When I first got to Broadway, I understood the musical side.
Rehearsals, subbing, contractors, learning books, surviving New York, getting better. That world made sense to me. What I didn’t understand was the business side, and that took years before I really started connecting the dots.
One of the things that made me stop and think was watching tours get announced before shows had barely opened. I was at Ain’t Too Proud and conversations about touring were already happening in the first few months of our Broadway run. My first reaction was: shouldn’t the goal be keeping the Broadway show open as long as possible?
Then I started understanding how this business actually works, and my thinking completely changed.
Broadway is not necessarily where the long-term money is made. Broadway is where the conditions for long-term revenue get created.
A Broadway production is extraordinarily expensive to run. There is theater rent, union labor, musicians, actors, stagehands, marketing, insurance, royalties, legal fees, general management, physical production costs, and investor pressure to recoup millions of dollars before anyone sees a dime of profit. It is one of the hardest businesses in the world to turn a consistent profit in. The economics are brutal and everybody in the industry knows it.
But here's what Broadway does that almost no other business can replicate: it stamps a production with legitimacy.
Tony nominations, press coverage, critical reviews, national visibility — once a show passes through Broadway, it carries that credential everywhere it goes. The title itself becomes the marketing. Regional theaters don’t have to convince their subscribers to take a chance on something unknown. They just put “Broadway’s Ain’t Too Proud” on the marquee and the audience already knows what they’re getting. That stamp is intellectual property, and intellectual property travels. Once a show earns it, the title becomes an asset that can generate revenue for years. Sometimes decades.
Ain’t Too Proud closed on Broadway in January 2022. And yeah, I’m still a little salty about it.
Hadestown opened the same year. It's still running. I subbed on that tour and also subbed once on the Broadway show, so I have genuine love for that show. But there's a longer conversation about what happened in New York between 2020 and 2023, about which shows survived and which ones didn't, and why. Let's just say I wasn't happy with a lot of what went down during that period. The mandates, the restrictions, the way certain decisions got made and who they protected and who they didn't. Some shows got the runway to recover. Others didn't get the same consideration. I watched it happen up close and I have a lot to say about it. Just not here.
I understand the business reasons Ain’t Too Proud closed. Understanding something doesn’t mean you have to be at peace with it.
What I do know is that closing on Broadway didn’t kill the property. It didn’t even slow it down.
Ain’t Too Proud is still being produced all over the country — more than three years after the Broadway run ended. This summer alone, Ain’t Too Proud is playing at The Gateway Playhouse on Long Island, Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, and The Muny in St. Louis, one of the most respected outdoor musical theater venues in America. The show is still moving, still generating licensing fees, royalties, and ticket revenue for rights holders, authors, and producers.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s the business model.
And I'll add something personal here. I had a hand in two of those three drummers getting hired.
Parker Reid is playing the Maine production at Ogunquit Playhouse. I’ve known Parker since he was born. He’s grown into an exceptional young drummer and it means everything to me to see him landing work at that level. Augusto Oropeza is playing the Long Island production at The Gateway Playhouse. Augusto was a guest on the Broadway Drumming 101 podcast, and when his name came up for that gig, I didn’t hesitate to recommend him. Both are exactly the kind of musicians this industry needs more of.
I don’t have information on who’s playing The Muny production in St. Louis. If you’re in that area and know, I’d love to hear about it.
I'm telling you this because it's proof of exactly what this platform is about. Getting hired on Broadway and its affiliated productions is not about talent alone. Almost everybody at that level can play. What separates the people who work consistently from the people who wonder why the phone isn't ringing is trust, built slowly, over years, through real relationships. Parker and Augusto didn't land those gigs because they got lucky. They landed them because the right people already knew who they were, and because they could deliver authentically when the moment came.
FYI: I put out a call in the Broadway Drumming 101 chat when the Gateway Playhouse gig came up. That’s the kind of thing I share there first. If you’re not in the chat yet, join it so you don’t miss the next one.
Producers understand this from day one, which is why they're never just asking whether a show can survive on Broadway. They're asking whether it can travel, whether it can license, whether it can generate revenue for ten or twenty years after the Broadway run ends. Because if the answer is yes, the Broadway production isn't the end of the story. It's the proof of concept that makes everything else possible.
The Lost Boys is making this visible in real time.
The show opened at the Palace Theatre on April 26. It’s been open for less than three weeks and earned 12 Tony nominations including Best Musical. A North American tour launching in Cleveland at Playhouse Square in spring 2028 was just announced. The Broadway run is not even a month old and the next chapter is already in motion. The producers didn't wait to see how things shook out. They understood what they had the moment audiences responded, and they moved.
That’s how producers think. The show is the asset. Broadway is the proof of concept.
Now here’s what that means for you.
The tour casting hasn't been announced. Nobody has the job yet, on any chair, which means right now, today, is when the networking starts. Not when the show is six months old, not when the contractor starts looking for musicians for gig. Right now, while the creative team's names are in every press release and the production is still the thing everyone in the industry is talking about.
Ethan Popp is the music supervisor. He did Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Michael Arden is directing. The general management company is Bespoke Theatricals. Those are your targets, and the approach isn’t to reach out asking for a job. You reach out to build a relationship. You follow the right people, engage with the work, and make yourself a known quantity in the right circles before the phone calls ever start. By the time a contractor is assembling a list of names for a 2028 tour, you want your name to already be familiar to the people making that list. That's not luck. That's strategy, and it starts two years before the first rehearsal.
Producers think about the long game from day one. Before a show even opens, they are already thinking about the tour, the licensing, the regional productions, the subsidiary rights. The Broadway run is just the first move on a board they’ve been studying for years. The smartest musicians in this business think exactly the same way. Every relationship you build now, every contractor you impress, every gig you show up prepared for — none of that expires. It compounds.
Every show that opened on Broadway this season is a future tour announcement waiting to happen. The casting notices aren’t up yet. Nobody has the job, as far as I know. That means the window is open right now, and most people aren’t walking through it.
The show closes. The money doesn’t. Make sure you’re in position when it starts moving.
Excellent article, about the inner workings of
Broadway (and Beyond)!