Jeffrey Seller
speaker
277 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 8 May
Jeffrey Seller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I want to also say at the time, I didn't even know it.
I just knew we could do better.
And I started reading plays every weekend.
I would read all these different plays.
And that's where I started to learn what makes a good play and a bad play.
The one thing that I look back on with Jonathan and his goals to write stories about our characters, our stories, our music, is that that value...
started with Rent, and it continued on from Avenue Q and In the Heights to Hamilton, but it also continued on through so many other shows that I didn't produce, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Next to Normal or Dear Evan Hansen, and even in its own fun way, maybe Happy Ending, which is now about two robots who fall in love.
So when I look at Broadway and I see all these contemporary musicals, I say, bless you, Jonathan, because every single one of these musicals is standing on his shoulders in some way, shape, or form.
And I think if we keep making musicals about who we are today, and by the way, Hamilton does that too, even though it's telling a story that's 250 years old.
So if we keep making those musicals, I think we're going to be in great shape.
Thank you so much.
It's been my great, great delight and pleasure.
Jeffrey Seller. Good afternoon. Jeffrey Seller here. I am the producer of Hamilton on Broadway and all over the world.
I came to New York with my bar mitzvah money. I had maybe $1,100, $10,000 of student debt, and my first job netted me $205 a week in 1986. So I had no money. I had no family money. There was no one in my family I could ever call to say, could you put $20,000 or $10,000? I mean, that would be a joke.
Those are investors who we rely on. And by we, I mean the audience relies upon them. Us holistic producers rely upon them. Historically, they were called dilettantes. And it wasn't necessarily a pejorative. It was just a description of an arts lover and an arts supporter. Is there a relatively infinite supply of the people formerly known as dilettantes?
There is an interesting pattern, which is that by the late 70s and the 80s, there were very few investors on Broadway. If you look back to the 1980s, if you remove the four British mega hits, Cats, Les Mis, Phantom, and Miss Saigon, all produced by Cameron McIntosh, We had very little musical theater or legitimate play theater going on on Broadway.
People with money had not yet discovered Broadway. Maybe they discovered the world of visual art first. But a lot of people with money started to discover Broadway, enjoy going to Broadway, and enjoy investing in Broadway. We are producing more musicals every year as a result of that activity.
Lynn and his colleagues, Tommy Kail, who's his director, they walked in my office in the summer of 2003. None of them were 30. They weren't even close to 30. They were courageous and adorable and fun. And the next thing I did is I went and watched them do Freestyle Love Supreme, their hip-hop improvisation show.
And I thought, oh, Lin is a genius. How is he making these raps up on his feet? So I knew I was in the presence of sheer brilliance. When I experience a new musical, I want the music to prick my ear in a different way. And we created a reading of In the Heights with a small band. And this was my first experience of it.
When Lynn came out and started that warm, enveloping rap, Lights Up on Washington Heights up at the break of day.
Showing 241–260 of 277 · page 13 of 14
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