What Happens After the Applause?
One of the great joys of my life was sitting in the Gramercy Theatre and watching From My Hometown play to a packed house.
Night after night, I would sit in the audience and watch people light up as the music began. The show was built around the classic soul music that shaped a generation, and audiences brought their own memories with them.
I call it BYOM: Bring Your Own Memories.
The moment someone heard “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” “Have You Seen Her,” or one of the Isley Brothers classics, something magical happened. You could see it in their faces. Sometimes they wanted to sing along. Sometimes they wanted to get up and dance. They weren’t just watching a musical. They were reliving a piece of their own lives.
And every now and then, I would sit there in the dark and think:
“Wow. This actually happened.”
The entire journey had begun years earlier when I heard some men singing outside my apartment window on 93rd Street. That moment planted a seed that eventually grew into an Off-Broadway musical.
Watching it unfold in front of an audience was bliss.
But here’s the part nobody tells you.
I wasn’t just the writer.
I was also the producer.
Originally, a producing partner and I worked with Amas Musical Theatre to develop the show. When the time came to make the leap to a commercial Off-Broadway production, my partner chose to move on. Suddenly, the responsibility for moving the project forward landed squarely on my shoulders.
And that responsibility was enormous.
There were investors.
There was fundraising.
There was payroll.
There were weekly expenses.
There were endless moving parts that audiences never see and rarely think about.
Every week brought a new challenge. Every solution seemed to create two new problems. Looking back, I sometimes joke that producing an Off-Broadway musical should come with its own warning label.
Watching the show was blissful.
The moment the curtain came down, I have never been so stressed in all of my life.
What audiences experienced as two and a half hours of joy, I experienced as a balancing act that never stopped.
I remember the day we made the decision to close the production during the 2004 Republican National Convention, which effectively shut down much of downtown Manhattan.
I made the phone call.
I hung up.
And I felt something happen inside my body.
For months, I had been carrying the anxiety of producing an Off-Broadway musical. In that moment, I felt what I can only describe as two claws releasing their grip from my stomach.
For the first time in a very long while, I could breathe.
The irony is that From My Hometown is still alive today.
The show continues to be licensed. New audiences continue to discover it. The music continues to resonate. What once felt like an impossible dream has become a lasting piece of my creative legacy.
But whenever people ask me what it was like to produce an Off-Broadway musical, I always tell them the same thing:
The applause was wonderful.
The producing nearly killed me.
And somehow, I’d probably do it all over again.
