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 then this gorgeous chorus joined behind him singing In the Heights.
It made the hair on my arms stand up. And I was in.
I'm an atheist, but it felt like there was divine intervention. I mean, if God was over Michelangelo's shoulders, then he was over Lynn's shoulders as well.
A full price ticket, Sweeney Todd, $229. Okay. Why? Why does that ticket have to be $229? Correct. Because I employ, to do that show every night, almost 100 people. The good news is that every single one of those people is making well over $2,000 a week. And because they have a great union, they are making benefits that drive their salary closer to $3,000 a week.
And as a producer, not as a human, but as a producer, how do you feel about that? I am concerned today that we're losing the ability to hit, in baseball terms, a double. When I did Avenue Q, the show cost $3.5 million to put on Broadway, same capitalization as Rent did six years before that. We could operate the show. That means how much it costs every single week to run for about $325,000.
So if we were grossing $500,000 a week, we were making a nice little profit. And by the way, Avenue Q won the Tony, ran on Broadway for six years, and was what I call a solid double. Same exact formula for In the Heights, which came five years after that. However, it was more expensive.
There were 30 people on stage, more musicians, more scenery, more costumes, but it still was able to break even on Broadway every week for only $450,000, which means that if I'm grossing $700 a week, I'm still making a little profit. Today, shows like Avenue Q or In the Heights are costing $10, $12 million. That's more money I have to earn back.
And the operating costs, instead of being $300, $400, $500, are $700, $800, in my case for Sweeney Todd, over $900. And that massive inflation is being driven primarily by what? It's being driven by higher labor costs, higher rental costs for equipment, higher production costs for building sets, higher production costs for building costumes, higher rent from the landlords, advertising costs.
It is also true that there is nothing I can do to become more efficient. I need those 26 to 35 actors. I cannot do it with less. In the case of Sweeney Todd, I need those 26 musicians. That's what I signed up for. That's what it takes.
I have two choices. Close my show or put more money in the bank so I can finance the losses every week. So now you've just gotten to the second most important decision a producer has to make. After what show will I do? When do I close? When the amount of money I bring in every week is less than the amount of money I need to operate my business, I close. What happened with Funny Girl?
What happened? Right. Well, what happened is that a young, talented star named Lea Michele came and completely 180 degrees turned that show around. Now, why would it then not extend?
I think they had her for a year, and stars like Lea Michele or Josh Groban, to get them to come to Broadway for a year is a wonderful thing. And it's very rare that you would get someone of that caliber to extend. Many stars, when they come to Broadway to do a play, will come to do like a 12-week run, and they're gone.
Asking a star to play 52 weeks is an enormous lift, and only special stars who love musicals, Hugh Jackman, Lea Michele, Josh Groban, are willing to do that because of their deep love for the form.
Theaters are best operated when it's a mom-and-pop business. That, again, is the producer Jeffrey Seller. We're not a real business. To expect a theater to have earnings growth every quarter is crazy. We go up and we go down. We have hits, but in between those hits, we have four flops in a row. One cannot guarantee shareholders or banks or whoever those people are consistent earnings.
The danger is that they're going to contribute to inflation by needing to take more of that box office pie to share with those money people.
Oh, I choose to be a producer seven days a week, 365 days a year. I didn't come to New York to be a landlord. I'm a poor kid from Detroit who likes musicals. I don't like buildings. How good a business is the Broadway theater landlord business, however? I wouldn't turn it down. It's a fantastic business. It's heads I win, tails you lose. Period. End of discussion.
I'll say that to their faces and they know it. And no one's going to say, how dare you say that, Jeffrey? They know it. I know it. We all know it.
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