Nancy Coyne: Well, Sereno-Coyne handles about 70 percent of the shows on Broadway, but maybe a better percentage is of the big musicals on Broadway. We handle about 80 or 85 percent. That’s what we specialize in, big Broadway musicals, because I think what our claim to fame is, is that we understand the consumer that really wants and loves those kinds of shows, the kinds of show that people talk about when they say, my first musical was Gypsy. Or my first musical was Sound of Music, the ones they remember all of their lives, we sell the tickets to. We help create those memories. We’re a full-service ad agency, but we do a lot more than just the ads, the posters, the billboards in Times Square, the playbills, the front of the theater. Everything that contributes to giving you an impression of what a Broadway show is before you’ve seen it, that’s the part we’re in charge of. We get you there.
Michael Kantor: So a producer can have the greatest, speak to how essential that role is, producer can the greatest show in the world. If no one really knows about it.
Nancy Coyne: Someone has to tell them about it. We’re the people that tell people, there’s a great show down there at the Royal Theater. Get your tickets, here’s how. I compare myself frequently to my colleagues over on Madison Avenue, and they are stuck with dealing with layers of people, with brand managers and all sorts of middlemen. I deal with the producers, the person who raised the money or put the money up to put the show on the stage. So it’s like going straight to the top every time out, which is challenging because the people that I deal are sort of creative and maybe even a little eccentric by definition. This isn’t the area that attracts the conservative businessmen. This is the area the attracts the rebel in all of us. And so I deal with a lot of people who march to different drummers and that’s part of what I love about it. We’re all involved together in putting a product together and putting it on the stage and putting out there for people. That is unlike any other product in the world. You know, Pepsi is like Coke and Coke is like 7Up. They’re all the same thing. Avenue Q isn’t at all like a chorus line, and Wicked isn’t at all the Boy From Oz. They’re unique experiences, and you don’t have one or the other. You don’t see one musical. You come to New York and you see three shows. When I was little, I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, and we used to come up for Thanksgiving, and we would see a show Friday night and two on Saturday before we went home on Sunday morning. And that was… What I thought of as a theater weekend, three shows in two days. Well, to some extent, because the stakes are so high, it is very expensive to put on a Broadway show. And so there are more players involved in many instances, rather than one guy at the top. But there are still those occasions. Cameron McIntosh was a sole producer. Rosie O’Donnell today is a sole produce. There’s always one person who’s calling the shots or who’s organizing the meeting. But yes, the The landscape is a little different. There are many more investors, and those investors are more than just investors. They were called angels in the old days. They’re producers now.
Michael Kantor: It seems like there’s a lot of movies being created into musicals, revivals, what do you see happen?
Nancy Coyne: I think, I don’t think that’s true. I think that there is always, there have always been films that they’ve turned in, they’ve always turned books into shows. Some make it, some don’t. It really has everything to do. If you could figure out what the trend was or how to do it, there wouldn’t be as many misses as there are hits. That’s one of the absolute peculiarities of the theater. There are no predictors. I’ve been involved with producers who thought that they were going to focus group everything before they did it, and they were gonna test titles. Should we make a movie out of a musical out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? And everybody who was called said, sure, that sounds good. I’ll go to see that. You know what it would have to be to be successful? Really good. If you ask somebody, you want to see a play called Equus, story of a boy and his horse, they’d say, no. How about Evita? You know i’m gonna make a musical about this fascist dictator in argentina it doesn’t sound good but in execution it was perfect and it became a very very big hit so i don’t think there are any rules and i think that’s one of the things that makes it so challenging
Michael Kantor: Broadway is sort of about, every classic show is about breaking rules, isn’t it?
Nancy Coyne: Absolutely. You know, here’s one of my favorite quotes from Neil Simon. He once said to me the thing he loved about the theater was he could stand in the back of the theater on a preview and listen to the audience and know what changes he had to make. That’s, you reinvent it every night. It’s new every night, every show is different from every other show and every show is different from the performance the night before. There’s changes built into the very nature of what we do. Well, everything that leads up to it is just foreplay. The opening night is a big event around here, and it has some advantages in that there’s a lot of press concentration. So it becomes of almost national attention if it’s a very big show what happens on opening night. The downside, of course, is if the critics don’t like it, then there’s been a lot of attention to the fact that the critics didn’t like. Fortunately, in the last, oh, 20, 25 years… There have been more and more ways to sell Broadway shows, so that there are many shows that are not as reliant on favorable notices. As long as you have a show on stage that genuinely is an audience pleaser, you have real chance of making it. You don’t have to have great reviews to be a hit show. It doesn’t hurt. And after all, critics are people, too. So when they like a show, the chances are very good that people will like it as well. But it isn’t one following the other the way it was. In the olden days. I came on board at the beginning of television commercials being used to sell Broadway and that was a big departure. That meant that we could give people a free sample of the Broadway show and they didn’t have to rely on someone else’s opinion. They could see 60 seconds in those days. Now we show 30 seconds and make up their mind based upon what they see. We’ve always used radio to great effect because radio gives you a sample of the music. So you listen to the radio spot, you hear the music. It’s very easy to draw the conclusion, if I like that 30 seconds, if like that 60 seconds, the chances are I’m going to like the show. And people have been pleasantly surprised, or not surprised, they’ve had their hopes realized by following the commercials and buying a ticket.
Michael Kantor: What’s the biggest change?
Nancy Coyne: Well, the biggest change in my world of Broadway musicals isn’t in my world of broadway musicals. It’s what’s happened to the rest of the world. The rest of world has become so computer literate and so focused on a screen, whether it’s a computer screen or a television screen or a movie screen, that the experience I’m selling has become more and more valuable as far as I can see. Parents who are in focus groups after taking their children to a Broadway show. Rhapsodize about the experience. I mean, they always thought it was a good thing to take their kids to the theater, but it’s so much a better thing today because kids don’t see live things. They see screens. They don’t have their imaginations tweaked. I think taking a kid to a theater is like reading to a child. It’s sort of essential that they learn how to imagine. You know, when in Shenandoah, for instance, John Cullum sings, This land here is Anderson land. He’s singing to four cardboard trees, and the audience has to sit there and imagine the state of Virginia and the rolling hills behind him. And of course, we do. That’s the power of the theater. But kids need to be exposed to this, and parents inherently know this. They know that there’s something wrong with their kids being glued to a screen all the time. So they bring them to the theater, and they tell us the most wonderful things afterwards. They say, oh my God, we had so much to talk about. We were on the same page. I heard some children at a production of Big River that was done by the roundabout with a deaf theater, and it was both signed and acted out. And the children in that audience were having conversations with their parents that would bring tears to your eyes. You know, one little boy, it was a verbatim, and I don’t work on this show. One little boy said to his father, You know, when they were moving their hands, it was sort of like poetry. Put a price tag on that. That’s what you dream your child will understand. Plus, the experience of being in a theater with 1,000 other people, all collectively imagining the same thing at the same time. That’s almost like church. And that’s an experience kids aren’t exposed to with computers. They isolate. They sit in their room, and all the entertainment is poured in to their room. This means getting up, going out, and sitting with other people and watching it happen in real time. You can’t rewind it. There’s no instant replay. You’re forced to have a memory. Your mind is made to work in ways that children’s minds are not being encouraged to work on these days. I think every parent should make sure their kids read books without pictures and go to the theater. Everybody remembers their first Broadway show. I’ve had a focus group of mothers asking if they had a child that was ready to go to a Broadway show and they all said, maybe not quite yet. And then we asked them to talk about their first Broadway show and they talked about their First Broadway show and then we said, when do you think your child will be ready for their first show? And they all had changed their minds because they remembered what their experience was like. They said, you know what, I think he is ready. I think now would be the perfect time. And that’s because everyone remembers the experience themselves and it doesn’t really change no matter how old you are there’s still that goosebump moment when the house lights dim and the overtures tuning up and you know something wonderful is going to happen behind the curtain any second now it is unlike anything else people keep the playbills that they’ve had for those those experiences forever
Michael Kantor: the difference between that kind of art and some of the other art that’s around.
Nancy Coyne: Well, again, back to my point about the screen versus the stage, the rarity of a handcrafted object in front of you has become increasingly valuable because it is so rare. You just don’t see this all the time. You are used to mass-produced items. And this is created just for you. It happens this way just once tonight. People talk about certain performances. There was a snowstorm, apparently production of gypsy one night. And there were about 14 people who made it to the theater. And they were scattered over the theater, and Ethel Merman said, I want you all down in the front row. And they all moved down into the frontrow. You can be sure those 14 people are still talking about that night. She gave the performance for a handful of people, and they’ll never forget it, because it was never done just like that before. I mean, it is absolutely in an era of the mass produced, it is one of a kind. Well, I’ll tell you, here’s an anecdote about Wicked. A couple of nights ago, I was having dinner with a family and the oldest child is eight. And for her ninth birthday, I wanted to take her to a Broadway show, so I ran down some possibilities. And when I got to Wicked, I said, it’s what happened before Dorothy came to Oz. And she said, you mean like the prequel? And I thought, OK, exactly. And she says, that’s the one I want to see. And I described it a little and she said oh, it sounds a little Harry Potter-esque. And I thought, is that an adjective now? I mean, it has built in appeal. This is something we all know, Oz. We can all feel familiar with Oz, but not what happened before Dorothy. And so I think there’s a natural curiosity. All right, tell me the story. And even though it’s a make-believe story, we almost believe it is truth, because Dorothy and Oz is a part of our truth. Everyone saw that movie many, many times. So we’d like to know what happened before Dorothy got there.
Michael Kantor: David Stone said something to the effect of, he went into a launch budget and a per week after the thing, but he said basically there was, of the 14 million dollars in the show, there was a million for advertising and then there was some launch budget. Will you figure out what’s the best way to sell a show like Wicked?
Nancy Coyne: Well, the best way to sell a show like Wicked is to get people in early who will do the selling for you. When I talked about shows being sort of critic proof, one of the reasons they’re critic proof is because if you have a large theater as we do with Wicked, the Gershwin Theater, that means a lot of people will see it before any critic sees it. And they’ll go out and tell other people long before the reviewers come in and word of mouth will have started. Word of mouth would have been well underway, two or three previews in to the run. And that’s really how you sell it. You expose it to as many people as you can. And you make it affordable so that they’ll bring children.
Michael Kantor: Why shouldn’t everybody do a TV commercial? What determines when a TV commercials made?
Nancy Coyne: Well, if you’re a huge runaway hit, you clearly don’t need to advertise on television. So there’s always that strategy for not using television. If you are a hit where, let’s say the music is the hook of the show, the thing that is most outstanding about the show. Then radio can do a very efficient job for you. If you’re show that everyone wants to see and all you have to do is remind people of how to get tickets, then the phone number in the newspaper works. I mean, every show is different from every other show. And deserves a strategy unto itself. And one of the things that we have to be very careful with is that we a limited budget, because we have a ceiling on how much money we can make. Again, this is different from any other product in America. The sky’s the limit. That’s America’s credo. The fact is, the sky is not the limit, you have, let’s say, 1,800 seats, eight performances, at a maximum of whatever. That’s as much as you can make, Therefore, it behooves you not to spend more than that. So you have to keep a very clear eye on how much you can take in before you decide how much you could put out.
Michael Kantor: Start me off, they’re wicked, we’re looking to sell to them, and why?
Nancy Coyne: Women are the decision makers when it comes to buying Broadway musicals in particular. They have to encourage their husband to come along. Sometimes he’s pleasantly surprised, sometimes he goes, why did you bring me here? Women happen to be the primary audience for shows. They bring their husbands, they bring their girlfriends, and they bring their kids.
Michael Kantor: What would you change about where Broadway is at now if you could change it?
Nancy Coyne: Give me a second because I’m not used to being upset about anything I mean, I’m I look at the glass as half full big-time half full I mean I I considered this to be a niche market when I went into it the niche has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger I find that I’m talking to more people than ever before and I never go to a cocktail party and someone asks me what I do that I don’t immediately have people interested in what I Do and that says to me that Broadway is top of mind certainly in this city The thing that most encouraged me about this street and this industry is after 9-11, we bounced back. We bounced back first. And before any other business, I have testimonials. I have a reel I can give you of people talking about going to a musical three or four days after the World Trade Center was destroyed. And they’re saying, God, it feels so right to be here with other people. It feels so right to be celebrating what makes us American. Musical comedy feels like the right thing to do. And I think anytime you have people saying that in the face of an incredible tragedy like that, you have a powerful medium. And I don’t see anything wrong with Broadway. Oh, there are certain industry practices that are archaic. There are certain rules. I mean, we have performance times when no one’s available to go to the theater. We have things that are written in stone from practically the Stone Age. In terms of union rules and regulations that need to be bent a little, which I think in time they will be. But I’m very positive about this industry. And I think when you see corporations like Disney and Universal and all the big players coming to Broadway, it’s not because they’re indulging a whim, it’s because they see value too. And especially when Broadway travels across the country. I mean, Broadway is not just New York. Broadway stands for equality. Caliber of entertainment and it goes across the country and attracts huge crowds wherever it goes. It’s the big event in any town.
Michael Kantor: Broadway represents New York, America. It’s the biggest event in the town around the world. What does Broadway represent for us and for the world?
Nancy Coyne: I think Broadway represents a fulfillment of a dream. I think almost every Broadway show is about the little engine that could. There’s some spunky character, whether it’s a lion cub or a girl getting off the bus in Manhattan or a green girl who dreams of meeting the Wizard of Oz. It’s about aspiration and it’s aspiration told in song and dance. It fulfills every fantasy we have, that we can fly, that we can sing, that can dance. And you sit there and you get lost in the story, much as in the way that you do in a movie. But the movie doesn’t sing and dance. The movie isn’t real. The move isn’t a fourth wall that’s been removed. You don’t feel like you’re there. You feel like you are part of the show when you go to the theater. And that seems to be a uniquely, I don’t know, American musical comedy phenomenon. Little girls going to Thoroughly Modern Millie dream of being Millie and they tell us that afterwards. I think the same thing will, I think with Wicked you will find a lot of little girls in that theater fantasizing being, you know, Glinda or being Elphaba and actually being able to go to Oz. I’m going to suggest they print up travel posters because I think little girls will want to hang Oz travel posters in their bedroom. Broadway represents the fulfillment of a dream. And it may start in New York. It may start on Broadway. But it works as well in the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. It works in the third grade when you put on a play about the Mr. Tooth decay. That was my own third grade play. And somebody played the tooth and somebody played the toothbrush. And all of a sudden, you were involved in something that you didn’t think you were going to be involved in. But theater has that power to do that. And Broadway represents the best of it. I mean, when something comes direct from Broadway, that’s a copy line. Direct from Broadway means you’re getting the real thing, the genuine article. It means big, it means bright, it mean brassy, it means a sound and a feeling that you can’t get anywhere else on earth.
Michael Kantor: And it doesn’t mean American when people in Stuttgart or…
Nancy Coyne: Yes, I think for the rest of the world, Broadway is one of the best things about America. You know, I look with interest at the kind of shows that make it in England, in London, and they’re usually shows like Chicago or Crazy for You, shows that are about Americans being very American, whether it’s Roxy Hart or just, you know, the girl in 42nd Street saying, I’ll do it. I’ll step into the part, that’s the American spunk that is evidenced in Broadway shows. That people like to think that’s our best quality. I won’t go into our worst quality, but that spunk is America’s best quality.” David Merrick wasn’t the last of something. I know this for a fact because Rosie O’Donnell is producing on Broadway. And she certainly comes as close to David Merick as anybody I’ve ever met. It’s a, his was a tradition. That sort of fell out of favor, and I think the pendulum will probably swing back. It’s, again, it’s not, the business is so costly that you’re more likely to see a handful of names above the title rather than one. But the tradition of impresario is not dead. Cameron McIntosh was every bit, is every bit the impresario that David Merrick was. Well, the- People like to lump it all together and call it the British Invasion, which I guess was Evita and Cats and Les Mis, Miss Saigon, Phantom of the Opera. It was also an invasion I guess or a shift to the sung through musical that was more operatic in tone. It certainly opened up the category to include things that might have been called operas once upon a time. And that category is still alive and well. Right now, we just happen to have more of the musical comedy with a book variety. But I have not doubt in the world that a sung through musical word to be very good would be a very big hit. Good is the operative word and the hard thing to find, the hard to do.
Michael Kantor: Two tickets, dinner, it’s $400, what have you. So how do you think ticket price is an effective broker?
Nancy Coyne: Well, it’s not an inexpensive treasure, and I think that that’s why perhaps people are slightly more selective than they might have been with the ticker price lower. By the same token, there’s plenty of discounts out there. There’s the half-price booth. I mean, I think we have as many forms of discounting as any industry. That makes it more affordable for people. Most previews are advertised through direct mail, and most previews are less expensive. Show once the show has opened. So I think there’s plenty of room in there for anybody to see a Broadway show.
Michael Kantor: How do you think you can bring in a new, younger audience? That’s the other thing, people bemoan. Where’s the next generation coming from?
Nancy Coyne: I’m not one of the people who bemoan the fact that there are no young people in the theater. They’re looking at a category 25 to 35 or 18 to 35 and they’re saying there are not enough of those people in there. I put it to you that that kind of, that group, that segment isn’t a prime target for the theater, they’re very busy building a career, amassing their fortune so that They can have a family and then they’ll come to the theater. I think the future of the theater is in the 10-year-olds who are at Hairspray or Mamma Mia or Wicked or Aida, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Phantom of the Opera. There are plenty of children going to the theater, and if that’s not the new audience, I don’t know what is. Trying to be hip isn’t what I think theater’s goal should be. I mean, there’s plenty of performance art, there are plenty things that other venues do. Broadway’s goal is not to be hip, as far as I’m concerned. It’s to be a mass market joy.
Michael Kantor: What’s the basic way of attract, what’s the hook for wicked?
Nancy Coyne: I think the hook for Wicked is it’s the story of two very different girls and the journey that they took. It’s like a buddy musical, and the two leading characters, the two buddies, are two women who happen to be witches. It’s a very, very intriguing story. And I think that the fact that women are the theater ticket buyers is a big asset to Wicked because they’ll identify with one of the two witches for sure.
Speaker 3: Great. Did you see the show in San Francisco? And what, how did it sort of, what did you learn seeing it? And you’d heard all about it, and you knew.
Nancy Coyne: Well, it’s interesting because there’s just, is there a woman behind that screen? No. You’re all men in this room. But there’s a genre of girls’ books that we’ve all read about boarding school books. You know, two girls go off to boarding school and they meet. It’s forever and it’s that kind of a show. I mean, the fact that Winnie Holtzman wrote the book and she wrote My So-Called Life, she understands this teenage mind which Glenda and Alphaba embody. It’s a very, very appealing story and I think that that’s the hook of it. I wouldn’t call it a throwback. I’d call it classic. I mean, it is the stuff Broadway musicals have traditionally been made about. And do I see a long life for it? Yeah, I think it will be a great musical, followed by a great movie musical of it, rather than the other way around, rather than a movie coming first. I think was very, very clever on the part of Universal once they had bought the book to say, wait a minute, I think there’s a musical before the movie. That’s what I liked about it initially, having read the book, is it would have been so easy to make it into a movie. But this is a unique way of looking at the property, and I think it increases the value of the property once it does become a musical.
