The Best on Broadway
by Sam Hurwitt
The producer behind some of Broadway's most celebrated plays and musicals doesn't live in New York. She lives in the Bay Area. San Francisco-based Carole Shorenstein Hays has racked up a plethora of Tonys, and she's putting the Bay Area on the national map.
Carole Shorenstein Hays will be with me in a moment. As I walk into SHN's offices above the Orpheum Theatre, she's just crossing the lobby into a coworker's office to work out a few of the details that make up every day of the life of a major commercial theatrical producer.
At the time of my visit in March, the company is still presenting the hit post-Broadway run of the Frankie Valli popsicle Jersey Boys, has just finished a world premiere pre-Broadway run of Legally Blonde: The Musical and is just launching Altar Boyz and gearing up for the April opening of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin. It's also about to announce an August opening of Avenue Q as the last show in its season, and it's preparing to unveil its 2007-08 Best of Broadway season in mid-May. Despite all this, a quiet air of calm surrounds Shorenstein Hays as she sits down at her desk to chat.
"I'm finding in life it's important to be relaxed in everything you do," she says. "Which means being in the moment and not thinking, Oh my god, I've got to do this or that--because everyone always has a bazillion things to do."
The company is known foremost for its Best of Broadway series, but a 2005 rebranding effort has sought to put more emphasis on the parent organization SHN, short for Shorenstein Hays Nederlander Theatres, which owns and operates the Orpheum and Golden Gate theatres and has a long-term lease on the Curran. Part of the reasoning behind the rebranding was to give other SHN ventures their due, such as the simultaneously launched FamilyStage series of family-friendly entertainment that began and ended with the fall 2005 musical adaptation of the popular children's book Holes, with the two previously announced follow-up shows in the season shelved indefinitely.
For Shorenstein Hays, however, the main impetus behind the rebranding effort was to reflect a shift of focus within the Best of Broadway series itself. In addition to bringing recent hits of the Great White Way to the Bay, as Shorenstein Hays and the Nederlanders have done for three decades, in recent years BoB has increasingly offered its patrons a first look at brand-new shows on their way to Broadway.
"It just seemed completely right at the time, because to me Broadway wasn't that interesting, so let's create what's going to be on Broadway," Shorenstein Hays says. "You can't just go, 'What's the best stuff out there?' and expect people to pay money. You're destined to get people irate and go out of business."
The pre-Broadway run of Mamma Mia at the Orpheum proved such a hit in 2001 that it was followed by world premieres of Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme, Wicked, Legally Blonde and the major revival of A Chorus Line; homegrown productions such as Irving Berlin's White Christmas; star vehicles such as Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance and Martin Short's Fame Becomes Me; and the inevitable few clunkers such as The Mambo Kings, Lennon and Lestat.
"La Boheme was the first time our organization took a huge financial and artistic risk," Shorenstein Hays says. "I mean, it was on such a huge scale. We just sat down like we're doing right now and Baz started telling me about it, and it just seemed a very compelling, modern way in which to tell a great, great, great story. But doing new shows before New York is wonderfully exciting and really challenging. It's like delivering a baby, like we're the maternity ward, because everyone's needs are quite on the surface. So I feel my job is to really be a great spiritual obstetrician, to say, 'Let's keep going forward, let's get there, let's get there.'"
Shorenstein Hays comes by her love of theatre honestly. Daughter of real estate mogul Walter Shorenstein, she grew up seeing big Broadway musicals at the Curran under the auspices of San Francisco Civic Light Opera, little suspecting that one day she'd be running the place after the SFCLO gradually fell apart.
"I would go with my parents as a kid, see all the great shows--My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, Sound of Music--and I was hooked," she says. "I would save up my money, buy the album, do all the roles in my room. I couldn't sing; I couldn't dance; I really had no talent; but in my room I could do it all. I started taking the bus down to the Curran and would help them set up the concession stand, then because I was there I could walk in to see the shows."
As a student at New York University, she says she wasn't academic in the slightest, but spent all her time going to shows.
"I started working in a producer's office, getting coffee," she recalls, "and going to the theatre, going to the theatre--second-acting a lot--I would find out when the intermission was and pick up a playbill on the street and with authority walk into the theatre. There would always be an empty seat in the second balcony and I'd sneak that one. To this day, I always encourage kids to do that: if they want to do theatre, just start. I was fortunate because I had no talent. I often think if I had a modicum of talent, I'd probably still be trying to do that."
Back in San Francisco, at 28, she took over the Curran Theatre with family friend James "Jimmy" Nederlander, himself a second-generation theatre producer and real estate operator along with his four brothers.
In the late '70s, the Shorenstein and Nederlander families first took over the lease on the Curran, then bought the Golden Gate and finally the Orpheum in 1981.
"With the profits from the Curran, we renovated the Golden Gate, because it was a twinned movie theatre, so we brought that back to its original state," Shorenstein Hays says. "The Civic Light Opera was in the Orpheum, and they were really kind of out of juice. It saddened me because I grew up going to the Civic Light Opera when it was at the Curran, but it just wasn't very good anymore. So we were able to acquire it, and it really taught me you've got to be relevant; you cannot take anything for granted. You can't just assume that people are going to come."
Thus began an often difficult partnership that continues despite an attempt by Shorenstein Hays in '91 to dissolve it in court. To this day, as the company's president, she runs SHN in partnership with one Nederlander or other. Until recently it was Jimmy's Los Angeles-based nephew Scott E. Nederlander, but now it's been turned over to another nephew, Scott's cousin Robert Nederlander Jr., who operates out of New York City. The Nederlanders have a number of theatrical endeavors here and elsewhere apart from SHN, such as managing the Post Street Theatre. Likewise, Shorenstein Hays often produces straight plays on Broadway, projects that are not under the SHN banner.
Jimmy, an old-fashioned theatrical wheeler-dealer of her father's generation, often treated Shorenstein Hays like an unschooled neophyte--which, relatively speaking, she was.
"I knew nothing about business whatsoever, but you just learn," she recalls. "I was really a very rambunctious kid, and just didn't want to do things the same way. I just had no interest in that. So it was like an arranged marriage, really."
In retrospect, though, she wouldn't be half the producer she is today if it weren't for the elder Nederlander.
"I just learned everything from him," she says, now at 58. "I mean, absolutely everything. Jimmy probably is the greatest theatrical dealmaker there is. He was really Max Bialystock in The Producers: You don't need to look at the budget; we'll just keep changing the numbers until you like the numbers you get. So it was very much of a shell game. But he taught me [that] if you have the passion and the fortitude, you can do it."
When Shorenstein Hays became interested in producing August Wilson's play Fences on Broadway in 1987, her partner thought it was a fool's errand.
"I fell in love with Fences, and Jimmy didn't get it," she says. "I mean, August Wilson was nobody; James Earl Jones wasn't a draw; it was a one-set, no-sequins, very hard-hitting family drama. So it just wasn't his thing. I said, 'Jimmy, give me a theatre, and don't take any risk in it.' It turned out it was the greatest deal ever, because the show sold out."
Her first outing as a Broadway producer, Fences was both a trial by fire and eventually a smash success. Convinced the play wasn't working in rehearsals at the Curran, Shorenstein Hays demanded cuts that neither Wilson nor director Lloyd Richards were willing to make. Finally she locked out Richards--the Yale School of Drama dean, artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre and director of Wilson's tepidly received 1984 Broadway debut Ma Rainey's Black Bottom--and made the cuts herself. The playwright was livid, but Fences went on to win both a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for best play.
"Yeah, it was tough going," she concedes. "I fired the director. Well, I didn't fire fire the director; there's all these technicalities--I had to remove him from the theatre in order to make the changes. August likened me to a delicatessen owner chopping his words the way a butcher slices pastrami. But fortunately, at the end of August's life, we did Gem of the Ocean together, and he said to me, 'I only wish I had Carole Shorenstein Hays doing all the rest of my productions.' So if you're going to be fearful about how people feel about you at the time, you shouldn't do this."
Pregnant with son Wally at the time of the 1987 Tonys, for the next 10 years Shorenstein Hays didn't stray too far from the nest (daughter Gracie was born in 1990), until '97 when she returned to Broadway with David Mamet's The Old Neighborhood. Since then she's shown a keen taste for challenging work in the mostly straight plays she's brought to Broadway as lead or co-producer, including Eugene Ionescu's The Chairs, Tennessee Williams's Not About Nightingales, Patrick Marber's Closer and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's musical Caroline, or Change. She also has an impressive track record in terms of plays she's produced that have racked up awards, including best play Tonys for Fences, David Auburn's Proof, Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, and Pulitzers for Proof, Doubt, Fences and Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog. Most of them she brought home to San Francisco as soon as feasible.
It wasn't just her kids that kept Shorenstein Hays's hands full during her decade away from Broadway producing. It took a while for Best of Broadway to really find its legs. It had some early hits such as Annie, but the unexpected success of The Phantom of the Opera made it possible for the organization to really expand its operations. Phantom opened at the Curran in 1993 and just kept going and going and going, finally closing five years later. The press regularly ran stories about shows such as Rent that might come to San Francisco if the Curran ever became available again, and straight plays that would normally play the Curran were diverted to the Golden Gate or even, in the case of Uta Hagen in Mrs. Klein, to American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater next door. In the meantime the Orpheum underwent a $20 million renovation that made it possible for it to host large touring musicals like Miss Saigon and The Lion King.
It also made it possible for SHN to start taking bigger chances on the pre-Broadway world premieres and the now-defunct FamilyStage series, which Shorenstein Hays now says was a nice idea that turned out to require an infrastructure way beyond what her organization had in place. As for the occasional artistic misfire like The Mambo Kings or Lestat (which actually did well enough in San Francisco on goth appeal alone), that's just what makes life interesting.
"You have a lot of good experiences, and then it's sort of cool to have a bad experience so you can talk about it," she says. "We've had a spectrum of great successes and things that just didn't work that sounded like they should have. But you just always have to be mindful and learn something from them. It doesn't bother me to fail as long as we fail big. Success can lead you really astray, because you start pontificating, and it's not about that. You feel, and that's all there is. I mean, you could do what I'm doing. It just takes getting up in the morning and going in.
Sam Hurwitt is the theatre critic of the East Bay Express and a regular theatre contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle's Pink Pages.
