very loud period of turbulence right now, but it’s nothing new. And I think, like both Lincoln and Douglass, you have to fight for the good, and you can’t just push your ideas through either. You have to actually make people understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and why the way you think things should be is the way that they should be. 

Creating a show like this is both high-wire act and marathon. Having tagged along with the Lincoln team for a couple years, I came to see their project as a bit like war itself: every breakthrough haunted by setback, every confidence tempered by anxiety. For instance: this new song, “12 Rooms in Springfield,” was put into the show with great excitement but then… wound up being cut. And, as we learned earlier in the series, there was much worse news than that: the actor who’d been playing Abraham Lincoln quit the show exactly one day before tickets went on sale at the La Jolla Playhouse. This had me wondering: what’s more surprising, that one person backs out of a project that takes so long to develop, or that anyone stays in? Today on Freakonomics Radio, in the third and final episode of our series: Broadway has always been the intended destination for 3 Summers of Lincoln. Will it actually get there?

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The La Jolla Playhouse was founded in 1947, by Gregory Peck, Mel Ferrer, and Dorothy McGuire — “summer stock for Hollywood luminaries,” as one producer puts it. There are actually four theaters on the site; it is set on the campus of U.C. San Diego, and is favorite out-of-town destination for ambitious new projects; over the years, it has sent 37 shows to Broadway. But as part of its non-profit mission, the Playhouse also collaborates with schools and the local military community; and producing a big new musical like 3 Summers of Lincoln is expensive.

Debby BUCHHOLZ: It’s very hard to develop a new musical without something participating beyond just our budget.

That is Debby Buchholz, La Jolla Playhouse managing director.

BUCHHOLZ: That can be foundation support, that can be individual support, or it can be a commercial producer.

As we heard earlier in this series, live theater suffers from what economists call “cost disease.” Any industry that requires a lot of human labor, as opposed to automation, is bound to get more expensive over time, since human wages keep rising, even while technology gets cheaper. For a non-profit theater like La Jolla, that means collaborating with commercial producers in what’s called an enhancement model.

BUCHHOLZ: La Jolla actually started the enhancement model, going back to Big River.

Big River was a 1980s musical that we heard about in part one of this series. It launched the career of Broadway producer Rocco Landesman.

BUCHHOLZ: The commercial producer put more money into the show beyond what the Playhouse was going to spend, to enhance the Playhouse’s production. To say, could we more fully develop the dance numbers? Could we more fully orchestrate it, so we would hear what a full orchestra would sound like? Could we give it more rehearsal time? 

Stephen DUBNER: Give me a sense of how much money a commercial producer might put toward a production like yours, dollar figures and/or percentage figures. 

BUCHHOLZ: It varies widely. It kind of depends at the moment that we’re going to do it, what the piece needs that’s in excess of the resources that we have at that moment to put into it.

DUBNER: Could it be as much as 30 or 40 percent?

BUCHHOLZ: Yes, it could be. 

DUBNER: So when a show that originates at La Jolla does move on to Broadway, what’s that deal look like from your end? Is it a dollar figure that you’d be guaranteed? Is it a percent of first dollars or after recoup? How does that work?

BUCHHOLZ: When it moves on, the Playhouse participates in two levels. The reason that people come to the Playhouse is because of that well-developed muscle of bringing new work forward. We are a creative participant. So we get a royalty percentage as well. 

DUBNER: Can you put a number on that?

BUCHHOLZ: I’d rather not. It’s comfortably within the industry practice, what’s classically referred to as the regional-theater royalty, which can be anywhere from half a percentage point to three, depending on a lot of different things.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about the Playhouse budget overall. What are the major contributors — where does box office come in, where does philanthropy come in, government funding? 

BUCHHOLZ: About a third of our revenue comes in as ticket revenue. A little more than a third comes in through philanthropy. We get some governmental support from the city of San Diego, and from the county, and from the state. There was actually a fair amount of federal support that came into most regional theaters during the pandemic. That was inordinately helpful. And I would hope that there’s a world in which that could start again. 

3 Summers of Lincoln would have its debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in February of 2025. That meant starting to assemble cast and crew — a big cast and crew — in January for rehearsals, costume fittings, choreography, tech rehearsals, and much more.

STAGE MANAGER: Hey folks, it’s now 1:30. 1:30, we’ll start up on stage. Start up on stage at the end of … 

We flew out to see for ourselves, and we checked in with Christopher Ashley, the show’s director.

Christopher ASHLEY: As we’re speaking now, we’re just starting day one of the second week of two weeks of tech.

For the past 18 years, Ashley has also been the artistic director at La Jolla — although next year, he’ll be moving to New York to take over the Roundabout Theatre Company. Ashley has already won a Tony Award for best director, and it would surprise no one if he were to win at least one more someday. He started directing theater in high school, studied English and math at Yale, and afterwards went to work at a bank.

ASHLEY: I did systems analysis in foreign exchange, which I enjoyed for a while until I realized, Oh, actually, my job is to figure out how to shield people’s money from tax liability. I was like, That doesn’t seem like a way to spend a life to me. 

Ashley took an internship at an Off-Broadway theater, and he won a National Endowment for the Arts grant for early-career directors.

ASHLEY: I was a freelance director for most of my 20s and 30s. It felt like dating audiences all the time. My interaction with them was two hours long, and then they would move on and I would move on. Part of why being artistic director for me was, I didn’t really want to date audiences. I wanted to have a relationship. I wanted to, like, talk to them across six plays in a season. That’s a much richer, fuller conversation about the world than one play for two hours. 

DUBNER: Just give me your — however you want to do it — day in the life, general job description? Artistic director feels like you’re wearing a different hat every 10 minutes. Can you just tell me what that job is? 

ASHLEY: There are a bunch of hats on my desk, you’re totally right. Together with Debby, we run the theater. Artistic directors are, kind of, the primary responsibility for programming and figuring out what’s on the stage. At La Jolla Playhouse, it’s also very much intended that I direct there, and I do one or two shows a year. All the education and outreach also falls within artistic director purview. So, we’re out in the schools with a new play every year, which is an amazing experience — to watch eight-year-olds see their first play — just, like the flight of imagination that is happening in their heads. And then I also produce, along with our artistic producing director, each of the individual shows.

And when Ashley is also directing a show, as he is with 3 Summers of Lincoln, there is another leveling up.

ASHLEY: It’s maybe a little bit like being a general in a war. You’re not making the individual decisions on the battlefield, but you’re saying what the goals are and what the strategy is. 

On an afternoon in early February, after four weeks of rehearsals for 3 Summers of Lincoln, Ashley is now leading 130 people through tech rehearsals.

ASHLEY: We have two weeks in the space to add the technical elements. How the set moves, all the automation, and actors moving chairs and tables around the scenery that you’ve practiced in the studio. You add all the lighting aspects. Lighting designs are tremendously complicated technical feats, with these lights that move and change color. Everything is computerized, right? So, if you stand on the stage and you look back at the house during a technical rehearsal, you’ll see 40 people uplit by their computer screens. There’s a lighting desk. There’s a sound desk. There’s a stage-management desk. There’s a separate desk where all the scenery and props folks are. It’s full of technicians, all of whom are simultaneously watching the show and building the technical structure.

As Ashley describes the minutiae of tech rehearsal, I feel like he’s giving a perfect illustration of what economists mean by “cost disease.”

ASHLEY: You painstakingly, moment-by-moment, work things out. Let’s do these three seconds. All right, now we know what those three seconds are. Let’s do the next seven seconds. It’s very incremental. It’s very layered, it’s very stop-and-go. And then by a week later, hopefully, you can run a number. And by the end of the two weeks, the goal is that you can actually run the show.

They did get through all that, and they pretty much were ready to run the show — with a brand-new actor in the title role. For most of the show’s development, Lincoln had been played by the Broadway veteran Brian Stokes Mitchell. When I asked Ashley about this late change, he found a positive way to spin it.

ASHLEY: We were fortunate enough to have Brian Stokes Mitchell in each of the three readings and workshops that led us up to the first production we’re about to start. And then he had personal circumstances that didn’t allow him to be part of the La Jolla Playhouse production. 

Stokes, as everyone calls him, was extraordinarily popular with the rest of the cast and the creative team; he was always checking in on folks, almost like a player-coach. So he had a lot of goodwill in the bank. Still, his sudden departure made people edgy. I asked Carmen Cusack how she took the news; as Mary Lincoln, Cusack had been working across from Stokes since the New York workshops.

Carmen CUSACK: I had just come back from some heavy stuff, heavy family stuff going on in Texas that I was trying to help sort out, and as soon as I got back from that, because of that stress, I got the flu, and was really in bed sick when I got the call from Christopher Ashley. So I was already down in the dumps, and then he calls and then he says that. And I was just like, yeah, just throw it on the heap, you know, because who else could do this role? He’s perfect for this role. 

DUBNER: Did you think the show might fall apart? 

CUSACK: I was concerned. I was concerned, but I have full trust and admiration for Christopher, and just the whole group. I said, “Well, are we going to keep going?” And he said, “Yep, we’re going to keep going.” 

We had tried several times to interview Stokes before he dropped out; we finally got him and the studio booked but he canceled the day before. I didn’t know what it meant to leave a show for “personal reasons,” and it didn’t seem right to pry too much. But in the absence of fact, rumors flew: maybe Stokes dropped out because he just didn’t think the show was good enough? Maybe he didn’t want to spend a few months living in a hotel room in La Jolla. Maybe, in this moment of such fractured politics, he didn’t want to draw attention as a Black actor playing Abraham Lincoln. Or maybe, at 67 years old, he just didn’t feel up for a long out-of-town run. He did perform in public shortly after quitting Lincoln — in New York, he starred in a five-day run of Love Life, an old Kurt Weill-Alan Jay Lerner musical; and he was a featured performer on a five-day “Broadway cruise,” from Miami to Cozumel. I went to see him in Love Life, and he looked as good as ever. Whatever the case, or whatever the cause for his departure, 3 Summers of Lincoln needed a new Lincoln, ASAP — so they called in their casting director. Here’s Christopher Ashley again:

ASHLEY: She’s like, here’s 30 people that we think would be fantastic to consider. So, we all bat them around, championed various names until we winnow that list down to, I think, we ended up with six people. And then you start figuring out, Okay, who is actually available to come and join us in a month?

DUBNER: And then what do you do? Do you send the script to all of those six? 

ASHLEY: No, no, no. You very much go one at a time. And most of those six, someone in our group has worked with before and all of us have seen many, many performances by them. It’s a very known group. You’re not just basing this on an audition, you’re also basing it on a body of work. And very, very excited that we’re being joined by Ivan Hernandez as Lincoln.

DUBNER: Tell me about Ivan. 

ASHLEY: For La Jolla Playhouse aficionados, he was the Zhivago in the La Jolla Playhouse production of Doctor Zhivago about 20 years ago. If you Google him, you’ll see him all over film, all over television, and all over theater stages. He’s super-smart, beautiful voice, has a kind of center of gravity that I think is a necessary part of Lincoln. 

DUBNER: Looks good in a top hat. 

ASHLEY: I’ve not tried him in a top hat yet, but I did draw one on a picture of him to sort of see what he looked like in my imagination.

DUBNER: And what number was Ivan on that list?

ASHLEY: I can’t tell you that. But he was high. 

Ivan HERNANDEZ: Hi, I’m Ivan Hernandez, and I’m playing Abraham Lincoln in 3 Summers of Lincoln. 

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With Brian Stokes Mitchell out as Lincoln, Ivan Hernandez was in. After several weeks of rehearsal, the director Christopher Ashley declared himself pleased with the new casting.

ASHLEY: He’s got Lincolniness, which is a hard thing to define, but you know it when you see it.

DUBNER: Can you describe it at least? What do you mean by Lincolniness? 

ASHLEY: It’s a gravitas. It’s intelligent use of language. In rehearsals, I was like, yeah, he’s really capturing something about Lincoln. And then we put the costume, and I thought, Wow, he’s really Lincoln. And then we did a last thing, which is he’d been rehearsing with a beard and mustache, and we just shaved the mustache, which is unique to Lincoln. You don’t see a lot of beards-no mustaches in the world. And there was something about, like, all of the work that had been done in creating the character, suddenly with that tiny gesture, got all the way across the finish line for me.

Hernandez has a strong musical-theater background, including on Broadway; but in recent years he’s been doing mostly TV, movies, and commercials. He played Carrie Bradshaw’s love interest on the recent Sex and the City reboot. I sat down with him backstage at the La Jolla Playhouse to see how he is adjusting to Lincoln.

HERNANDEZ: Normally I don’t do regional theater anymore. I mean, I’m married, I have kids, I live in Los Angeles. But I just kept thinking, I can’t turn down this part. I mean, this is a once in a lifetime kind of a role. It’s just an incredible story — part of history. So I felt like if I still want to be an actor, I have to do this. And I love doing musicals. I don’t get to do them as often as I used to when I used to live in New York. It’s incredibly hard work, and it takes all of you, but it’s very rewarding, too, if it’s the right piece.

I asked Hernandez what tech rehearsal is like from the actor’s perspective.

HERNANDEZ: They’re long hours, but it’s sort of relaxing too, because you’re going through everything slowly, so you’re just on stage getting the lights done. It’s kind of the quiet before the storm of actually performing the show, which is nerve-wracking, too, because you’re like, I still need to run these lines and go through the show. 

DUBNER: Especially you. You’re the late addition, yeah?

HERNANDEZ: Yes, that’s true. It was a lot of words to learn.

DUBNER: Are your fellow cast members particularly sympathetic to your situation?

HERNANDEZ: Yes. All of them have played giant roles on Broadway and they know exactly what it’s like, and what it takes.

The dialogue is one thing; his Lincoln character also has nine songs — including an early, establishing song called “This Impossible Position.”

Ivan HERNANDEZ as Abraham LINCOLN: All I want is a nation reunited. All I want is a people set free. Oh, but how, how to craft coalitions amongst pitiful politicians who compromise with conditions, putting me in this impossible position.

I also caught up backstage with Lincoln’s foil, Frederick Douglass, played by Quentin Earl Darrington:

Quentin Earl DARRINGTON: My focus right now is depth and breadth of his complexity in this story. To make sure that every T is crossed, every I is dotted, and done so with love, brilliance, and excellence.

DUBNER: How much of it is mental? 

DARRINGTON: I’m very intentional about what comes out of my mouth, especially through song. So there’s a lot of thought and a lot of time with why I will place a certain thing a certain way or what I choose to land on, what operative words or colors that I want to shape. It’s like a scalpel, precision. 

DUBNER: Could you give an example?

DARRINGTON: Yeah, there’s a moment in the show where I’m grieving, and the grief that is expressed could be very uncontrolled and boisterous and loud and kind of have no form or shape, crying out. But we’ve been playing with it, and we’re doing just the opposite. It’s almost a silent grief. I sing it right in the point of axis between my eyes and my forehead and I just leave it there and don’t push and allow the sound techs to do what they do, and it just is received in a new way.

DARRINGTON as Frederick DOUGLASS: You get used to the news you hear on the streets. More injured, more killed, each day it repeats. You pray on your knees to your God up above, that it’s never your kinfolk, your blood.

DARRINGTON: It’s an interesting way of palatizing sound because you’ll get a lot of force and power from me, and this is completely opposite. And it’s perfect for the moment.

DUBNER: So I think when the average ticket buyer — especially someone that doesn’t know much about the theater or maybe doesn’t see a lot of theater, when they come to buy a Broadway ticket, you know, it’s pretty expensive. I think when you pay that much for something, you just want to sit back and say, Okay, entertain me. My sense is that many theatergoers may not know or care or bother to think much — why should they? — about what it takes to get this thing on stage in front of them. So for them, it’s an entertainment that they’ve bought. But behind that ticket are, as we’re seeing in the theater there during tech rehearsals, hundreds of people working for months and months. And when I look at it from the economic side, a $2- or $400 ticket — it’s a lot of money, but it begins to seem like chump change when I look at what it takes to do this. So from the performer’s side, how does it work? Can you describe for me how it has been for you to earn your living as a theater performer?

DARRINGTON: Ooh, man. Do we have enough time? 

DUBNER: I’ve got nothing to do.

DARRINGTON: It’s interesting how you said that about the ticket price versus what it cost to build the thing, right? It’s a lot. And it seems like just a drop in the bucket. There’s so many hours upon hours upon days upon years of our lives that we put into our projects. I ask myself many times, Why do I keep doing this? For me, it’s a calling. It’s greater than me. So I keep going and I just keep learning how to find peace, find balance, find resolve in the grueling aspect of it. I think that is one of the greatest successes of an artist’s journey, is finding that balance, because you will always have devastating days and you will always have extremely joyful mountaintop days. But it’s how you, in the midst of all of that, continue to keep saying yes to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next. That’s difficult.

DUBNER: So you got a new Lincoln between when we last saw the show and now, right?  

DARRINGTON: Yes. Yes.

DUBNER: What’s that transition been like for you?  

DARRINGTON: The transition was difficult, because I was focused on where we were and what we were building. I’ll tell you today where I am, we have our dear brother Ivan Hernandez, and he is brilliant. I cannot wait for audiences to get a chance to see him.

DUBNER: How did you have to adjust your work in this show to playing with a different Lincoln, from Stokes to Ivan? 

DARRINGTON: One clear example are keys. We changed the keys of the show. Stokes has a beautiful, rich baritone. Ivan’s a much higher singer. So we lifted some keys and arranged some things, of duets. So I’m singing much higher than I was before, which is cool for me. My range is kind of all over the place, and it’s fun. It’s fun to sing there.

Ivan HERNANDEZ as Abraham LINCOLN: He doesn’t give an inch. He’s certainly no fool.

Quentin DARRINGTON as Frederick DOUGLASS: He didn’t even flinch. As stubborn as a mule.

DUET: But could the man be right on some finer points he made? I did enjoy the fight. Round two, another day.

The songs in 3 Summers of Lincoln fit comfortably in the Broadway idiom, but there is a freshness about them. The composer, Crystal Monee Hall, is a first-time Broadway composer. Here is Carmen Cusack, who plays Mary Lincoln:

CUSACK: Crystal is such a sophisticated, interesting, soulful writer. I love singing her stuff. Just when you think you know what the melody is, you don’t. She says, “No, we’re not going there.” I kind of winked at her a few times when I knew I was hitting the wrong note, and she wanted this other thing, and she would kind of look up at me like, I know, I know, I did it wrong, I’m sorry. 

And here’s Cusack, at tech rehearsal, singing a song called “In Each Letter,” where Mary Lincoln asks her husband to show mercy by pardoning Union soldiers who deserted their posts.

STAGE MANAGER: Thank you. All right. Carmen, go ahead.

CUSACK as Mary LINCOLN: You’re more than a man, you’re Commander-in-Chief. Save a life while you can, save a mother from grief. Each day brings bad news, don’t let it harden your heart. Put your power to use and make mercy an art.

These tech rehearsals run for hours, sometimes late into the night. The pace is remarkably slow. The performers are in costume, with full hair and makeup, but they spend most of their time just standing in place while technical decisions are made, and memorialized, and rehearsed. The creative team takes notes, notes, more notes. It’s easy to find yourself asking: what, exactly, does all this add up to? Yes, it’s a commercial enterprise, but what’s the larger purpose of all this work?

Alan SHORR: It tells a story that’s important today.

That is Alan Shorr, the producer in Boston who came up with and commissioned the Lincoln idea.

SHORR: It talks about leadership. It talks about how one man — two men — could change the world. One of the lyrics, “There’s a country out there waiting for us, better than this.” And there is. You know, we’re a great country, but there is a country out there better than where we are today. And we should all strive to make this a better country.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about the capitalization of this show. What do you expect it to be capitalized at, or cost to get it to Broadway?

SHORR: As little as we possibly can. As a businessperson from the past and as a fiduciary, I will do everything that I can to keep cost at the lowest possible amount without sacrificing the art of the show. Today, an average musical costs anywhere from $17 to $30 million. I think we’ll be at the very low end of that number.

DUBNER: Talk about how much you’ve raised so far, and then what the plan is for the next 12 months or so. 

SHORR: We’re raising about $4 million to get us through La Jolla.

DUBNER: How many investors are involved in that? 

SHORR: There may be about 20 to 25.

DUBNER: Can you just talk about the state of investing now? You know, what’s a typically small investment and typically large investment?

SHORR: The smallest investment that most shows allow is $25,000. And it goes up from there. We’ve had people at this stage of our production coming in with $250,000. We’re talking about pre-Broadway right now. Once a show has established itself as something that’s definitely going to Broadway, it really has the potential to be a great show, then you will see $250, $500, even $1 million come in. My guess is things will go great in La Jolla, because I know the product that we’ve achieved so far. This really is a special, special musical. I believe that after La Jolla, people will be throwing money at the project.

3 Summers of Lincoln opens. And maybe the future of theater isn’t so bleak?

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In 2023, the culture critic Isaac Butler wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater Is Imploding Before Our Eyes.” And he called for a federal bailout of nonprofit theater. There is certainly plenty of evidence to back up his “imploding” thesis: beloved regional theaters shutting down, the donor class, especially younger donors, showing a lack of interest in theater and live theater faces massive competition from Netflix and other streamers. In response to Butler’s piece, the Indiana University arts economist Michael Rushton wrote this: “You cannot save an art form if people are not interested in attending.” But Rushton, when we called him up, noted that Butler’s claim is not new:

Michael RUSHTON: If you read cultural commentators in the 1920s, they talk about the death of theater because of the invention of cinema and the radio. It didn’t really happen. It may be that there is going to be a natural downsizing in theater. Industries ebb and flow, and the fact that some theaters are closing and some theaters are finding we can’t do as many plays per year as we used to does not mean that theater is dying.

DUBNER: I’ve seen data from the Broadway League that the average annual household income of a Broadway ticket buyer is — do you want to guess the number? 

RUSHTON: I’m going to guess the average household income is going to be over $100,000. 

DUBNER: Yeah, it’s over $250, $250,000. How do you think about the population of Broadway ticket buyers then — are they just rich by definition? Is a Broadway ticket therefore a luxury good? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing? 

RUSHTON: I’m not sure I would call live performance a luxury good, because it’s not necessarily that expensive, relative to other things that people spend money on. So, yes, a night out at live theater is going to cost one a lot. But people do spend lots of money to go on trips, or go to amusement parks, or go to live sporting events. So I think that live theater needs to be thinking about, How do we turn this into something people really want to do? Our biggest selling point is that there are live, breathing individuals on a stage right in front of you.

DUBNER: You recently published a book called The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts. What can you tell us about cause and effect with cultural institutions? Is it that successful economies and cultures have the wealth to support these institutions, and that’s why they exist? Or do those cultural institutions contribute to the success of an economy and culture?

RUSHTON: I’m not sure whether we can say that high culture necessarily leads to economic riches, but it can lead to riches in other ways, in terms of greater understanding, greater insight, greater appreciation of beauty, those intrinsic goods that make our make our lives better. 

DUBNER: Do you feel that the arts in the U.S. have contributed to a greater cultural culture of understanding and insight and appreciation of beauty? 

RUSHTON: One would hope so. And one would think that our greatest playwrights have given us insights into social dynamics and the family. If you think of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and all of our great authors and poets and composers, they have helped us understand ourselves somewhat, and I think that has made our lives richer.

DUBNER: I happen to be on your team, Michael. I feel very much the same way personally that you’re describing. That said, when I look at the relatively tiny number of people who attend theater, who attend opera, who attend classical music, even who go to museums, I think, Well, there is a small portion of any population that likes that stuff, and the vast majority in our country at this moment in time simply don’t. So what’s your best argument that it does deserve public funding, even though the share of the population who partakes is relatively tiny, and that share of the population tends to be able to afford it themselves already?

RUSHTON: The justification for public funding for the arts, even though the audiences tend to skew towards the well-off, is that you want to preserve the very best of our culture for future generations. You want to preserve it for current generations who may not have discovered it, but who might find real meaning in it. So just keeping that opportunity alive, and not letting those opportunities die out, so that all we have is whatever a commercial culture finds it can make a dollar out of, is important. 

DUBNER: What’s the last thing you saw, a live performance, that moved you?

RUSHTON: Last live performance I went to was a very, very low-budget outdoor performance of Henry IV, Part 1. And it was wonderful.

DUBNER: Where was this, and who were the performers? 

RUSHTON: This was in Bloomington, and it was just a local amateur theater company. The audience was very diverse and sitting in lawn chairs or just on the grass. The costumes were really makeshift, but the actors and the audience alike were just so involved in their performance, and all the action and the sword fights. There were no star performers at all. It’s not Shakespeare’s best-known play, and yet it was just a terrific night out, and something that I will not forget. 

Jeffrey SELLER: Musical theater is a magic trick.

That’s Jeffrey Seller, a lead producer on Hamilton, Rent, and others.

SELLER: When an artist lines up in the perfect way music, dialogue, lyric, movement, character, and story, in a way that makes me go from the back of my seat to the front of my seat, that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and makes me cry, and fills me with joy, and affects me in my — to use a Yiddish word, kishkas, my guts — we can get you in your guts. We’re going to entertain you, and inspire you, and do it with illumination and education, but most important, we’re going to lift you out of your chair and take you to a place you’ve never been.

Will 3 Summers of Lincoln be able to do that, to lift people out of their chairs and take them to a place they’ve never been? We’re about to find out.

ASHLEY: Hi, I am Christopher Ashley, the artistic director here at La Jolla Playhouse, also the director of the show. Thank you for your patience tonight. We’re about to get started. So tonight is our very first public performance of this world premiere musical. What that means is you are the first audience for this musical ever, and we are delighted to meet you.

ENSEMBLE: We’re writing a story larger than us that goes farther than us. There is a country waiting for us. There is a country better than this. 

Audiences at the La Jolla Playhouse loved 3 Summers of Lincoln. Tickets sold very well, and Christopher Ashley told me later that the Playhouse’s surveys showed that roughly 95 percent of the audience was either satisfied or very satisfied with the show. The San Diego Union-Tribune called it a “thrilling and handsome production,” and noted that the show “seems to kick into a higher gear” whenever Quentin Darrington is singing, as Frederick Douglass. Carmen Cusack as Mary Lincoln and Ivan Hernandez, the last-minute Abraham, were also well-received, and well-reviewed — although, to be honest, I did find myself missing Brian Stokes Mitchell as Lincoln. And I did hear some audience members grumbling that they had come to see the show expecting Stokes in the lead role. But who knows, maybe he’ll be back in the show if and when it makes it to Broadway. The producer Alan Shorr told me they hope to bring the show to New York in 2026 — provided they can raise the rest of the roughly $20 million it costs to mount a show this size, and provided there is a suitable theater available, neither of which are guaranteed. Between now and then, there will be more rewrites, more streamlining, more reconsideration of everything. Here’s Christopher Ashley again:

ASHLEY: I do think there’s something about the process that is insane, and also the most satisfying thing you can possibly do with your life. It’s intensely collaborative, the process of making a new show together. Every day you say something, and then someone does something with that thing you’ve said that is better and richer and more exciting than you had in your head. And that keeps on, taking the process further, higher, and deeper into the center of the story. Once you’ve had that experience, it’s a little bit like crack. And you don’t want to give it up.

For now, everyone in Lincoln is back to juggling their other projects. Quentin Darrington is producing a show called I Dream, about Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. Joe DiPietro wrote a play that recently opened in Kansas City, called An Old-Fashioned Family Murder; he told us that murder mysteries and comedies are what regional theaters are looking for these days. And how about Daniel Watts, the super-energetic co-lyricist and co-choreographer on 3 Summers of Lincoln?

WATTS: There’s a piece about Pelé that I have been writing that started what I thought was just a piece about him and his story, which is fascinating.

DUBNER: Is that for you to perform in as well? 

WATTS: Yes. I ended up going to Brazil during the last World Cup and ultimately ended up being at Pelé’s bedside watching the World Cup final with him 11 days before he passed away. I’m not kidding. 

DUBNER: How did that happen?

WATTS: See, now that’s a whole other podcast. 

Is it a whole other podcast? I’ve heard worse ideas. This series was a blast to make, and I’d like to thank everyone for letting us watch them work — the entire 3 Summers of Lincoln crew, the La Jolla Playhouse crew, and all the producers and academics and others we spoke with, including a lot of people who were very helpful but whose voices you didn’t hear, including Jane Abramson, Sue Frost, Frank Rich, Michael Riedel, and Scott Zeiger. Big thanks to everyone. We will be back next week. 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 was produced by Alina Kulman, and mixed by Jasmin Klinger, with help from Jeremy Johnston; thanks also to Jason Gambrell for field recording in New York and Alec Moore for field recording in La Jolla. 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. As always, thanks for listening.