Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir - Hardcover

Seller, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668064189 ISBN 13: 9781668064184

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A New Yorker, NPR, and Washington Independent Review Best Book of 2025

A coming-of-age tale from one of the most successful American producers of our time, Jeffrey Seller, who is the only producer to have mounted two Pulitzer Prize–winning musicals—Hamilton and Rent.

Before he was producing the musical hits of our generation, Jeffrey was just a kid coming to terms with his adoption, trying to understand his sexuality, and determined to escape his dysfunctional household in a poor neighborhood just outside Detroit. We see him find his voice through musical theater and move to New York, where he is determined to shed his past and make a name for himself on Broadway.

But moving to the big city is never easy—especially not at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis—and Jeffrey learns to survive and thrive in the colorful and cutthroat world of commercial theatre. From his early days as an office assistant, to meeting Jonathan Larson and experiencing the triumph and tragedy of Rent, to working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on In the Heights and Hamilton, Jeffrey completely pulls back the curtain on the joyous and gut-wrenching process of making new musicals, finding new audiences, and winning a Tony Award—all the while finding himself.

Told with Jeffrey’s candid and captivating voice, Theater Kid is a gripping memoir about fighting through a hardscrabble childhood to make art on one’s own terms, chasing a dream against many odds, and finding acceptance and community.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey Seller is one of the most successful American producers of our time. He produced the Tony Award–winning musicals Rent, Avenue Q, In the Heights, and Hamilton. His shows have garnered twenty-two Tony Awards, including four for Best Musical, and his Broadway productions and tours have grossed over $4.6 billion and reached more than 43 million attendees. Jeffrey is the only producer to have mounted two Pulitzer Prize–winning musicals—Hamilton and Rent. He also revolutionized theater accessibility with the $20 ticket lottery for Rent, making theater affordable for all. 

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Chapter One: The Accident

Chapter One THE ACCIDENT

CARDBOARD VILLAGE. That’s what the kids at school call my neighborhood. I hate that name, coined by a child poet to describe the tar shingles that cover our small houses, built fast and cheap on concrete slabs with no basements to protect us from tornadoes in Oak Park, Michigan, the poor enclave in a rising Jewish suburb just north of Detroit. It’s the neighborhood where the parents have less: less money, less education, less stability. And the kids are deemed less: less smart, less cooperative, less likely to succeed.

On the first day of middle school, my new locker mate looks over at me and asks, “You live in The Village?”

I freeze. My heart speeds up. Blood pumps to my head and ears.

“What?”

“Cardboard Village,” he says.

Caught, as if I’m in trouble, I blurt out one syllable.

“Yep.”

“What’s it like?” he asks.

“What’s what like?” I act like I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“You know, tornadoes. Where do you hide? You’re kind of like the little pig in the house made of straw.”

I don’t have an answer. I don’t want to hide. I want to escape the neighborhood that makes me ashamed. I want to escape the poverty that entraps me and my dark, dour family. Mom frowns, Dad erupts, and my fourteen-year-old older sister, Laurie, hides in her bedroom smoking cigarettes. They all fit together. They are tall and heavy; I’m paper-thin. They have dark hair and eyes; I’m blond-haired and blue-eyed. I’m the adopted son who looks and acts different. While they watch Detroit Lions football games, I write plays and make paper cutouts of trees and leaves and sunbursts to tape to my wall. I’m the answer to the Sesame Street quiz, “One of these things is not like the other.”

And yet.

I’m also the favorite. The light of the family. The boy everyone wants to be with even when I don’t want to be with them.

JUMP BACK TO JUNE 1974. I’m nine years old.

“Wanna serve some papers?” asks my dad. We have just finished dinner with Mom and Laurie. It is still light outside on this late spring night.

I do not want to go with my dad to serve papers, but I’m afraid to hurt his feelings.

“Um, I think I need to get ready for school tomorrow.” It’s a lame excuse and doesn’t stop him.

“Come on, keep me company, it’s only two papers,” he says.

“Go with your father,” says Mom. “Keep him company.”

“Sure,” I say.

We walk to the side drive, cracked like a broken plate, with weeds invading, and open the doors to his Ford LTD station wagon, bought used a couple years ago. I get in the passenger seat, pushing aside dirty napkins and an empty quart of buttermilk from Guernsey Farms, his favorite roadside dairy stand. He can drink a quart of buttermilk a day.

“Just throw that stuff on the floor,” says Dad as he drops his weight onto the front seat, which bounces the car toward him like a rowboat about to tip. Dad is a giant next to my small nine-year-old body—he’s six-foot-three and 250 pounds. His sword-like eyebrows burn red and the curly crimson hair on his head is receding, but still forms its own burning bush. He’s an enormous man, whose size provides safety and entertainment. There is a picture in our small family collection of my sister and me on his shoulders, visiting the zebras at the Detroit Zoo. I love this photograph. Riding his shoulders is also the best vantage point for watching the annual Hudson’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. His height lets me soar over the other onlookers, and his expansive shoulders and hands warm my legs and feet. His enormity can also terrify because when this giant loses his temper, he is like another tornado from which we cannot hide.

He backs down the driveway, swerves around the small island in front of our house, and heads toward Detroit.

Driving in the car with Dad, I look straight ahead or out my window, and try not to wince or make funny sounds as he bounds through the streets as if they are his own personal highways. Making a left turn is a game of chicken. For the passenger sitting closest to the oncoming car, it is a terrifying death sport.

“So, what’s happening, son?”

“School’s out in two weeks,” I say.

“Looking forward to summer?”

“Sort of,” I say. I like school more than summer vacation. It’s more fun than being at home.

“Where we going tonight?” I ask.

“Let’s see here,” he says, looking down and taking out of his large brown folder a white summons that is attached to a legal complaint. I shouldn’t have asked. He pays more attention to the paper than the road.

“We need to get this guy. I’ve had no luck. He’s never home when I show up.”

“What’s the deal?” I ask.

“It says here he owes a year of child support. Here, take a look at the complaint.”

I like reading the complaints.

“It says this guy left town for a year and tried to pass for dead,” I say.

“A man who treats his children like that should be in jail,” he says.

“Well, I guess they found him,” I say.

“And now we’re gonna get him.”

We’re driving on Eight Mile Road, the dividing line between Detroit and the suburbs. The businesses change as we move east through the city. Dress shops and cleaners give way to boarded-up storefronts.

“So, what’s happening, son?” Dad asks.

He already asked that question. But he doesn’t remember. “School’s out in two weeks,” I say.

“What are you doing this summer?”

Same question he just asked. “Going to day camp with Bruce, and we’re playing T-ball,” I say.

“I loved going to B’nai B’rith camp when I was a kid,” he says.

A guy pulls into our lane, cutting off Dad.

“What the fuck?” He steps on the gas pedal and swerves into the lane next to the other car. “Roll down your window,” he says to me.

“What?” I can hear him, but I don’t want to roll down my window.

“Roll down your window,” he says. I do what I am told.

“Hey! Asshole! Learn how to drive,” shouts Dad.

“Kiss my ass,” says the other driver as he gives Dad the finger. He roars away. I can see Dad revving up, about to start chasing him, but then he changes his mind and slows down.

“Sorry about that,” he says.

Some silence.

The neighborhood changes again. It becomes middle class, but there are no bagel factories or kosher delicatessens, just lots of liquor stores and churches. This is the East Side, which is 100 percent gentile, while we are from the West Side, which is more Jewish. We arrive at a white brick ranch house with a bow window in the front. The grass is unmown and has a lot of dandelions coming up, kind of like our house. There are no bushes or flowers around the edges. All the windows are covered with bedsheets of different colors and patterns. Dad parks on the street in front, takes out the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668064189
• ISBN 13: 9781668064184
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italien