It all started at Purim: A producer’s odyssey

Jeffrey Seller is one of the most successful producers on Broadway.

His shows have won 22 Tony awards, including four in the prestigious Best Musical category. His Broadway productions and tours have grossed more than $4.6 billion and been seen by more than 43 million theatergoers. He is the only producer to have mounted two Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals — “Rent” and “Hamilton.”

And he owes it all to Eleanor Glazer, his Hebrew school teacher at Temple Israel in Palmer Park, Mich. “She changed my life,” Mr. Seller said in a Zoom interview.

Mr. Seller had a difficult childhood. As he recounts in his newly published memoir, “Theater Kid,” he was adopted and “grew up in Cardboard Village, the poor enclave in a rising Jewish suburb of Detroit, Oak Park.” His parents fought constantly, and his father, who’d been in a serious motorcycle accident, was subject to fits of rage and loss of memory.

But everything changed when Mrs. Glazer cast him as a sailor in the synagogue’s annual — though not traditional — Purim play. It was a mashup of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Old Testament, Mr. Sellers remembered. Queen Esther expressed her frustration with Ahasuerus by singing “I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”

“God bless Eleanor Glazer, because theater was important to her, and she took it seriously,” Mr. Seller tells me. “As a result, theater became important to me, and I took it seriously.

“She also became my bar mitzvah tutor. She was a convert, as I recall, who could read Hebrew and worked with me on my Torah portion.”

Mr. Seller took the good feelings the Purim play generated and auditioned for Stagecrafters, a community theater. He was at first cast in a minor role in an adult play, but then became a regular performer as part of Stagecrafters’ Rag-a-Muffin youth ensemble, which presents plays for young audiences.

But he did more than act in Rag-a-Muffin productions. He paid attention to the way a play was crafted. To the stage directions. And, most important, to the way the audience reacted. At age 13.

That’s how old he was when he was cast in a production of “Popcorn Pete.” “I got the part of Jack-in-the-box,” he said. “I performed a funny little dance, and I remember how much I enjoyed participating. But I also remember thinking what a silly title. And what happens in this play? Nothing much is happening.

“It’s not so great. So the question became why did we choose this play when it’s not that good and the audiences are kind of small? Who picked this play? And can’t we do better?”

That is an extremely mature reaction for a 13-year-old, but, as Mr. Seller explained, “I was trying at age 13 — and even before — to shape my world, not just participate in it.”

He discovered that a reading committee recommended plays to Stagecrafters board, and immediately got himself appointed to both committee and board. “Getting kids who are willing to spend their free time reading plays probably wasn’t easy,” he said.

“I’d think about plays while I’m daydreaming on my bed. I ask myself how do you make someone want to see a show? What will make them buy tickets?”

He came up with two possible productions, “The Hobbit” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” What the plays shared was name recognition and — more important — large casts. More young actors meant more parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles buying seats.

Both proposals were accepted by the Rag-a-Muffin powers-that-be. Both were produced. And both were successful. It was an early portent of what was to come.

Meanwhile, Mr. Seller participated in local theater festivals, honing his craft and his understanding of theater as both art and business. He matriculated at the University of Michigan, where he majored in — wait for it — theater.

Like thousands of hopefuls before him, after graduating from college in 1986 he went to New York City, eventually landing a job with a company that booked road shows of Broadway productions. It was like “getting a Ph.D. in Broadway producing,” he said. But that wasn’t enough. “I needed to make my own shows.”

He directed a production of “The Fantasticks” for a church in Brooklyn, and then a friend told him that Temple Rodeph Sholom, one of the biggest Reform synagogues in New York, was looking for someone to direct its community theater.

Mr. Seller got the job, and that proved pivotal in his career. In 1989, at his suggestion, two friends wrote a musical based on one of the five Yiddish folktales in “Shtetl Tales,” a kids’ play Mr. Seller directed at Michigan. At first, it was just a 10-minute exercise in craft. But when he saw it, Mr. Seller suggested his friends expand it into a full-length musical. They did, and they called it “A Pound of Feathers.”

Mr. Seller convinced the synagogue to finance the production, and then he cast the musical and directed it. The experience provided him perspective on his strengths and weaknesses.

“It was my first time directing and producing a new musical,” he said. “And what I learned from that experience is that I probably have an essential gift that probably not a lot of people have. That is having macro, big ideas and the ability to put together teams to make them happen. I made something exist that didn’t exist previously.

“But I realized that while my work as a producer was essential, my work as a director was not. I had a feeling I’d always be able to find a great director, but I could never find a better producer.”

That proved true in 1991 when Mr. Seller was invited to go downtown to hear a performance of a rock monologue called “Boho Days” by a composer named Jonathan Larson.

“It was a visceral experience, which for me means the music just overflows and cascades through my body,” he said. “The hair on my arm is rising. I’m watching the story of a 30-year-old composer of rock musicals that no one wants to produce. I feel like I’m a 30-year-old wannabe producer, and I don’t understand how this man who I’ve never met seems to be telling the story of my life.”

He expressed his enthusiasm for the work, but it felt unformed and, ultimately, he was unable to move forward with it.

At about the same time, Mr. Seller went to work for Kevin McCollum at a new company called the Booking Office, essentially performing the same tasks as at his previous job. (He would eventually become a partner in the company with McCollum.)

In 1993, Mr. Larson approached Mr. Seller about his just-completed musical, based loosely on the opera “La Boheme.” Despite his high hopes, Mr. Seller was disappointed by much of what he heard at a reading of the play. But what to do? How do you tell this person, a man with significant potential but likely a fragile ego, the truth?

“This is where being a producer is a lot like being a parent,” he said. “You love your children. You nurture your children. How do you tell them when they need to do better? How do you criticize them?

“I was frightened I would offend. I was frightened I would lose the friendship. But I had to be honest. So like with your children, you lead off with a compliment. That’s easy. And then you get to the meat, and the meat was I couldn’t find the story and I cannot connect with any of the characters.”

Mr. Larson didn’t take it well. “He was not happy with me,” Mr. Seller recalled. “But I think he took it in, and when he called me a year and a half later, I think he was eager to show me that he had taken this collage of life in the East Village and made it into a story with a beginning, middle, and end.”

It was near perfect, but Mr. Seller wasn’t sure it was ready for production. So, “I seek out the opinions of an expert, a smart person I trust and respect.”

That person was the legendary producer Manny Azenberg. I spoke to him in late April, a little more than a week after he’d attended Mr. Seller’s annual Passover seder. He recalled when he first met Mr. Seller and Mr. McCollum:

“The two little pishers came in and wanted to get the bus and truck [touring] rights to ‘Lost in Yonkers,’” a Neil Simon play. “I was not happy with the old-line people who were doing the shows, so I said ‘they’re yours. But I’ll come after you if you don’t do a good job.’”

Mr. Azenberg may have seen a little bit of himself in young Jeffrey Seller. “Every generation you bump into some young people you know are going to replace you,” he said. “And I think [he] inherited the mantle.”

What Mr. Azenberg advised Mr. Seller then was “Don’t start unless you’re sure the script is ready. You have no idea what you’re going to discover when you put it in front of an audience, but if you’re not absolutely certain before you start, you’ll never catch up.”

Mr. Seller listened to Mr. Azenberg. Mr. Larson listened to Mr. Seller, and he made further changes in the show. The rest is theatrical history. “Rent” ran on Broadway for 12 years and grossed $280 million. (Mr. Larson famously, tragically, died of a heart attack the day before its first preview. He was 35 years old.)

Mr. Seller says, “My job is to say yes. To nurture the artist.” But he does more. He innovates to put tushies in seats. He understood that high ticket prices were pricing people out of the market.

“When we opened ‘Rent,’ it was just a short distance from when we couldn’t afford full-price tickets. There’d already been various student rushes, but just because you’re not a student doesn’t mean you can afford it. So we decided to sell $20 tickets, and if we put those people in the first two rows it would create waves of enthusiasm and joy that would go all the way to the last row of the balcony.”

When Mr. Seller’s next production, “Avenue Q,” opened to poor advance sales, he refused to shut it down. He believed in it. Instead of closing the show, he papered the house — that is, he handed out free tickets to people on the street — in order to build word of mouth. It worked. Daily sales doubled almost every two days, and the musical went on to win three Tonys.

As Mr. Azenberg noted: “When Jeffrey commits to a project, he really cares about it.