AI transcript
0:00:10 making something out of nothing is hard in the beginning all you have is your imagination it’s
0:00:19 your only tool your only muscle but if you are determined and lucky that thing in your
0:00:26 imagination can become real and then if you are very lucky people will pay to see it
0:00:42 there’s been theater since the beginning of man really what is theater what is going to theater
0:00:46 and being in a theater what is it what happens what transpires at that moment
0:00:58 it’s the same as the oldest human endeavor of all which is gossip theater is gossip this is a crazy
0:01:04 idea i know except that it’s true what do you do when you go to the theater you overhear
0:01:11 conversations it’s staged but people are talking to each other and you’re listening to them you’re
0:01:15 making assessments about their moral character about their intentions about what’s going to happen
0:01:21 this guy’s not trustworthy she’s ambitious and is concealing it he’s got designs on this there’s
0:01:28 nothing more human and more basic to what human beings do than observing people interact and talking
0:01:32 about it among themselves gossiping so theater is the most fundamental art of all
0:01:39 that is rocco landisman i’m a broadway producer and the former chair of the national endowment for the
0:01:45 arts i’ve known rocco for a long time he was one of the first important people i got to know when i was
0:01:51 starting out as a writer in new york and he was easily one of the most interesting too very sharp and
0:01:57 also very blunt with a reputation as a bit of a rogue which he seemed to enjoy when he was starting
0:02:05 out the thing in his imagination was a musical that he wanted to call big river the plan was to take an american
0:02:13 literary classic mark twain’s huckleberry finn it was my favorite novel and set it to music with new songs by the country
0:02:20 for the country i thought and still do think that roger miller is the greatest songwriter in american history
0:02:33 when landisman heard that miller was playing a club date in new york he went to the show
0:02:40 and afterward he talked his way backstage i said i’d like you to write a broadway musical he basically
0:02:44 didn’t know what i was talking about not only had he never written a broadway musical he’d never seen
0:02:52 one so he kind of pawned me off into his wife mary and she said well write a letter i wrote him a letter
0:03:00 and didn’t get a reply and your credentials as a producer at this point were what basically nil i had been a
0:03:06 professor at the yale school of drama for a number of years i had no producing credential of any kind
0:03:11 my credibility was zilch so i read a letter and don’t get a reply i write another letter and don’t
0:03:17 get a reply i write another one and months go by and nothing’s happening i keep writing and finally i got
0:03:23 a note call actually from one of his managers who said you seem to be pretty insistent about this and
0:03:30 pretty serious why don’t you meet with roger and tell him what you have in mind so landisman flew out
0:03:36 to reno where miller was performing and once again he went backstage afterwards it was one of the
0:03:41 thrills of my life to be backstage with roger miller with his guitar and singing his songs he didn’t
0:03:45 remember the lyrics to all of the songs but i knew them all so whenever we would come to a point where
0:03:51 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
0:03:57 well you have a book and you have a score someone writes the story and you have music and lyrics and you’re
0:04:02 going to do the music and lyrics and he says but there’s a book right i said yeah he says well get
0:04:09 me the book now there was no book yet there’s no there wasn’t anything that’s the show that i’ll
0:04:15 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
0:04:23 i came up with the idea i put the whole team together and luckily it worked it was a hit it won seven tony
0:04:28 awards and best musical and ran over a thousand performances i wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for
0:04:38 for that i wouldn’t have a career at all but of course landisman did have a career a big one he
0:04:44 produced several more hits a guys and dolls revival angels in america the producers and he wound up
0:04:51 running jimson theaters the third largest broadway landlord so when a freakonomics radio listener wrote
0:04:56 in to say that they’d always wondered about the economics of live theater and that we should make a
0:05:02 series about that rocko was one of the first people i thought of not just because he knows things there
0:05:07 are plenty of people in the industry who know things but because he is willing to say them which
0:05:14 many people are not for instance i asked him about a couple of recent broadway disasters 25 million
0:05:21 dollar musicals that bombed it’s a terrible investment the broadway theater it’s about like horse racing
0:05:26 i’ve owned racehorses and i’ve owned theaters and i’ve produced broadway shows 15 to 20 percent
0:05:32 of the shows that are put on broadway earn their money back and it’s the same with racehorses 15 to
0:05:39 20 percent of the racehorses that race at the tracks earn their oats okay so with such a terrible roi
0:05:43 for broadway production why do people invest they can’t help themselves they fall in love with the shows
0:05:53 so today on freakonomics radio investors who fall in love with shows performers who fall in love with
0:06:01 the stage and audiences who fall in love with the whole enterprise there is of course one huge problem
0:06:09 the problem is that it’s very very expensive there’s no economy of scale and there’s no economy of
0:06:16 mechanization it’s handmade live every night so here’s the question in a time with so much entertainment
0:06:23 including an infinite stream of digital and virtual entertainments how can it be that this very
0:06:32 expensive handmade live every night thing even exists theater isn’t going away people telling stories is not
0:06:37 going away we take a hard look at theatrical finances are you trying to get me killed
0:06:47 we try to figure out what drives these creators i feel like every theater maker has a secret desire
0:06:55 to change the world and we follow one new musical from the very beginning one wrong decision you’re
0:07:02 dead and you don’t know it to what will someday be the end there’s a long way to go yes there is
0:07:04 there’s a long way to go i guess i should be knocking wood
0:07:22 please take your seats our show is about to begin
0:07:44 this is freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host steven dubner
0:07:53 the live theater industry in the u.s is estimated at under six billion dollars a year with around 27 000 employees
0:08:00 so not very big but there is a lot going on beneath the surface that most of us don’t see when we buy
0:08:07 a ticket you could imagine a pyramid with broadway at the top broadway is both a goal and the engine that
0:08:13 drives a lot of the activity further down the pyramid in regional and repertory theaters most of which are
0:08:21 non-profits in community theater and high school and college theater and in any number of church halls and
0:08:27 garages and living rooms where someone decides to put on a show but the broadway economy is by far
0:08:35 the most visible and the most influential over the past couple decades it has gotten much more expensive
0:08:43 to produce shows on broadway and ticket prices have also spiked the average now is around 130 this leads
0:08:50 some people to conclude that broadway is unsustainable that it is sick and perhaps dying but keep in mind that
0:08:56 people have been saying that forever one of broadway’s many nicknames is the fabulous invalid which comes
0:09:04 from a kaufman hart play first produced in 1938 lately you may have seen encouraging headlines about
0:09:11 broadway box office like when george clooney decides to star in a play for a few months this led one producer
0:09:19 to complain that throwing movie stars at the broadway model is just a way of cauterizing the bleeding by the way
0:09:25 that producer was scott rudin who had been sent into exile for throwing a stapler at his assistant among
0:09:33 other allegations one thing about broadway it is not dull this series won’t be dull either we will tell
0:09:40 you about the real estate cartel that controls broadway the theatrical unions that get good wages for their
0:09:47 members and drive producers absolutely crazy the performers and other creatives who in pursuit of
0:09:55 their dreams are willing to scrape by on relatively low pay we thought the best way to tell this story
0:10:01 was to follow one show so that’s what we’ll do with plenty of tangents the show we’re going to follow
0:10:07 the show began five years ago as nothing but an idea it is now significantly through its gestation
0:10:15 period but not yet on broadway and with no guarantee it will ever get there so let’s start with the
0:10:22 writer my name is joe di pietro i write plays and musicals and on the new musical three summers of
0:10:29 lincoln i am the book writer meaning i write the script and the co-lyricist di pietro remembers
0:10:36 exactly how he started down this career path his parents took him to see the musical 1776 on broadway
0:10:42 it was the first show i saw as a i don’t know 10 year old i can still remember where i was sitting
0:10:47 in the mezzanine and the lights came up on the continental congress i was like put a fork in me i’m
0:10:53 done i’m going to be a part of this somehow he’s now been writing for more than 30 years his credits
0:11:00 include the musical memphis for which di pietro won two tony awards and all shook up an elvis presley
0:11:07 jukebox musical so what is this new show he’s working on three summers of lincoln three summers
0:11:14 of lincoln picks up in the second summer of the civil war when things are going terribly and there is
0:11:23 no end in sight it is a brutal bloody war lincoln needs to figure out how to end this and he just can’t
0:11:29 the south is fighting stronger than he thought where’d the idea come from was this sprung from the brain
0:11:36 of joe di pietro it did not spring from my brain quite the opposite i was sitting at home in the
0:11:42 first december of the pandemic theater was dead i make my living as a writer on royalties from my
0:11:48 productions all over the world and there were exactly zero productions happening it was a scary
0:11:54 uncertain time and i got a call one day out of the blue from two producers i know and who invested in
0:12:00 my shows named richard winkler and alan shore alan shore i am the general partner for three summers
0:12:07 of lincoln richard winkler general partner of three summers of lincoln this was our idea from the very
0:12:15 inception it all has to start with the idea and the art and then you figure out how to finance it
0:12:23 richard winkler worked for years on broadway as a lighting designer i met hundreds of producers who
0:12:31 i didn’t think had very good taste and spent money in stupid ridiculous ways i kept thinking that i
0:12:38 wanted to be a producer when i turned 60 and had this realization that i don’t want to be in the
0:12:46 theater till midnight anymore i said well i’m going to try this that was 16 years ago alan shore who lives
0:12:53 in boston spent most of his career in financial services he started producing around 12 years ago
0:13:02 so what does a broadway producer actually do here’s shore the best way i can analogize it is the producer
0:13:09 or the lead producer is the ceo of a company that is producing a piece of live theater they’re ultimately
0:13:16 responsible for every decision that gets made would have been your greatest hits as a producer thus far
0:13:23 leopold stott was the most recent prior to that lehman trilogy i was involved with come from away
0:13:30 i will stop there have you had flops flops yeah we had one i was called diana
0:13:41 diana as in diana princess of wales it was a musical also written by joe di pietro and it was
0:13:49 scheduled to open on broadway in march of 2020 then came covet all 41 broadway theaters shut down for
0:13:55 what turned out to be 18 months so what do you do now if you’re a producer who’s already spent millions
0:14:03 to develop a show we had a production that we thought was great so why not bring the cast back
0:14:10 in a healthy way and live capture it on stage and sell it to net or netflix came to the production said
0:14:19 we’d like to do this and so a filmed stage version of diana premiered on netflix in october 2021 critics
0:14:27 hated it and so did viewers cringeworthy they called it and exploitative and tawdry the guardian
0:14:34 named diana the year’s most hysterically awful hate watch when you have a new musical and you try
0:14:40 to live capture it you don’t get the essence of really what’s there and so although it was a great
0:14:47 idea at the time some great ideas just don’t necessarily work the producers did finally bring diana
0:14:54 live to broadway it didn’t work there either it closed after barely a month and reportedly lost
0:15:00 around 10 million dollars maybe princess diana just wasn’t the right character to build a new musical
0:15:10 around so how about abraham lincoln i asked alan shore to explain the genesis of that idea it first
0:15:15 started the summer 2020 during covid where none of us had anything to do but sit around and think
0:15:22 literally when george floyd was murdered our president at the time had mentioned that he had
0:15:28 done more for black people than anybody since abraham lincoln and that started me thinking well what did
0:15:34 lincoln actually do let’s get to the facts i had obviously read books about abraham lincoln i saw the
0:15:41 movie lincoln that steven spielberg produced but that only told the story from 1864 through 1865 so the
0:15:48 question in my mind is what happened before that how did lincoln get there so i called richard my
0:15:55 partner and i said what do you think about doing a musical about abraham lincoln to which i said those
0:16:04 those two words do not belong in the same sentence because why not richard lincoln and musical i just
0:16:09 didn’t think they did so i said well i don’t know if it does or not but what else do we got to do let’s
0:16:15 explore it and the first person that i called was an acquaintance doris kearns goodwin who i thought was
0:16:21 was the authority on abraham lincoln that’s a pretty handy acquaintance to have while she lives in boston so
0:16:28 that helps so i called her and asked her and her producing partner if this would be something she’d be
0:16:35 interested in participating in and fortunately for us she readily agreed and then we called joe di
0:16:41 pietro and they said hey joe we are commissioning some of our favorite writers but we just have a
0:16:45 topic we’ll give you and then you can write anything you want about it this was like a miracle and i like
0:16:51 richard and allen very much so i’m just thinking like i’m gonna do it no matter what it is juggling
0:16:57 mermaids fine i’ll write that that’ll work that’ll work when do you want it and they said we want you to
0:17:02 write a musical about abraham lincoln i don’t think i said this out loud but my first thought was
0:17:12 absolutely not that is a terrible idea i’m just thinking like how does lincoln sing what is it
0:17:20 about and the civil war it was so awful i was just thinking like no joe said no no no this is not a good
0:17:26 idea i don’t want to do this we talked him into a conversation with somebody else and that was doris
0:17:32 kearns goodwin was the other conversation yes and they got along like a house of fire and then joe said
0:17:39 well let me do some research and then i thought well you know so many great musicals start out as
0:17:46 terrible ideas right name some a hip-hop musical about a founding father terrible idea a musical about
0:17:52 the sinking of the titanic that’s a terrible idea a musical about cannibalism and it becomes sweeney
0:17:57 todd so you’re like all right maybe that instinct you should be a little more open
0:18:05 the hip-hop musical about a founding father was of course hamilton by lin-manuel miranda
0:18:12 hamilton was such a sensation that it seemed to change the rules for producers creators performers the
0:18:20 audience it opened up new possibilities but for joe di pietro there was a puzzle to solve alexander
0:18:27 hamilton had been relatively obscure to most people abraham lincoln quite the opposite there are more
0:18:33 books published about abraham lincoln than anyone except for jesus and they’re all according to my
0:18:40 calculation about 800 pages long i was like i don’t want to sit in my house during the pandemic reading 800
0:18:46 page books about the civil war like that is not fun when you feel like you’re getting overwhelmed by
0:18:52 american political history it must be nice to have doris kearns goodwin on your side she wrote a book
0:18:57 called leadership in turbulent times which is about what she considers to be the four most effective
0:19:07 presidents i read this one chapter which said during the last three summers of the civil war mary lincoln
0:19:12 dragged abraham to a place called the soldier’s home which was the first u.s home for indigent
0:19:19 soldiers it had a little cottage that the previous president buchanan used as a summer getaway from
0:19:27 the heat in the swamp of dc so he spent his three summers there and i thought oh well that three summers
0:19:32 gives you structure and it turns out those three summers were really consequential because the first
0:19:38 summer he came up with the idea and then at the very end of the summer decreed the emancipation
0:19:45 proclamation the second summer one of his biggest critics though on the same side as him was the great
0:19:52 abolitionist frederick douglas and frederick douglas who had been a thorn in his side one day decides i’m
0:19:57 going to go to the white house and wait online with all of the other people who are waiting online to see
0:20:01 the president and i’m going to demand to speak with him and tell him that he’s moving too slow and ending
0:20:09 this war so frederick douglas does that and they talk and they quickly recognize that they might not
0:20:19 agree with their methods of how to end the war but they couldn’t deny each other’s brilliance and then the
0:20:24 the third summer when things were really going bad this time lincoln calls frederick douglas because he
0:20:29 has a mission for him that he thinks will help end the war my question about this show is always okay
0:20:37 fascinating historical thing but how does it relate to today how is it in conversation with activism today
0:20:44 and how is it in conversation with the presidency today all of those questions and once the frederick
0:20:51 douglas aspect came in they started to really interest me then i was like you know i’ll write an
0:21:01 outline pay me a little money let me write an outline and see if i get hooked di pietro did get hooked but
0:21:09 he’s a playwright not a composer and a musical isn’t a musical without music so coming up after the break
0:21:16 a nation on the edge on the verge the center can hold when two ideas can merge
0:21:34 i’m stephen dubner this is freakonomics radio we will be right back
0:21:44 the playwright joe di pietro had been commissioned to write the script for a new musical about abraham
0:21:53 lincoln di pietro is white as was lincoln but the story is really about slavery ending slavery and the
0:21:59 other main character is the black abolitionist frederick douglas given the subject matter of the show
0:22:04 i was like oh it would be great to have a lyricist who would look at the subject matter from a different
0:22:12 perspective than i did daniel j watts was a star dancer in a broadway show i wrote called memphis
0:22:19 back in 2009 he was fantastic and has been in probably dozens of shows by now he also at the
0:22:26 time was a spoken word artist a budding spoken word artist i went to see his spoken word performances and
0:22:32 i was like wow god he’s really good and so you thought oh he can write i thought he can write i think i
0:22:37 called him out of the blue in the pandemic when theater was literally dead there was no hope and
0:22:42 no future and we were all broke he was like hey there’s this project i’m working on and i need a
0:22:47 co-lyricist i recognize that i cannot speak for a lot of these people i’m wondering if you would be
0:22:54 interested and that is daniel watts i am a co-lyricist and co-choreographer for three summers of lincoln
0:23:02 as a kid growing up in the carolinas watts played sports he took dance and gymnastics he has always
0:23:10 had a high level of energy everyone’s like sit down daniel sit down i’m like yeah yeah yeah yeah sure
0:23:16 sure sure sure i got things to do watts has been performing on broadway since 2006 he was nominated for
0:23:23 tony award for playing ike turner in tina the tina turner musical he has also appeared in the little
0:23:31 mermaid the color purple and yes hamilton so what did he think about the idea of a lincoln musical
0:23:39 i was like oh lord that just sounds silly like oh no joe why is this the thing you’re calling about you
0:23:44 know i’ve been waiting for years for you to call me and like this is the thing but only because how i’m
0:23:50 used to seeing lincoln depicted is where i was you know coming from but the other thing is that time
0:23:58 period of how america broke and then came back together is really fascinating to me i just was
0:24:04 really excited when he said yes because i thought like oh i am actually going to learn so much from
0:24:11 him daniel is probably 20 years younger than me and from a very different background in this particular
0:24:19 collaboration i am very much about story story story how does the song start what dramatically
0:24:24 happens in the middle to change the trajectory of it and then how does it end in a new way he’s much
0:24:32 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
0:24:38 he’ll often like break down a word which is what oftentimes rappers do it really opened my eyes and we
0:24:43 we went to my house in connecticut to start this together he’d written act one i think that an
0:24:48 outline of act two we read through it first and whatever jumped out at us personally we kind of
0:24:54 just made our own little notes it was like let’s maybe try to write two or three songs while we’re
0:25:01 here we sat on my porch and the first thing we wrote for some reason was a campfire song called
0:25:07 scarlet the harlot it’s just basically a dirty song that civil war soldiers used to sing and then it
0:25:12 becomes about abraham lincoln and then abe enters and interrupts them and they’re singing this filthy
0:25:18 song about abe so as you’re giggling now we essentially sat around my porch and giggled for a
0:25:23 day and wrote this silly song that we always liked we kept putting it in drafts and cutting it and putting
0:25:31 in the drafts again scarlet the harlot that got cut quickly and then found its way back in in the last
0:25:36 six months why did it get cut we just didn’t know where it went you know the story tells you what it
0:25:41 is as you keep developing it so how scarlet ended up back was that we realized we didn’t have any time
0:25:47 with abraham and the soldiers which we felt was very very important i haven’t heard scarlet yet can you
0:25:55 sing me a little bit right now scarlet the harlot the poor soldier’s whore open her legs as wide as
0:26:02 a door that’s all i can give you right now it’s body it’s very body song that you know hopefully it stays
0:26:11 you just never know you never know the music and the lyrics to me it seems really really hard to write
0:26:17 lyrics for a musical first without the music is that not really hard no well not for me i don’t
0:26:23 want to speak for anybody else or i only say for joe and i the poetry comes first right now my musical
0:26:30 theater nerd is going off in musical theater first you say it and then once the emotion overcomes you
0:26:36 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
0:26:42 have lyrics then you seek out composers that you think might both have music pouring out of them
0:26:48 but also would understand this story and want to apply their artistry to it
0:26:59 a composer perhaps like this one and warning there’s a bit of off color language here
0:27:30 my name is crystal monet hall i am a singer and a songwriter
0:27:40 and a performer and a vocal arranger and a vocal producer and keep going a composer and an educator
0:27:52 my mom has a beautiful voice and i learned how to sing listening to her sing on sunday mornings in
0:27:59 church i had my first solo in the choir when i was like i don’t know seven or eight you remember what you
0:28:06 saying i do i do it’s a song called i may be young can i hear a bit the chorus is like i may be young
0:28:09 and never get old
0:28:25 may not have a savior his name is jesus
0:28:34 i can’t feel him down in my soul and then my solo was like this
0:28:48 sign me up for that church and you went to the university of virginia correct i did yeah it’s a
0:28:53 source of pride for me my dad was in the first class of black people to ever matriculate there
0:28:58 you got a master’s in education as well is that right i went to uva for five and a half years got my
0:29:04 master’s got two bachelor’s degrees and i took a position teaching high school english and drama in
0:29:09 charlottesville and then i resigned on my birthday which is october the first which means i taught for
0:29:17 for about a month you loved it huh i loved it no i did but i was like i am not happy i’m gonna go to
0:29:22 new york and i’m gonna sing and i don’t even know if i knew what that meant i guess in my mind i was
0:29:28 gonna like lay across a piano in like a shiny dress what was your first job i came to new york i auditioned
0:29:36 i took the first job i got it was a disney cruise line and the next thing that i got was the non-union
0:29:45 tour of rent and i did that for a year what’s that like it’s like really short sits in cities like we
0:29:51 would sleep on the floor of a bus i mean like a greyhound bus we didn’t feel it at all could i do
0:29:59 it today hell nah but then i was ready for the world honey i was a road dog after i did that non-equity
0:30:03 tour for a year i went directly into the broadway show and you started as a swing is that right i
0:30:09 started as a swing i mostly played joanna mrs jefferson the seasons of love soloist i closed
0:30:11 it out so i was there for about the last four or five years
0:30:20 rent like hamilton was another huge and groundbreaking broadway hit the
0:30:25 kind of show that changes how people think about what’s possible later in this series we’ll hear
0:30:32 from jeffrey seller a lead producer of both rent and hamilton for crystal monet hall performing in a
0:30:40 broadway hit was a great gig but even a union acting job barely covers the rent when the rent is in new
0:30:47 new york city almost every theatrical performer as a side hustle hall taught herself guitar and began
0:30:53 writing songs she went on tour with mickey heart of the grateful dead and she released a record of her
0:31:00 own at one point she moved to california but she soon came back to new york she performed in the alicia
0:31:06 keys jukebox musical hell’s kitchen at the public theater before the show moved to broadway and then she got a
0:31:12 call from joe di pietro and daniel watts about a new musical they were writing called three summers
0:31:18 of lincoln here’s di pietro again she had a self-titled debut album and i was like oh i really like the
0:31:24 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
0:31:31 said pick two or three songs and write something and send it to us would she pick what i very clearly
0:31:37 remember her picking is the opening number which is called 90 day war initially a civil war everyone
0:31:44 thought it would last 90 days and so by the second summer of the civil war it was over 400 days and the
0:31:50 big thing is an opening number you want to introduce the sound of the show all of those people sitting in
0:31:57 the audience say okay you’re writing a show about abraham lincoln prove that this is a good idea
0:32:06 prove that this isn’t hamilton prove it’s not 1776 prove you have your own voice the first lyrics in 90 day
0:32:13 war are a nation on the edge on the verge the center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge can i hear a
0:32:19 a little bit of a little bit of that so it starts with everybody goes whoa which i thought was so cute
0:32:21 because it sort of sounds because it sort of sounds like the word war
0:32:37 a nation on the edge on the verge the center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge
0:32:45 you know what i mean suddenly we’re in some sort of rock
0:32:53 thing but we’re like in six eight and there’s this military snare under it the other song that
0:32:59 she wrote was pounding on the rock which now opens act two that is a song when frederick
0:33:03 douglas and his son are trying to recruit folks for the first black regiment
0:33:20 they’re up in new england trying to get young black men to sign up for this war that young black men
0:33:25 don’t know why they should be fighting and dying for this country that has let them down at every
0:33:33 place imaginable it’s this sort of rousing number and i remember listening to her demo and minute into it
0:33:40 without realizing it i find myself standing up and like happily bouncing around my apartment and the music
0:33:45 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
0:33:50 room with this person for the next two years three years four years however long it takes to create this
0:33:59 musical two years three four years yes it can easily take that long to create a musical and who pays for
0:34:06 all this well it depends in this case the producers alan shore and richard winkler were writing the checks
0:34:12 here’s shore initially my partner and i put up all the money the reason for that having come from the
0:34:19 financial world i’ve always looked at myself as a fiduciary i am not willing to ask other people to
0:34:25 put money into something that i don’t feel comfortable with and until we got to the point with three summers of
0:34:31 lincoln where we believed that we had something special it was only at that point that we decided
0:34:37 okay we’re going to move to the next step it’s very expensive and we will bring in outside investors
0:34:43 at what point was that in the development in the show that was last november december when we did our
0:34:50 three-week workshop up until that point essentially myself and my partner were fully funding the project
0:34:57 and what did it cost up until that point probably mid to high six figures that went into hiring the
0:35:05 people to write the show the composer the lyricist the director actors actresses for us to hear what it
0:35:12 is that the writers actually came up with that was a year and a half process where we had several workshops
0:35:20 and all of that cost money well you generally get contracted for a series of drafts and i think it just
0:35:26 depends who you are that’s joe di pietro winning tony awards my price increased which was very very nice
0:35:31 i always say the day after i won two tony awards i wasn’t a better writer but everyone thought i was
0:35:39 generally the advances for theater are much less than for movies you hear about writers getting 50 000 100 000
0:35:49 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
0:35:56 ask for about 50 or so and here is crystal monet hall the creative team you get your upfront to work on the
0:36:02 show whatever that is and that depends on you know how much cache you have and how long you’ve been in the
0:36:08 business and what you can command but after that you don’t get paid you don’t get any money as you’re
0:36:14 going you hope that it is something that is very very lasting and that you will be able to get
0:36:22 all of that back end but that’s not necessarily promised it’s a hope and faith thing you know you gotta love
0:36:28 it you gotta love it are you willing to tell me what you’re making for composing three summers of lincoln
0:36:39 i can say that first-time composers are generally making for an upfront between 18 and 25 000 right now
0:36:47 i am inside of the dream and that’s daniel watts like i literally flew in yesterday morning from chicago
0:36:53 because i’m on a tv show called the shy i was like hey guys gotta go fly back here to jump right into a
0:37:00 workshop of a musical that i’m the co-lyricist and co-choreographer of little me is like yeah older me is
0:37:07 like daniel you’re doing a lot how does your salary shooting a tv show compare to your salary and the
0:37:13 time it takes also creating a musical oh it’s night and day it’s just different economics you know when it
0:37:20 comes to theater there is a fixed amount of tickets that can be sold there’s only so much money that can
0:37:27 come in also in theater you can only get paid if you’re there so if you miss a show you lose pay you
0:37:32 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
0:37:38 to remember anything i can leave it i shot my whole episode in two days that was two days of shooting and i
0:37:45 make a lot more money doing that and there’s also a residual check on the other side once it airs
0:37:49 so by the time three summers of lincoln makes it to broadway assuming it makes it to broadway you will
0:37:55 have been working on it for years years yes years and the fee that you get for being the co-lyricist
0:38:01 and choreographer on this show you could make that much money in how many days or weeks of shooting tv or
0:38:09 film i can make that in an episode oh my god i made it this weekend so basically we should be
0:38:13 very grateful to tv and film for subsidizing theater work essentially honestly yeah
0:38:24 the punishing economics notwithstanding there came a time when the writing team of di pietro watts and hall
0:38:31 had a real live lincoln musical on paper ready to get up on its feet but if you’re going to make a
0:38:39 musical about a big time historical figure you will need a performer just as big time to play the role
0:38:47 brian stokes mitchell is an incredible star he is exactly the right person to play the role that’s
0:39:01 coming up after the break i’m steven dubner and this is freakonomics radio
0:39:09 it’s december 2023 we are in a big well-lit rehearsal space called open jar studios on the 11th floor of a
0:39:15 building near the heart of the broadway theater district the theaters themselves are very visible
0:39:21 with their marquees and their huge show posters but the rest of the broadway ecosystem is hidden away
0:39:29 in buildings like this one not just rehearsal spaces but production offices ticketing agencies pr firms and
0:39:37 advertising firms vocal and acting and dance coaches agents and lawyers it’s a long list today i am seeing
0:39:44 for the first time a workshop performance of three summers of lincoln there are well over a hundred
0:39:51 people in the audience some family and friends but also potential investors producers theater owners
0:39:57 etc this workshop is being officially presented not by alan shore and richard winkler the commercial
0:40:04 producers who’ve been developing the show but by the la jolla playhouse in san diego that is where
0:40:10 three summers of lincoln will eventually have its world premiere as it works its way toward broadway la
0:40:15 la jolla is considered one of the best regional theaters in the country and over the years it has
0:40:22 been a launch pad for many broadway shows rocco landisman’s big river back in 1984 the outsiders which
0:40:30 won the tony last year for best musical also come from away a big hit that told the story of airline
0:40:37 passengers stranded in newfoundland after 9 11 la jolla is a non-profit theater that is very much part of the
0:40:43 for-profit ecosystem and their partnership on three summers of lincoln is what’s called an enhancement
0:40:50 deal here is the lincoln writer joe di pietro generally producers give them hundreds of thousands
0:40:56 if not millions of dollars to enhance their production on stage so their audience sees a really
0:41:05 glitzy impressive presentation and also it helps the theater to say hey we’re producing musicals that are
0:41:11 going to broadway you saw them here first and here is the lincoln producer alan shore the fact that
0:41:16 they’re a non-profit has nothing to do with the quality of the product that they’re going to be
0:41:25 producing on our behalf in la jolla artistically they have no say so in the show there are hatchery for
0:41:31 something that we believe will move on very quickly to the commercial stage in the case of this show the
0:41:37 symbiosis runs even deeper because lincoln is being directed by christopher ashley who is the
0:41:45 artistic director at la jolla ashley won a tony for his work on come from away he also directed diana
0:41:50 the musical but we don’t need to say any more about that ashley’s attachment to this new show three
0:41:59 summers of lincoln runs deep one of the things that drew me to it is the relationship between lincoln and
0:42:09 frederick douglas these two incredibly well-educated passionate writers thinkers who started out really as
0:42:17 enemies and those two men sort of magnetically drawing each other toward each other’s point of view
0:42:22 i sometimes think about subtitling three summers of lincoln as the radicalization of lincoln
0:42:31 watching how a person moves from a very lawyerly careful an incrementalist way of thinking towards
0:42:39 somebody who is capable of bold radical action that war was not going to get solved without a couple of
0:42:45 radical moves being made there were so many people who were so deeply economically invested in the
0:42:51 institution of slavery and how you say i understand that and i don’t care that there is a moral imperative
0:42:57 here that transcends the economic motive and that seems to me like it’s got a lot of resonance and
0:43:07 applications in the current world and now in this big rehearsal studio the cast of three summers of lincoln is
0:43:13 spread out in a semicircle they have their scripts in front of them on music stands there will be some
0:43:19 some standing and some sitting but no real moving about and certainly no choreography there are also
0:43:27 no costumes no props no scenery this is just a chance to hear and feel the story and the songs with real
0:43:35 performers the show opens on a tap dancer who has a prosthetic leg his missing leg represents the
0:43:43 war wounded his tapping mimics a telegraph for the purposes of this workshop there is a narrator to fill in some details
0:43:51 we see text we see text projected on the walls june 1862 the war has been raging for 430
0:43:57 days estimated casualties 53 864
0:44:13 lights rise on white union soldiers and black field assists silhouetted within fog rising from the battlefield
0:44:43 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 he will find some peace and
0:44:49 the pleasant breeze for everybody who wondered at the pleasant breeze for everybody who wondered at the beginning of this project how would
0:45:09 abraham lincoln sing well this is how he sings 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
0:45:29 where’s the idea where’s the idea where’s the breeze where is the inspiration to ease these troubles these tensions these
0:45:37 unmentioned terrors how to mend these dissensions between men and their errors
0:45:41 where’s the breeze
0:45:50 where’s the breeze
0:45:59 brian stokes mitchell is an incredible star that’s the producer richard winkler he is exactly the right person
0:46:09 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
0:46:19 he is a brilliant performer and he can stand on a broadway stage and command 1500 people without any
0:46:27 difficulty and here’s the director christopher ashley he’s so lincolny and he’s also the most amazing
0:46:34 collaborator he’s like game for anything he will try anything the most beautiful voice in america just like
0:46:40 extraordinary voice every time i have a conversation with him about a scene or lincoln or the current
0:46:46 world i feel like i understand our story better there is no one in the history of performance so i would
0:46:48 rather have playing lincoln for us than brian stokes mitchell
0:47:01 stokes as everyone calls him is one of the most beloved broadway performers of his era in addition
0:47:07 to being as we’ve already heard tall and slender with the most beautiful voice in america he’s also
0:47:14 a box office draw not the same as a george clooney or denzel washington or a hugh jackman but for the core
0:47:22 broadway audience brian stokes mitchell is a name brand in the 1990s he appeared in ragtime as coalhouse
0:47:31 walker jr a harlem musician navigating lost love racial injustice and violence in 2000 he won a tony
0:47:38 for his performance in kiss me kate stokes is black but he doesn’t always play black characters on stage he
0:47:46 exudes both charm and gravity he doesn’t seem to need attention the way some performers do and this
0:47:53 makes him even more charismatic offstage he’s known as kind and caring he was a founding member of black
0:48:01 theater united and chair of the entertainment community fund a leading man in every way the three summers of
0:48:08 lincoln team was thrilled to have stokes developing the role of abraham lincoln from the ground up here’s joe di pietro again
0:48:16 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
0:48:24 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
0:48:31 folks in it but a brian stokes mitchell is seeing how it fits with him if he enjoys it if he thinks he
0:48:38 really wants to play this role when the workshop i saw all the roles were played by black or white
0:48:44 actors with what looked to be pretty much historical accuracy right mcclellan was played by a white guy
0:48:49 douglas and his family played by black actors and so on but then there’s brian stokes mitchell as lincoln
0:48:55 just talk about that casting choice i’ll tell you how that came about we had done a reading of the
0:49:01 first act of the show very early on and was going very well and we sort of cast lincoln was a very
0:49:08 talented white actor we had talked about stokes playing frederick douglas because he’s probably the
0:49:14 preeminent male musical performer of that age and he’s you know just brilliant so we’re writing the show
0:49:19 and crystal goes to us you know the way i’m writing these characters the lincoln character has a much more
0:49:25 traditional theatrical voice and douglas is much more soulful and you know stokes is super talented
0:49:31 but that’s not where he lives as a performer and we’re like he can do anything calm down
0:49:37 he’s gonna be great and then daniel and crystal come to me and they were really a little gingerly like
0:49:43 we have an idea we don’t know if you’re gonna like it i’m like i have an idea too i said you write down
0:49:49 your idea and i’m gonna write down my idea we do that and we both on a little piece of paper wrote
0:49:56 stokes says lincoln oh my gosh so daniel and chris who both were friends with him and had worked with
0:50:02 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
0:50:05 goes all right what’s the show and he goes well it’s called three summers of lincoln and it’s about
0:50:10 lincoln and frederick douglas daniel said he saw stokes eyes get a little glassy like oh frederick
0:50:15 douglas okay and then they said well we want you to play lincoln and he suddenly was like oh now i’m
0:50:24 interested and a black man playing him is certainly provocative especially if every other role in the
0:50:29 the show is cast according to the race that historically they would be here again is the
0:50:37 director christopher ashley the frederick douglas and lincoln relationship lives so much at the center
0:50:46 of this musical we’re in three summers of the presidency of lincoln 1862 63 and 64 they didn’t actually meet
0:50:53 until 63 in person so we have the interesting problem dramatically of how do you have two central
0:50:57 characters who don’t meet until after your intermission so you have to kind of get them into
0:51:03 contention and interaction from afar before they finally collide
0:51:15 and here’s how that happens douglas is played by quentin earl derrington a phenomenally intense and
0:51:22 talented performer who appears in the first act essentially in split screen with lincoln my name is frederick
0:51:31 douglas and let it be known here i am did the man actually say the constitution gives him no authority
0:51:37 to end the inhumanity of slavery this is what happens when you elect a lawyer president if the
0:51:42 constitution protects a gross injustice you don’t equivocate you don’t hesitate you change the goddamn
0:51:48 constitution quentin derrington who goes by q has been performing on broadway for more than 15 years
0:51:56 years his credits include cats and mj the musical he is a deeply religious man who sees his talent as
0:52:02 something to be shared here he is off stage out of character it’s a gift it’s a precious gift from god
0:52:10 and i use it for him and for people when did you um discover the gift right around eighth ninth grade
0:52:16 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
0:52:22 give me a solo whatever it’s hard for me to imagine insane listen this is the truth i wanted so desperately to
0:52:28 sing so i just started mimicking i taught myself through copying some of my favorite artists of the
0:52:35 time john p key who was a gospel singer amazing legend jodeci which was my favorite group back
0:52:41 then r&b group and stevie wonder i listened to every track they’ve ever made on repeat and i taught
0:52:47 myself to sing through just copying those wonderful wonderful artists and i started singing publicly after
0:52:54 that before that though i mean you were singing in the choir what were you missing i was making noise
0:52:58 i was making a lot of noise that’s all
0:53:07 and here’s a scene from the workshop frederick douglas is at the white house about to meet
0:53:15 the president for the first time lincoln’s valet william slade introduces douglas mr president this
0:53:24 no need for an introduction william i’ve devoured mr douglas’s writings you have let’s see
0:53:34 the president sports um hold on let me get this right ah ah yes the president sports pride of race
0:53:46 and blood and contempt for negroes is that what you said uh yes well judging by your verbiage i assume
0:53:54 you’re an avid reader so we have much to discuss sit please he threw me off my game
0:54:04 he didn’t seem to judge he didn’t seem to judge he knew me by my fame and seemed to
0:54:12 bear no grudge the two men talk about their favorite authors for douglas it’s charles dickens because
0:54:21 douglas explains he writes of society’s injustices lincoln’s favorite author is shakespeare he says
0:54:27 for he writes of the burdens of kings well i encourage you to read the novels of dickens mr president
0:54:35 and i encourage you to read the plays of shakespeare mr douglas i have all of them at least twice twice
0:54:45 he threw me off my game he’s not as i’d expect
0:54:56 i didn’t know his aim so deferred lady flex may i offer you a drink mr douglas
0:55:02 the relationship between douglas and lincoln and the interplay between quentin darrington and brian
0:55:09 stokes mitchell is riveting and even though this was just a workshop the story and songs and
0:55:20 performances are undeniably moving
0:55:31 i was sitting next to debbie buckholz who runs the la jolla playhouse as soon as the performance was
0:55:38 over a friend rushed up to her and said you better start practicing your tony speech later i spoke with
0:55:44 the commercial producers alan shore i think without exception everybody went away thinking this is
0:55:53 really something special and richard winkler i have gone to hundreds of these not of mine but
0:56:00 colleagues at the end of it if people leave right away and say thank you very much congratulations it’s
0:56:08 really nice let’s be in touch that tells you one thing about what they saw if they stay around
0:56:17 for an hour and talk to each other and talk to the cast to the point that the producer has to say
0:56:24 ladies and gentlemen i’m really sorry our rental of this room ends in three minutes could you please
0:56:32 leave well that’s what happened on friday you were there i was there i was the one who had to say
0:56:40 folks our rental is over in three minutes people don’t hang around at the end if it’s not great they just
0:56:40 don’t
0:56:49 it was exciting to see and hear so much excitement to see the coming together of a story that was just a
0:56:57 flicker in someone’s imagination to see it live and breathe and make people laugh and gasp and grieve
0:57:04 the gestation period for a new musical is so long and difficult and expensive that every time it moves
0:57:11 forward it feels like a major accomplishment but there’s a lot more to be done next will come some
0:57:18 rewrites and then more workshopping with the actors and then a whole other layer of creative work that will
0:57:24 feed into the production at la jolla lighting design and scenic design costumes and choreography
0:57:30 the la jolla playhouse has a strong subscriber base and this new lincoln show has begun to catch their
0:57:37 attention subscribers are particularly jazzed about brian stokes mitchell in the lead role to have a
0:57:43 a performer of that caliber star in a new broadway bound musical at a regional theater is a real
0:57:51 attraction but then one day before tickets go on sale for the world premiere of three summers of
0:57:59 lincoln i hear from one of the show’s producers brian stokes mitchell has quit the project personal
0:58:07 reasons that’s all anyone is saying everyone is shaken rumors fly we’ll hear more about that later
0:58:16 in the series coming up next time part two is the theater business actually a business we’re not a
0:58:25 real business we go up and we go down we have hits but in between those hits we have four flops in a row
0:58:31 that’s next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too
0:58:36 freakonomics radio is produced by stitcher and renbud radio you can find our entire
0:58:44 archive on any podcast app also at freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes this
0:58:49 series is being produced by alina culman and we had research assistance from julie canfor this episode
0:58:55 was mixed by jasmine clinger with help from jeremy johnston the freakonomics radio network staff also
0:59:02 includes augusta chapman dalvin abuaji eleanor osborne ellen frankman elsa hernandez gabriel roth
0:59:09 greg rippon john snars morgan levy neil caruth sarah lily tayo jacobs and zach lipinski our theme song
0:59:15 is mr fortune by the hitchhiker and our composer is luis guerra as always thanks for listening
0:59:26 nice work if you can get it yeah yes and that should have been a hit too i was a co-producer on that
0:59:35 the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything
0:59:39 stitcher
0:59:42 you
0:00:19 your only tool your only muscle but if you are determined and lucky that thing in your
0:00:26 imagination can become real and then if you are very lucky people will pay to see it
0:00:42 there’s been theater since the beginning of man really what is theater what is going to theater
0:00:46 and being in a theater what is it what happens what transpires at that moment
0:00:58 it’s the same as the oldest human endeavor of all which is gossip theater is gossip this is a crazy
0:01:04 idea i know except that it’s true what do you do when you go to the theater you overhear
0:01:11 conversations it’s staged but people are talking to each other and you’re listening to them you’re
0:01:15 making assessments about their moral character about their intentions about what’s going to happen
0:01:21 this guy’s not trustworthy she’s ambitious and is concealing it he’s got designs on this there’s
0:01:28 nothing more human and more basic to what human beings do than observing people interact and talking
0:01:32 about it among themselves gossiping so theater is the most fundamental art of all
0:01:39 that is rocco landisman i’m a broadway producer and the former chair of the national endowment for the
0:01:45 arts i’ve known rocco for a long time he was one of the first important people i got to know when i was
0:01:51 starting out as a writer in new york and he was easily one of the most interesting too very sharp and
0:01:57 also very blunt with a reputation as a bit of a rogue which he seemed to enjoy when he was starting
0:02:05 out the thing in his imagination was a musical that he wanted to call big river the plan was to take an american
0:02:13 literary classic mark twain’s huckleberry finn it was my favorite novel and set it to music with new songs by the country
0:02:20 for the country i thought and still do think that roger miller is the greatest songwriter in american history
0:02:33 when landisman heard that miller was playing a club date in new york he went to the show
0:02:40 and afterward he talked his way backstage i said i’d like you to write a broadway musical he basically
0:02:44 didn’t know what i was talking about not only had he never written a broadway musical he’d never seen
0:02:52 one so he kind of pawned me off into his wife mary and she said well write a letter i wrote him a letter
0:03:00 and didn’t get a reply and your credentials as a producer at this point were what basically nil i had been a
0:03:06 professor at the yale school of drama for a number of years i had no producing credential of any kind
0:03:11 my credibility was zilch so i read a letter and don’t get a reply i write another letter and don’t
0:03:17 get a reply i write another one and months go by and nothing’s happening i keep writing and finally i got
0:03:23 a note call actually from one of his managers who said you seem to be pretty insistent about this and
0:03:30 pretty serious why don’t you meet with roger and tell him what you have in mind so landisman flew out
0:03:36 to reno where miller was performing and once again he went backstage afterwards it was one of the
0:03:41 thrills of my life to be backstage with roger miller with his guitar and singing his songs he didn’t
0:03:45 remember the lyrics to all of the songs but i knew them all so whenever we would come to a point where
0:03:51 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
0:03:57 well you have a book and you have a score someone writes the story and you have music and lyrics and you’re
0:04:02 going to do the music and lyrics and he says but there’s a book right i said yeah he says well get
0:04:09 me the book now there was no book yet there’s no there wasn’t anything that’s the show that i’ll
0:04:15 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
0:04:23 i came up with the idea i put the whole team together and luckily it worked it was a hit it won seven tony
0:04:28 awards and best musical and ran over a thousand performances i wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for
0:04:38 for that i wouldn’t have a career at all but of course landisman did have a career a big one he
0:04:44 produced several more hits a guys and dolls revival angels in america the producers and he wound up
0:04:51 running jimson theaters the third largest broadway landlord so when a freakonomics radio listener wrote
0:04:56 in to say that they’d always wondered about the economics of live theater and that we should make a
0:05:02 series about that rocko was one of the first people i thought of not just because he knows things there
0:05:07 are plenty of people in the industry who know things but because he is willing to say them which
0:05:14 many people are not for instance i asked him about a couple of recent broadway disasters 25 million
0:05:21 dollar musicals that bombed it’s a terrible investment the broadway theater it’s about like horse racing
0:05:26 i’ve owned racehorses and i’ve owned theaters and i’ve produced broadway shows 15 to 20 percent
0:05:32 of the shows that are put on broadway earn their money back and it’s the same with racehorses 15 to
0:05:39 20 percent of the racehorses that race at the tracks earn their oats okay so with such a terrible roi
0:05:43 for broadway production why do people invest they can’t help themselves they fall in love with the shows
0:05:53 so today on freakonomics radio investors who fall in love with shows performers who fall in love with
0:06:01 the stage and audiences who fall in love with the whole enterprise there is of course one huge problem
0:06:09 the problem is that it’s very very expensive there’s no economy of scale and there’s no economy of
0:06:16 mechanization it’s handmade live every night so here’s the question in a time with so much entertainment
0:06:23 including an infinite stream of digital and virtual entertainments how can it be that this very
0:06:32 expensive handmade live every night thing even exists theater isn’t going away people telling stories is not
0:06:37 going away we take a hard look at theatrical finances are you trying to get me killed
0:06:47 we try to figure out what drives these creators i feel like every theater maker has a secret desire
0:06:55 to change the world and we follow one new musical from the very beginning one wrong decision you’re
0:07:02 dead and you don’t know it to what will someday be the end there’s a long way to go yes there is
0:07:04 there’s a long way to go i guess i should be knocking wood
0:07:22 please take your seats our show is about to begin
0:07:44 this is freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host steven dubner
0:07:53 the live theater industry in the u.s is estimated at under six billion dollars a year with around 27 000 employees
0:08:00 so not very big but there is a lot going on beneath the surface that most of us don’t see when we buy
0:08:07 a ticket you could imagine a pyramid with broadway at the top broadway is both a goal and the engine that
0:08:13 drives a lot of the activity further down the pyramid in regional and repertory theaters most of which are
0:08:21 non-profits in community theater and high school and college theater and in any number of church halls and
0:08:27 garages and living rooms where someone decides to put on a show but the broadway economy is by far
0:08:35 the most visible and the most influential over the past couple decades it has gotten much more expensive
0:08:43 to produce shows on broadway and ticket prices have also spiked the average now is around 130 this leads
0:08:50 some people to conclude that broadway is unsustainable that it is sick and perhaps dying but keep in mind that
0:08:56 people have been saying that forever one of broadway’s many nicknames is the fabulous invalid which comes
0:09:04 from a kaufman hart play first produced in 1938 lately you may have seen encouraging headlines about
0:09:11 broadway box office like when george clooney decides to star in a play for a few months this led one producer
0:09:19 to complain that throwing movie stars at the broadway model is just a way of cauterizing the bleeding by the way
0:09:25 that producer was scott rudin who had been sent into exile for throwing a stapler at his assistant among
0:09:33 other allegations one thing about broadway it is not dull this series won’t be dull either we will tell
0:09:40 you about the real estate cartel that controls broadway the theatrical unions that get good wages for their
0:09:47 members and drive producers absolutely crazy the performers and other creatives who in pursuit of
0:09:55 their dreams are willing to scrape by on relatively low pay we thought the best way to tell this story
0:10:01 was to follow one show so that’s what we’ll do with plenty of tangents the show we’re going to follow
0:10:07 the show began five years ago as nothing but an idea it is now significantly through its gestation
0:10:15 period but not yet on broadway and with no guarantee it will ever get there so let’s start with the
0:10:22 writer my name is joe di pietro i write plays and musicals and on the new musical three summers of
0:10:29 lincoln i am the book writer meaning i write the script and the co-lyricist di pietro remembers
0:10:36 exactly how he started down this career path his parents took him to see the musical 1776 on broadway
0:10:42 it was the first show i saw as a i don’t know 10 year old i can still remember where i was sitting
0:10:47 in the mezzanine and the lights came up on the continental congress i was like put a fork in me i’m
0:10:53 done i’m going to be a part of this somehow he’s now been writing for more than 30 years his credits
0:11:00 include the musical memphis for which di pietro won two tony awards and all shook up an elvis presley
0:11:07 jukebox musical so what is this new show he’s working on three summers of lincoln three summers
0:11:14 of lincoln picks up in the second summer of the civil war when things are going terribly and there is
0:11:23 no end in sight it is a brutal bloody war lincoln needs to figure out how to end this and he just can’t
0:11:29 the south is fighting stronger than he thought where’d the idea come from was this sprung from the brain
0:11:36 of joe di pietro it did not spring from my brain quite the opposite i was sitting at home in the
0:11:42 first december of the pandemic theater was dead i make my living as a writer on royalties from my
0:11:48 productions all over the world and there were exactly zero productions happening it was a scary
0:11:54 uncertain time and i got a call one day out of the blue from two producers i know and who invested in
0:12:00 my shows named richard winkler and alan shore alan shore i am the general partner for three summers
0:12:07 of lincoln richard winkler general partner of three summers of lincoln this was our idea from the very
0:12:15 inception it all has to start with the idea and the art and then you figure out how to finance it
0:12:23 richard winkler worked for years on broadway as a lighting designer i met hundreds of producers who
0:12:31 i didn’t think had very good taste and spent money in stupid ridiculous ways i kept thinking that i
0:12:38 wanted to be a producer when i turned 60 and had this realization that i don’t want to be in the
0:12:46 theater till midnight anymore i said well i’m going to try this that was 16 years ago alan shore who lives
0:12:53 in boston spent most of his career in financial services he started producing around 12 years ago
0:13:02 so what does a broadway producer actually do here’s shore the best way i can analogize it is the producer
0:13:09 or the lead producer is the ceo of a company that is producing a piece of live theater they’re ultimately
0:13:16 responsible for every decision that gets made would have been your greatest hits as a producer thus far
0:13:23 leopold stott was the most recent prior to that lehman trilogy i was involved with come from away
0:13:30 i will stop there have you had flops flops yeah we had one i was called diana
0:13:41 diana as in diana princess of wales it was a musical also written by joe di pietro and it was
0:13:49 scheduled to open on broadway in march of 2020 then came covet all 41 broadway theaters shut down for
0:13:55 what turned out to be 18 months so what do you do now if you’re a producer who’s already spent millions
0:14:03 to develop a show we had a production that we thought was great so why not bring the cast back
0:14:10 in a healthy way and live capture it on stage and sell it to net or netflix came to the production said
0:14:19 we’d like to do this and so a filmed stage version of diana premiered on netflix in october 2021 critics
0:14:27 hated it and so did viewers cringeworthy they called it and exploitative and tawdry the guardian
0:14:34 named diana the year’s most hysterically awful hate watch when you have a new musical and you try
0:14:40 to live capture it you don’t get the essence of really what’s there and so although it was a great
0:14:47 idea at the time some great ideas just don’t necessarily work the producers did finally bring diana
0:14:54 live to broadway it didn’t work there either it closed after barely a month and reportedly lost
0:15:00 around 10 million dollars maybe princess diana just wasn’t the right character to build a new musical
0:15:10 around so how about abraham lincoln i asked alan shore to explain the genesis of that idea it first
0:15:15 started the summer 2020 during covid where none of us had anything to do but sit around and think
0:15:22 literally when george floyd was murdered our president at the time had mentioned that he had
0:15:28 done more for black people than anybody since abraham lincoln and that started me thinking well what did
0:15:34 lincoln actually do let’s get to the facts i had obviously read books about abraham lincoln i saw the
0:15:41 movie lincoln that steven spielberg produced but that only told the story from 1864 through 1865 so the
0:15:48 question in my mind is what happened before that how did lincoln get there so i called richard my
0:15:55 partner and i said what do you think about doing a musical about abraham lincoln to which i said those
0:16:04 those two words do not belong in the same sentence because why not richard lincoln and musical i just
0:16:09 didn’t think they did so i said well i don’t know if it does or not but what else do we got to do let’s
0:16:15 explore it and the first person that i called was an acquaintance doris kearns goodwin who i thought was
0:16:21 was the authority on abraham lincoln that’s a pretty handy acquaintance to have while she lives in boston so
0:16:28 that helps so i called her and asked her and her producing partner if this would be something she’d be
0:16:35 interested in participating in and fortunately for us she readily agreed and then we called joe di
0:16:41 pietro and they said hey joe we are commissioning some of our favorite writers but we just have a
0:16:45 topic we’ll give you and then you can write anything you want about it this was like a miracle and i like
0:16:51 richard and allen very much so i’m just thinking like i’m gonna do it no matter what it is juggling
0:16:57 mermaids fine i’ll write that that’ll work that’ll work when do you want it and they said we want you to
0:17:02 write a musical about abraham lincoln i don’t think i said this out loud but my first thought was
0:17:12 absolutely not that is a terrible idea i’m just thinking like how does lincoln sing what is it
0:17:20 about and the civil war it was so awful i was just thinking like no joe said no no no this is not a good
0:17:26 idea i don’t want to do this we talked him into a conversation with somebody else and that was doris
0:17:32 kearns goodwin was the other conversation yes and they got along like a house of fire and then joe said
0:17:39 well let me do some research and then i thought well you know so many great musicals start out as
0:17:46 terrible ideas right name some a hip-hop musical about a founding father terrible idea a musical about
0:17:52 the sinking of the titanic that’s a terrible idea a musical about cannibalism and it becomes sweeney
0:17:57 todd so you’re like all right maybe that instinct you should be a little more open
0:18:05 the hip-hop musical about a founding father was of course hamilton by lin-manuel miranda
0:18:12 hamilton was such a sensation that it seemed to change the rules for producers creators performers the
0:18:20 audience it opened up new possibilities but for joe di pietro there was a puzzle to solve alexander
0:18:27 hamilton had been relatively obscure to most people abraham lincoln quite the opposite there are more
0:18:33 books published about abraham lincoln than anyone except for jesus and they’re all according to my
0:18:40 calculation about 800 pages long i was like i don’t want to sit in my house during the pandemic reading 800
0:18:46 page books about the civil war like that is not fun when you feel like you’re getting overwhelmed by
0:18:52 american political history it must be nice to have doris kearns goodwin on your side she wrote a book
0:18:57 called leadership in turbulent times which is about what she considers to be the four most effective
0:19:07 presidents i read this one chapter which said during the last three summers of the civil war mary lincoln
0:19:12 dragged abraham to a place called the soldier’s home which was the first u.s home for indigent
0:19:19 soldiers it had a little cottage that the previous president buchanan used as a summer getaway from
0:19:27 the heat in the swamp of dc so he spent his three summers there and i thought oh well that three summers
0:19:32 gives you structure and it turns out those three summers were really consequential because the first
0:19:38 summer he came up with the idea and then at the very end of the summer decreed the emancipation
0:19:45 proclamation the second summer one of his biggest critics though on the same side as him was the great
0:19:52 abolitionist frederick douglas and frederick douglas who had been a thorn in his side one day decides i’m
0:19:57 going to go to the white house and wait online with all of the other people who are waiting online to see
0:20:01 the president and i’m going to demand to speak with him and tell him that he’s moving too slow and ending
0:20:09 this war so frederick douglas does that and they talk and they quickly recognize that they might not
0:20:19 agree with their methods of how to end the war but they couldn’t deny each other’s brilliance and then the
0:20:24 the third summer when things were really going bad this time lincoln calls frederick douglas because he
0:20:29 has a mission for him that he thinks will help end the war my question about this show is always okay
0:20:37 fascinating historical thing but how does it relate to today how is it in conversation with activism today
0:20:44 and how is it in conversation with the presidency today all of those questions and once the frederick
0:20:51 douglas aspect came in they started to really interest me then i was like you know i’ll write an
0:21:01 outline pay me a little money let me write an outline and see if i get hooked di pietro did get hooked but
0:21:09 he’s a playwright not a composer and a musical isn’t a musical without music so coming up after the break
0:21:16 a nation on the edge on the verge the center can hold when two ideas can merge
0:21:34 i’m stephen dubner this is freakonomics radio we will be right back
0:21:44 the playwright joe di pietro had been commissioned to write the script for a new musical about abraham
0:21:53 lincoln di pietro is white as was lincoln but the story is really about slavery ending slavery and the
0:21:59 other main character is the black abolitionist frederick douglas given the subject matter of the show
0:22:04 i was like oh it would be great to have a lyricist who would look at the subject matter from a different
0:22:12 perspective than i did daniel j watts was a star dancer in a broadway show i wrote called memphis
0:22:19 back in 2009 he was fantastic and has been in probably dozens of shows by now he also at the
0:22:26 time was a spoken word artist a budding spoken word artist i went to see his spoken word performances and
0:22:32 i was like wow god he’s really good and so you thought oh he can write i thought he can write i think i
0:22:37 called him out of the blue in the pandemic when theater was literally dead there was no hope and
0:22:42 no future and we were all broke he was like hey there’s this project i’m working on and i need a
0:22:47 co-lyricist i recognize that i cannot speak for a lot of these people i’m wondering if you would be
0:22:54 interested and that is daniel watts i am a co-lyricist and co-choreographer for three summers of lincoln
0:23:02 as a kid growing up in the carolinas watts played sports he took dance and gymnastics he has always
0:23:10 had a high level of energy everyone’s like sit down daniel sit down i’m like yeah yeah yeah yeah sure
0:23:16 sure sure sure i got things to do watts has been performing on broadway since 2006 he was nominated for
0:23:23 tony award for playing ike turner in tina the tina turner musical he has also appeared in the little
0:23:31 mermaid the color purple and yes hamilton so what did he think about the idea of a lincoln musical
0:23:39 i was like oh lord that just sounds silly like oh no joe why is this the thing you’re calling about you
0:23:44 know i’ve been waiting for years for you to call me and like this is the thing but only because how i’m
0:23:50 used to seeing lincoln depicted is where i was you know coming from but the other thing is that time
0:23:58 period of how america broke and then came back together is really fascinating to me i just was
0:24:04 really excited when he said yes because i thought like oh i am actually going to learn so much from
0:24:11 him daniel is probably 20 years younger than me and from a very different background in this particular
0:24:19 collaboration i am very much about story story story how does the song start what dramatically
0:24:24 happens in the middle to change the trajectory of it and then how does it end in a new way he’s much
0:24:32 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
0:24:38 he’ll often like break down a word which is what oftentimes rappers do it really opened my eyes and we
0:24:43 we went to my house in connecticut to start this together he’d written act one i think that an
0:24:48 outline of act two we read through it first and whatever jumped out at us personally we kind of
0:24:54 just made our own little notes it was like let’s maybe try to write two or three songs while we’re
0:25:01 here we sat on my porch and the first thing we wrote for some reason was a campfire song called
0:25:07 scarlet the harlot it’s just basically a dirty song that civil war soldiers used to sing and then it
0:25:12 becomes about abraham lincoln and then abe enters and interrupts them and they’re singing this filthy
0:25:18 song about abe so as you’re giggling now we essentially sat around my porch and giggled for a
0:25:23 day and wrote this silly song that we always liked we kept putting it in drafts and cutting it and putting
0:25:31 in the drafts again scarlet the harlot that got cut quickly and then found its way back in in the last
0:25:36 six months why did it get cut we just didn’t know where it went you know the story tells you what it
0:25:41 is as you keep developing it so how scarlet ended up back was that we realized we didn’t have any time
0:25:47 with abraham and the soldiers which we felt was very very important i haven’t heard scarlet yet can you
0:25:55 sing me a little bit right now scarlet the harlot the poor soldier’s whore open her legs as wide as
0:26:02 a door that’s all i can give you right now it’s body it’s very body song that you know hopefully it stays
0:26:11 you just never know you never know the music and the lyrics to me it seems really really hard to write
0:26:17 lyrics for a musical first without the music is that not really hard no well not for me i don’t
0:26:23 want to speak for anybody else or i only say for joe and i the poetry comes first right now my musical
0:26:30 theater nerd is going off in musical theater first you say it and then once the emotion overcomes you
0:26:36 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
0:26:42 have lyrics then you seek out composers that you think might both have music pouring out of them
0:26:48 but also would understand this story and want to apply their artistry to it
0:26:59 a composer perhaps like this one and warning there’s a bit of off color language here
0:27:30 my name is crystal monet hall i am a singer and a songwriter
0:27:40 and a performer and a vocal arranger and a vocal producer and keep going a composer and an educator
0:27:52 my mom has a beautiful voice and i learned how to sing listening to her sing on sunday mornings in
0:27:59 church i had my first solo in the choir when i was like i don’t know seven or eight you remember what you
0:28:06 saying i do i do it’s a song called i may be young can i hear a bit the chorus is like i may be young
0:28:09 and never get old
0:28:25 may not have a savior his name is jesus
0:28:34 i can’t feel him down in my soul and then my solo was like this
0:28:48 sign me up for that church and you went to the university of virginia correct i did yeah it’s a
0:28:53 source of pride for me my dad was in the first class of black people to ever matriculate there
0:28:58 you got a master’s in education as well is that right i went to uva for five and a half years got my
0:29:04 master’s got two bachelor’s degrees and i took a position teaching high school english and drama in
0:29:09 charlottesville and then i resigned on my birthday which is october the first which means i taught for
0:29:17 for about a month you loved it huh i loved it no i did but i was like i am not happy i’m gonna go to
0:29:22 new york and i’m gonna sing and i don’t even know if i knew what that meant i guess in my mind i was
0:29:28 gonna like lay across a piano in like a shiny dress what was your first job i came to new york i auditioned
0:29:36 i took the first job i got it was a disney cruise line and the next thing that i got was the non-union
0:29:45 tour of rent and i did that for a year what’s that like it’s like really short sits in cities like we
0:29:51 would sleep on the floor of a bus i mean like a greyhound bus we didn’t feel it at all could i do
0:29:59 it today hell nah but then i was ready for the world honey i was a road dog after i did that non-equity
0:30:03 tour for a year i went directly into the broadway show and you started as a swing is that right i
0:30:09 started as a swing i mostly played joanna mrs jefferson the seasons of love soloist i closed
0:30:11 it out so i was there for about the last four or five years
0:30:20 rent like hamilton was another huge and groundbreaking broadway hit the
0:30:25 kind of show that changes how people think about what’s possible later in this series we’ll hear
0:30:32 from jeffrey seller a lead producer of both rent and hamilton for crystal monet hall performing in a
0:30:40 broadway hit was a great gig but even a union acting job barely covers the rent when the rent is in new
0:30:47 new york city almost every theatrical performer as a side hustle hall taught herself guitar and began
0:30:53 writing songs she went on tour with mickey heart of the grateful dead and she released a record of her
0:31:00 own at one point she moved to california but she soon came back to new york she performed in the alicia
0:31:06 keys jukebox musical hell’s kitchen at the public theater before the show moved to broadway and then she got a
0:31:12 call from joe di pietro and daniel watts about a new musical they were writing called three summers
0:31:18 of lincoln here’s di pietro again she had a self-titled debut album and i was like oh i really like the
0:31:24 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
0:31:31 said pick two or three songs and write something and send it to us would she pick what i very clearly
0:31:37 remember her picking is the opening number which is called 90 day war initially a civil war everyone
0:31:44 thought it would last 90 days and so by the second summer of the civil war it was over 400 days and the
0:31:50 big thing is an opening number you want to introduce the sound of the show all of those people sitting in
0:31:57 the audience say okay you’re writing a show about abraham lincoln prove that this is a good idea
0:32:06 prove that this isn’t hamilton prove it’s not 1776 prove you have your own voice the first lyrics in 90 day
0:32:13 war are a nation on the edge on the verge the center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge can i hear a
0:32:19 a little bit of a little bit of that so it starts with everybody goes whoa which i thought was so cute
0:32:21 because it sort of sounds because it sort of sounds like the word war
0:32:37 a nation on the edge on the verge the center can’t hold when two ideas can’t merge
0:32:45 you know what i mean suddenly we’re in some sort of rock
0:32:53 thing but we’re like in six eight and there’s this military snare under it the other song that
0:32:59 she wrote was pounding on the rock which now opens act two that is a song when frederick
0:33:03 douglas and his son are trying to recruit folks for the first black regiment
0:33:20 they’re up in new england trying to get young black men to sign up for this war that young black men
0:33:25 don’t know why they should be fighting and dying for this country that has let them down at every
0:33:33 place imaginable it’s this sort of rousing number and i remember listening to her demo and minute into it
0:33:40 without realizing it i find myself standing up and like happily bouncing around my apartment and the music
0:33:45 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
0:33:50 room with this person for the next two years three years four years however long it takes to create this
0:33:59 musical two years three four years yes it can easily take that long to create a musical and who pays for
0:34:06 all this well it depends in this case the producers alan shore and richard winkler were writing the checks
0:34:12 here’s shore initially my partner and i put up all the money the reason for that having come from the
0:34:19 financial world i’ve always looked at myself as a fiduciary i am not willing to ask other people to
0:34:25 put money into something that i don’t feel comfortable with and until we got to the point with three summers of
0:34:31 lincoln where we believed that we had something special it was only at that point that we decided
0:34:37 okay we’re going to move to the next step it’s very expensive and we will bring in outside investors
0:34:43 at what point was that in the development in the show that was last november december when we did our
0:34:50 three-week workshop up until that point essentially myself and my partner were fully funding the project
0:34:57 and what did it cost up until that point probably mid to high six figures that went into hiring the
0:35:05 people to write the show the composer the lyricist the director actors actresses for us to hear what it
0:35:12 is that the writers actually came up with that was a year and a half process where we had several workshops
0:35:20 and all of that cost money well you generally get contracted for a series of drafts and i think it just
0:35:26 depends who you are that’s joe di pietro winning tony awards my price increased which was very very nice
0:35:31 i always say the day after i won two tony awards i wasn’t a better writer but everyone thought i was
0:35:39 generally the advances for theater are much less than for movies you hear about writers getting 50 000 100 000
0:35:49 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
0:35:56 ask for about 50 or so and here is crystal monet hall the creative team you get your upfront to work on the
0:36:02 show whatever that is and that depends on you know how much cache you have and how long you’ve been in the
0:36:08 business and what you can command but after that you don’t get paid you don’t get any money as you’re
0:36:14 going you hope that it is something that is very very lasting and that you will be able to get
0:36:22 all of that back end but that’s not necessarily promised it’s a hope and faith thing you know you gotta love
0:36:28 it you gotta love it are you willing to tell me what you’re making for composing three summers of lincoln
0:36:39 i can say that first-time composers are generally making for an upfront between 18 and 25 000 right now
0:36:47 i am inside of the dream and that’s daniel watts like i literally flew in yesterday morning from chicago
0:36:53 because i’m on a tv show called the shy i was like hey guys gotta go fly back here to jump right into a
0:37:00 workshop of a musical that i’m the co-lyricist and co-choreographer of little me is like yeah older me is
0:37:07 like daniel you’re doing a lot how does your salary shooting a tv show compare to your salary and the
0:37:13 time it takes also creating a musical oh it’s night and day it’s just different economics you know when it
0:37:20 comes to theater there is a fixed amount of tickets that can be sold there’s only so much money that can
0:37:27 come in also in theater you can only get paid if you’re there so if you miss a show you lose pay you
0:37:32 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
0:37:38 to remember anything i can leave it i shot my whole episode in two days that was two days of shooting and i
0:37:45 make a lot more money doing that and there’s also a residual check on the other side once it airs
0:37:49 so by the time three summers of lincoln makes it to broadway assuming it makes it to broadway you will
0:37:55 have been working on it for years years yes years and the fee that you get for being the co-lyricist
0:38:01 and choreographer on this show you could make that much money in how many days or weeks of shooting tv or
0:38:09 film i can make that in an episode oh my god i made it this weekend so basically we should be
0:38:13 very grateful to tv and film for subsidizing theater work essentially honestly yeah
0:38:24 the punishing economics notwithstanding there came a time when the writing team of di pietro watts and hall
0:38:31 had a real live lincoln musical on paper ready to get up on its feet but if you’re going to make a
0:38:39 musical about a big time historical figure you will need a performer just as big time to play the role
0:38:47 brian stokes mitchell is an incredible star he is exactly the right person to play the role that’s
0:39:01 coming up after the break i’m steven dubner and this is freakonomics radio
0:39:09 it’s december 2023 we are in a big well-lit rehearsal space called open jar studios on the 11th floor of a
0:39:15 building near the heart of the broadway theater district the theaters themselves are very visible
0:39:21 with their marquees and their huge show posters but the rest of the broadway ecosystem is hidden away
0:39:29 in buildings like this one not just rehearsal spaces but production offices ticketing agencies pr firms and
0:39:37 advertising firms vocal and acting and dance coaches agents and lawyers it’s a long list today i am seeing
0:39:44 for the first time a workshop performance of three summers of lincoln there are well over a hundred
0:39:51 people in the audience some family and friends but also potential investors producers theater owners
0:39:57 etc this workshop is being officially presented not by alan shore and richard winkler the commercial
0:40:04 producers who’ve been developing the show but by the la jolla playhouse in san diego that is where
0:40:10 three summers of lincoln will eventually have its world premiere as it works its way toward broadway la
0:40:15 la jolla is considered one of the best regional theaters in the country and over the years it has
0:40:22 been a launch pad for many broadway shows rocco landisman’s big river back in 1984 the outsiders which
0:40:30 won the tony last year for best musical also come from away a big hit that told the story of airline
0:40:37 passengers stranded in newfoundland after 9 11 la jolla is a non-profit theater that is very much part of the
0:40:43 for-profit ecosystem and their partnership on three summers of lincoln is what’s called an enhancement
0:40:50 deal here is the lincoln writer joe di pietro generally producers give them hundreds of thousands
0:40:56 if not millions of dollars to enhance their production on stage so their audience sees a really
0:41:05 glitzy impressive presentation and also it helps the theater to say hey we’re producing musicals that are
0:41:11 going to broadway you saw them here first and here is the lincoln producer alan shore the fact that
0:41:16 they’re a non-profit has nothing to do with the quality of the product that they’re going to be
0:41:25 producing on our behalf in la jolla artistically they have no say so in the show there are hatchery for
0:41:31 something that we believe will move on very quickly to the commercial stage in the case of this show the
0:41:37 symbiosis runs even deeper because lincoln is being directed by christopher ashley who is the
0:41:45 artistic director at la jolla ashley won a tony for his work on come from away he also directed diana
0:41:50 the musical but we don’t need to say any more about that ashley’s attachment to this new show three
0:41:59 summers of lincoln runs deep one of the things that drew me to it is the relationship between lincoln and
0:42:09 frederick douglas these two incredibly well-educated passionate writers thinkers who started out really as
0:42:17 enemies and those two men sort of magnetically drawing each other toward each other’s point of view
0:42:22 i sometimes think about subtitling three summers of lincoln as the radicalization of lincoln
0:42:31 watching how a person moves from a very lawyerly careful an incrementalist way of thinking towards
0:42:39 somebody who is capable of bold radical action that war was not going to get solved without a couple of
0:42:45 radical moves being made there were so many people who were so deeply economically invested in the
0:42:51 institution of slavery and how you say i understand that and i don’t care that there is a moral imperative
0:42:57 here that transcends the economic motive and that seems to me like it’s got a lot of resonance and
0:43:07 applications in the current world and now in this big rehearsal studio the cast of three summers of lincoln is
0:43:13 spread out in a semicircle they have their scripts in front of them on music stands there will be some
0:43:19 some standing and some sitting but no real moving about and certainly no choreography there are also
0:43:27 no costumes no props no scenery this is just a chance to hear and feel the story and the songs with real
0:43:35 performers the show opens on a tap dancer who has a prosthetic leg his missing leg represents the
0:43:43 war wounded his tapping mimics a telegraph for the purposes of this workshop there is a narrator to fill in some details
0:43:51 we see text we see text projected on the walls june 1862 the war has been raging for 430
0:43:57 days estimated casualties 53 864
0:44:13 lights rise on white union soldiers and black field assists silhouetted within fog rising from the battlefield
0:44:43 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 he will find some peace and
0:44:49 the pleasant breeze for everybody who wondered at the pleasant breeze for everybody who wondered at the beginning of this project how would
0:45:09 abraham lincoln sing well this is how he sings 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
0:45:29 where’s the idea where’s the idea where’s the breeze where is the inspiration to ease these troubles these tensions these
0:45:37 unmentioned terrors how to mend these dissensions between men and their errors
0:45:41 where’s the breeze
0:45:50 where’s the breeze
0:45:59 brian stokes mitchell is an incredible star that’s the producer richard winkler he is exactly the right person
0:46:09 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
0:46:19 he is a brilliant performer and he can stand on a broadway stage and command 1500 people without any
0:46:27 difficulty and here’s the director christopher ashley he’s so lincolny and he’s also the most amazing
0:46:34 collaborator he’s like game for anything he will try anything the most beautiful voice in america just like
0:46:40 extraordinary voice every time i have a conversation with him about a scene or lincoln or the current
0:46:46 world i feel like i understand our story better there is no one in the history of performance so i would
0:46:48 rather have playing lincoln for us than brian stokes mitchell
0:47:01 stokes as everyone calls him is one of the most beloved broadway performers of his era in addition
0:47:07 to being as we’ve already heard tall and slender with the most beautiful voice in america he’s also
0:47:14 a box office draw not the same as a george clooney or denzel washington or a hugh jackman but for the core
0:47:22 broadway audience brian stokes mitchell is a name brand in the 1990s he appeared in ragtime as coalhouse
0:47:31 walker jr a harlem musician navigating lost love racial injustice and violence in 2000 he won a tony
0:47:38 for his performance in kiss me kate stokes is black but he doesn’t always play black characters on stage he
0:47:46 exudes both charm and gravity he doesn’t seem to need attention the way some performers do and this
0:47:53 makes him even more charismatic offstage he’s known as kind and caring he was a founding member of black
0:48:01 theater united and chair of the entertainment community fund a leading man in every way the three summers of
0:48:08 lincoln team was thrilled to have stokes developing the role of abraham lincoln from the ground up here’s joe di pietro again
0:48:16 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
0:48:24 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
0:48:31 folks in it but a brian stokes mitchell is seeing how it fits with him if he enjoys it if he thinks he
0:48:38 really wants to play this role when the workshop i saw all the roles were played by black or white
0:48:44 actors with what looked to be pretty much historical accuracy right mcclellan was played by a white guy
0:48:49 douglas and his family played by black actors and so on but then there’s brian stokes mitchell as lincoln
0:48:55 just talk about that casting choice i’ll tell you how that came about we had done a reading of the
0:49:01 first act of the show very early on and was going very well and we sort of cast lincoln was a very
0:49:08 talented white actor we had talked about stokes playing frederick douglas because he’s probably the
0:49:14 preeminent male musical performer of that age and he’s you know just brilliant so we’re writing the show
0:49:19 and crystal goes to us you know the way i’m writing these characters the lincoln character has a much more
0:49:25 traditional theatrical voice and douglas is much more soulful and you know stokes is super talented
0:49:31 but that’s not where he lives as a performer and we’re like he can do anything calm down
0:49:37 he’s gonna be great and then daniel and crystal come to me and they were really a little gingerly like
0:49:43 we have an idea we don’t know if you’re gonna like it i’m like i have an idea too i said you write down
0:49:49 your idea and i’m gonna write down my idea we do that and we both on a little piece of paper wrote
0:49:56 stokes says lincoln oh my gosh so daniel and chris who both were friends with him and had worked with
0:50:02 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
0:50:05 goes all right what’s the show and he goes well it’s called three summers of lincoln and it’s about
0:50:10 lincoln and frederick douglas daniel said he saw stokes eyes get a little glassy like oh frederick
0:50:15 douglas okay and then they said well we want you to play lincoln and he suddenly was like oh now i’m
0:50:24 interested and a black man playing him is certainly provocative especially if every other role in the
0:50:29 the show is cast according to the race that historically they would be here again is the
0:50:37 director christopher ashley the frederick douglas and lincoln relationship lives so much at the center
0:50:46 of this musical we’re in three summers of the presidency of lincoln 1862 63 and 64 they didn’t actually meet
0:50:53 until 63 in person so we have the interesting problem dramatically of how do you have two central
0:50:57 characters who don’t meet until after your intermission so you have to kind of get them into
0:51:03 contention and interaction from afar before they finally collide
0:51:15 and here’s how that happens douglas is played by quentin earl derrington a phenomenally intense and
0:51:22 talented performer who appears in the first act essentially in split screen with lincoln my name is frederick
0:51:31 douglas and let it be known here i am did the man actually say the constitution gives him no authority
0:51:37 to end the inhumanity of slavery this is what happens when you elect a lawyer president if the
0:51:42 constitution protects a gross injustice you don’t equivocate you don’t hesitate you change the goddamn
0:51:48 constitution quentin derrington who goes by q has been performing on broadway for more than 15 years
0:51:56 years his credits include cats and mj the musical he is a deeply religious man who sees his talent as
0:52:02 something to be shared here he is off stage out of character it’s a gift it’s a precious gift from god
0:52:10 and i use it for him and for people when did you um discover the gift right around eighth ninth grade
0:52:16 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
0:52:22 give me a solo whatever it’s hard for me to imagine insane listen this is the truth i wanted so desperately to
0:52:28 sing so i just started mimicking i taught myself through copying some of my favorite artists of the
0:52:35 time john p key who was a gospel singer amazing legend jodeci which was my favorite group back
0:52:41 then r&b group and stevie wonder i listened to every track they’ve ever made on repeat and i taught
0:52:47 myself to sing through just copying those wonderful wonderful artists and i started singing publicly after
0:52:54 that before that though i mean you were singing in the choir what were you missing i was making noise
0:52:58 i was making a lot of noise that’s all
0:53:07 and here’s a scene from the workshop frederick douglas is at the white house about to meet
0:53:15 the president for the first time lincoln’s valet william slade introduces douglas mr president this
0:53:24 no need for an introduction william i’ve devoured mr douglas’s writings you have let’s see
0:53:34 the president sports um hold on let me get this right ah ah yes the president sports pride of race
0:53:46 and blood and contempt for negroes is that what you said uh yes well judging by your verbiage i assume
0:53:54 you’re an avid reader so we have much to discuss sit please he threw me off my game
0:54:04 he didn’t seem to judge he didn’t seem to judge he knew me by my fame and seemed to
0:54:12 bear no grudge the two men talk about their favorite authors for douglas it’s charles dickens because
0:54:21 douglas explains he writes of society’s injustices lincoln’s favorite author is shakespeare he says
0:54:27 for he writes of the burdens of kings well i encourage you to read the novels of dickens mr president
0:54:35 and i encourage you to read the plays of shakespeare mr douglas i have all of them at least twice twice
0:54:45 he threw me off my game he’s not as i’d expect
0:54:56 i didn’t know his aim so deferred lady flex may i offer you a drink mr douglas
0:55:02 the relationship between douglas and lincoln and the interplay between quentin darrington and brian
0:55:09 stokes mitchell is riveting and even though this was just a workshop the story and songs and
0:55:20 performances are undeniably moving
0:55:31 i was sitting next to debbie buckholz who runs the la jolla playhouse as soon as the performance was
0:55:38 over a friend rushed up to her and said you better start practicing your tony speech later i spoke with
0:55:44 the commercial producers alan shore i think without exception everybody went away thinking this is
0:55:53 really something special and richard winkler i have gone to hundreds of these not of mine but
0:56:00 colleagues at the end of it if people leave right away and say thank you very much congratulations it’s
0:56:08 really nice let’s be in touch that tells you one thing about what they saw if they stay around
0:56:17 for an hour and talk to each other and talk to the cast to the point that the producer has to say
0:56:24 ladies and gentlemen i’m really sorry our rental of this room ends in three minutes could you please
0:56:32 leave well that’s what happened on friday you were there i was there i was the one who had to say
0:56:40 folks our rental is over in three minutes people don’t hang around at the end if it’s not great they just
0:56:40 don’t
0:56:49 it was exciting to see and hear so much excitement to see the coming together of a story that was just a
0:56:57 flicker in someone’s imagination to see it live and breathe and make people laugh and gasp and grieve
0:57:04 the gestation period for a new musical is so long and difficult and expensive that every time it moves
0:57:11 forward it feels like a major accomplishment but there’s a lot more to be done next will come some
0:57:18 rewrites and then more workshopping with the actors and then a whole other layer of creative work that will
0:57:24 feed into the production at la jolla lighting design and scenic design costumes and choreography
0:57:30 the la jolla playhouse has a strong subscriber base and this new lincoln show has begun to catch their
0:57:37 attention subscribers are particularly jazzed about brian stokes mitchell in the lead role to have a
0:57:43 a performer of that caliber star in a new broadway bound musical at a regional theater is a real
0:57:51 attraction but then one day before tickets go on sale for the world premiere of three summers of
0:57:59 lincoln i hear from one of the show’s producers brian stokes mitchell has quit the project personal
0:58:07 reasons that’s all anyone is saying everyone is shaken rumors fly we’ll hear more about that later
0:58:16 in the series coming up next time part two is the theater business actually a business we’re not a
0:58:25 real business we go up and we go down we have hits but in between those hits we have four flops in a row
0:58:31 that’s next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too
0:58:36 freakonomics radio is produced by stitcher and renbud radio you can find our entire
0:58:44 archive on any podcast app also at freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes this
0:58:49 series is being produced by alina culman and we had research assistance from julie canfor this episode
0:58:55 was mixed by jasmine clinger with help from jeremy johnston the freakonomics radio network staff also
0:59:02 includes augusta chapman dalvin abuaji eleanor osborne ellen frankman elsa hernandez gabriel roth
0:59:09 greg rippon john snars morgan levy neil caruth sarah lily tayo jacobs and zach lipinski our theme song
0:59:15 is mr fortune by the hitchhiker and our composer is luis guerra as always thanks for listening
0:59:26 nice work if you can get it yeah yes and that should have been a hit too i was a co-producer on that
0:59:35 the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything
0:59:39 stitcher
0:59:42 you
It has become fiendishly expensive to produce, and has more competition than ever. And yet the believers still believe. Why? And does the world really want a new musical about … Abraham Lincoln?! (Part one of a three-part series.)
- SOURCES:
- Christopher Ashley, artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse.
- Quentin Darrington, actor.
- Joe DiPietro, playwright and lyricist.
- Crystal Monee Hall, composer, singer, actor.
- Rocco Landesman, Broadway producer, former owner of Jujamcyn Theaters, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
- Alan Shorr, Broadway producer.
- Daniel Watts, writer, choreographer, actor.
- Richard Winkler, Broadway producer.
- RESOURCES:
- 3 Summers of Lincoln (2025)
- “Live Performance Theaters in the US – Market Research Report (2014-2029),” by Grace Wood (IBISWorld, 2024).
- Leadership: In Turbulent Times, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018).
- Big River (1984)
- EXTRAS:
- “How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway,” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
- “You Can Make a Killing, but Not a Living,” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).