Broadway Bound and Beyond: The Course
The Career Foundation Every Working Musician Needs (But Nobody Teaches)
This course is for musicians on any instrument, especially college students preparing for the professional world. Whether you want to perform, tour, record, teach, or work in theater, you need more than strong playing. You need to understand relationships, reputation, versatility, and the business of making a living in music.
Want in before everyone else?
The course opens to the public in January 2027. Subscribers to Broadway Bound and Beyond hear about it first, and paid subscribers get an early enrollment window before it opens to everyone else. Subscribing is the way in.
The book is out now. Read it here. This page is for the course that builds on it.
Talent Is Only the Entry Fee
You can play. You’ve put in the hours. You can read, you can groove, and you can hang with anybody on the bandstand.
The phone still isn’t ringing the way it should.
Here’s what nobody tells you: talent is only the entry fee. The people doing the hiring aren’t just asking whether you can play. They want to know whether they can trust you, whether you can cover whatever the book throws at you, and whether you’ll still be standing in five years. Music school spent years on the first question and skipped the rest.
So you practice harder and hope that’s the missing piece. Meanwhile the calls go to players you know you can match. Every month without a plan is another month of subs, chairs, and relationships going to somebody else.
Twenty people. ABBA covers. Nobody there to be impressed.
That gig at a Ramada Inn in New Rochelle in 1993 is the reason I have a Broadway career. It wasn’t because the gig was glamorous. It wasn’t. It’s where I met a guitar player named Matt Beck, who was already deep into the Broadway world. On a break one night he pulled me aside and asked if I’d ever thought about playing musical theater. That conversation got me a bus and truck tour of Footloose. The tour led to my first off-Broadway show, Tick, Tick... Boom!, written by the same guy who wrote Rent. That show is how the drummer at Rent heard my name and called me to sub on Broadway for the first time. And subbing on Rent is how I built the reputation that eventually landed me my first Broadway chair, Memphis: The Musical, in 2009.
None of it started with an audition.
All of it started with a Friday night gig nobody was watching. That’s where I learned the three things nobody teaches you in music school.
Three Pillars, Every Time
Broadway Bound and Beyond: The Course. It’s built on 26 years on Broadway, including Memphis: The Musical, Ain’t Too Proud, and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and on the three pillars that decide who actually works:
Relationships. How trust actually gets built, and why it has nothing to do with networking.
Versatility. Why the musicians who work the most are the ones who can play anything.
Financial resilience. Treating your career like an asset instead of a series of gigs.
What You Walk Away With
You don’t come away with more information. You come away with a plan.
You’ll know which pillar is costing you work. You’ll have a worksheet for every module and a dated action plan you build yourself. That plan is how you get the calls, the callbacks, and a career that doesn’t depend on the next gig.
You already know me from Broadway Bound and Beyond: the podcast, the interviews, and the week to week of life in the pit.
This is different.
The book laid out the foundation. The course is where I’m turning it into something you can actually work through, module by module, with the tactics the book didn’t have space to unpack.
Here’s exactly what’s inside
Module 1: The Reality Check. Why talent is only the entry fee, the four questions everyone who actually hires you is asking, and the three pillars this whole course is built on. Before you know which pillar is your biggest gap, you rate yourself honestly on all three.
Module 2: The Trust Economy. How relationships actually get built in a small industry, the full story of the Ramada Inn gig that led to my entire Broadway career, and exactly what to say, and never say, when you reach out to someone you don’t know yet.
Module 3: Reputation. What people say about you when you’re not there to hear it. Why being a good hang matters more than being the most talented player in the building. How to recover professionally when something goes wrong, because it will.
Module 4: Versatility as a Career Strategy. A genre-by-genre breakdown of what Broadway actually demands (funk, jazz, rock, Afro-Cuban, and more), plus a concrete way to close whichever gap is costing you work right now.
Module 5: Financial Resilience. How to structure your business, build a six-month runway, and run every gig decision through the same rule of three I use myself: the money, the people, and the music.
Module 6: Putting It All Together. How the three pillars compound instead of working alone, and a specific 90-day action plan you build yourself: one relationship, one genre, and one financial move, each dated on your calendar.
Every module comes with its own worksheet: a self-assessment, a trust audit, a relationship plan, a versatility plan, and a financial resilience plan. By the end, you’re not just informed. You walk out with an actual plan.
If you’ve read the book, this is the deeper layer. If you haven’t, start with the book first.
Want first access to the course?
The course opens to the public in January 2027. Subscribers hear about it first.
Free gets you every post in this section: the relationships, the versatility, the money conversations, all of it.
Paid gets you the Real-World Training posts, the full tactical breakdowns that go past the free version, and an early enrollment window before the course opens to the public.
Either way, subscribing is the only way in. There’s no other list.