The other day, I was fortunate enough to cap a summer spent working as an intern/assistant to a broadway composer I'll leave unnamed with a dinner, where I asked them all the questions I had about life as a professional songwriter for musical theatre. Here are some of the most valuable things they imparted, the sorts of things I'm glad I had someone tell me instead of learning the long way 'round. I write this in the spirit they brought to the dinner: the will to share the factets of building a life in musical theatre it's hard to teach, or talk about.
A lot of our conversation was them explaining the mechanics of three levels of theatre-making: off-off-Broadway, off-Broadway, and Broadway.
OFF-OFF-BROADWAY.
The world of day jobs, where everybody starts. There's no commercial producers, and no money. Theatre spaces will pay you hundreds of dollars, at most, to put up your pieces, and they're run by one or two people, so getting them to know you and your work is the way you get your foot in the door.
These small theatres are good sites to mount productions, but so too are concert spaces- Joe's Pub is on the high end, but spaces like it could entertain concert productions and readings.
All spheres of theatremaking rely on personal connections, but the preprofessional/early professional space especially so. This is alarming to a strange bird introvert like me, who finds many interactions difficult to navigate and draining. Two things this composer said about their experience reassured me: one, that everyone in the theatre world is a little strange, so any fumbling I would feel inside my skin would get lost in the noise, and two, that it took them years and years to meet his closest collaborators. It was a decade or so into their work in the theatre to meet a director collaborator they've worked with on 3 of their shows, for example. I hope those observations are as reassuring and galvanizing to you as they were to me.
OFF-BROADWAY.
Off-Broadway is the world of commission work. An off-Broadway theatre, like the Signature or MCC, will pay you a flat fee- a little less than a year's wages for "a year's work" (it takes about a year, if not less, for them to write a show, so their year counts for more than the rest of us). The good news: if your show is a commercial bomb, you're still paid the same. The bad news: if your show is a commercial smash, you're still paid the same. Your revenue comes exclusively from the commission.
The people who will be securing you these commissions on the institution's behalf are artistic directors; they're who you're going to want to ensure you make a connection with in order to get your work developed and produced at a professional standard.
BROADWAY.
Usually, getting to Broadway looks like a producer "swooping in" on a show and buying its rights. For about five years, as the show continues to be developed, you don't see money for it, even up through the production process for Broadway. Then, once the show opens, you get a healthy cut of the box office royalties.
Big productions abroad pay similarly well to Broadway royalties for the duration of their runs. Licensing rights from smaller productions are individually insignificant; a show has to be produced a fair bit for it to be an appreciable source of income instead of a respectable cushion. Fiscally speaking, having a show stay open on Broadway seems preferable to a hit on the community theatre circuit seems preferable to a show that the musical theatre intelligentsia drool over.
BEYOND BROADWAY.
I was surprised by how open this composer was talking about writing with commercial ambition. Because I characterized them as a more artsy, experimental writer, it was a shock to hear them say they modeled the structure of one of their flagship shows off of Les Mis, and wrote it with Broadway ambitions from the start, though they were still working well off-broadway at its inception. They talked about how a show of theirs with a cast of 4, virtually no set, and low barrier to musical entry was one of their most popular shows on the amateur theatre circuit. They contrasted this with pieces they've written that demanded virtuosic singers and performers, and pieces that were intensely personal and linked to recent events. Those pieces never find the same foothold after their flagship productions, and they don't contribute significantly to this composer's income.
I'd also noticed this tendency towards actively working to make pieces produceable in Adam Guettel, who originally orchestrated Light in the Piazza for piano trio (though that didn't last), and deliberately wrote Days of Wine and Roses for two and a half singers. It seems to me that the more one's tendencies skew off the beaten path, the more actively one needs to think about steering one's pieces back towards being feasible to perform and stage on the community theatre level. After all, that's the stage on which pieces find their longevity, audience, and sustainable profit, all the things you want as a career artist.
PARTING NOTES.
An agent shouldn't start your career, but join your career. When you get to the point where it would be useful to have someone to advocate and negotiate on your behalf with institutions and producers, or read contracts with you, talk to theatre artists you admire who are doing what you want to do and ask who's representing them. That'll point you towards where you need to go.
This composer recommended to me the book "Song of Spider-Man", by Glenn Berger, the second bookwriter hired to fix "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark". We were talking about how quotidian the day-to-day of writing and developing a Broadway musical seems to be, and they said that book described that tension well. When I get around to reading it, I'll be sure to post about it.
I googled the contents of our meal in their entirety; here's the first google result.
