Broadway these days is dominated by corporations like Disney and Cablevision, which use their vast resources to produce mainstream musicals such as “Aida,” “Footloose” and “Jekyll & Hyde.”
But there is a group of independent producers — all women — who have given the New York theater some of its most important and successful plays in the last 10 years.
The four producers — Daryl Roth, Anita Waxman, Chase Mishkin and Arielle Tepper — come to the table with deep pocketbooks. And their wealth allows them to take risks and to indulge their own tastes in plays and musicals.
Roth, for instance, produced “Wit,” Margaret Edson’s acclaimed play about an English teacher battling ovarian cancer.
Mishkin took a chance on “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” when many producers thought a one-person show starring a man in drag would never work on Broadway.
Their money also gives them control over their shows. All four say they don’t just write the checks but make day-to-day decisions about marketing, advertising and casting.
“I know there are some people in our business who just want my money and don’t give a rat’s a– about what I think,” says the 60-something Mishkin. “But that’s not the way it works. If I put in the money, I have a say in the way things are run.”
The suggestion that they are dilettantes makes all of them laugh.
Says Waxman: “I only wish I were a dilettante! I’d be having a lot more fun. But the truth is, I’ve had to work all my life.”
Daryl Roth
After watching from the sidelines as the Broadway musical “Nick and Nora” imploded in 1991, Daryl Roth vowed that the next time she put money into a show, she’d be the boss.
“No one was in charge,” says Roth, 55, who invested $500,000 in the show. “Good ideas were not heard, things that should have been done were not done. It was a real eye-opener, and I realized that the next time I did a show, I’d have to be in control.”
The flop also made her shy about taking another stab at the high-stakes world of Broadway theater, where millions can be lost overnight.
So Roth turned her attention to off-Broadway and quickly established herself as one of its leading producers of serious plays.
She presented three of the most significant dramas of the 1990s — Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” and “Wit.”
All won Pulitzer Prizes for drama.
The elegant Roth has an irreverent side, which comes out in her productions of “De La Guarda,” the wacky downtown performance art piece, and the Shakespeare hip-hop musical “The Bomb-itty of Errors.”
“I do like serious plays,” she says. “But I also like the fun stuff, especially things like ‘Bomb-itty,’ that I think will bring young people to the theater.”
Roth, a lifelong theater lover and mother of two who grew up in Wayne, N.J., is married to New York real estate mogul Steven Roth. But she doesn’t use her husband’s money to finance plays, instead relying on investors she’s cultivated based on her own track record.
Chase Mishkin
Chase Mishkin’s first foray onto Broadway was an out-and-out disaster.
In 1996, she produced a play called “The Apple Doesn’t Fall,” which was directed by her friend Leonard Nimoy.
Vincent Canby, then the chief drama critic of the New York Times, savaged the show, which closed after a handful of performances.
“I was so devastated by the review, I wrote him a letter,” says Mishkin. “That’s how naive I was. Of course, I never got a reply.”
Since then, her track record has improved.
Mishkin produced the 1998 Broadway hit “The Beauty Queen of Leenan” and this season produced three Broadway shows — “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and “Waiting in the Wings.”
Stylish but blunt-spoken, Mishkin — who says she’s “pushing 60” — produces plays for one reason: to make money.
“I have to think something will be commercially viable before I go out and raise money for it,” she says.
A Midwest girl who once worked as a model and showgirl in Las Vegas, Mishkin changed course after falling in love with Ralph Mishkin, the owner of a carpet company. She gave up showbiz and helped her husband build his business into the largest supplier of carpeting on the West Coast.
Ralph Mishkin died in 1992. “He was the love of my life and I think about him every day,” she says, wiping away tears. But she soldiered on, plunging back into the entertainment world, this time as a Broadway producer.
“I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to be single and live alone for the rest of my life,” she says. “But it’s extremely gratifying to have had some success in the theater, even at this point in my life.”
Arielle Tepper
At 27, Arielle Tepper is one of the youngest producers on Broadway.
Her youth serves her well: She’s attracted to shows that have a hipper, edgier feel than the run-of-the-mill fare on the Great White Way.
Tepper produced “Freak,” John Leguizamo’s hugely successful 1998 solo performance piece, as well as Sandra Bernhardt’s “I’m Still Here . . . Damn It!” last year.
This season she put money into the Playwright’s Horizon production of “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead.'” Then, bucking the widespread belief that a serious musical with the word “Dead” in the title could never work commercially, she transferred the show to Broadway.
The naysayers were right: Despite strong reviews and good word-of-mouth, the show closed at a loss of $2 million.
But Tepper says she went into the project knowing the chances of making money were slim.
“I’m willing to take risks,” she says. “I produce from the heart. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s the only way I know how to do things.”
To be a risk-taker, it helps, of course, to have money — and Tepper has lots of it.
Her grandfather was real estate kingpin Philip J. Levin who, at his death in 1971, left an empire valued at more than $100 million.
It would be easy to dismiss Tepper as a rich girl playing with a new toy, but life has not been easy for her. Her parents divorced when she was young. In her mid-teens she found herself caring for her mother, who was battling cancer.
Two years after her mother’s death, Tepper, then studying abroad in London, went to see “Les Miserables” — and was bitten by the theater bug.
She became “obsessed,” she says, with Cameron Mackintosh, the famous producer of “Les Miz.” After graduating from Syracuse University, she worked for him as an assistant company manager before striking out on her own as a producer.
“If I feel about a show the way I did with ‘Les Miz,’ I know I have to produce it,” she says. “You try to be unemotional, but, in this business, I don’t think that’s possible.”
Anita Waxman
At the Tony Awards last week, Anita Waxman was reminded just how capricious the theater industry can be.
Not long after she claimed a Tony for her revival of “The Real Thing,” she watched “Contact” beat out “The Wild Party,” which she co-produced, for Best Musical.
“The Wild Party” closes today, losing all of its $5.1 million investment.
“The theater is not a real business,” she says. “You can only be in it if you have blind optimism. I try to run my shows like a company, but if I didn’t have blind optimism about their chances of success, I’d never do them. From an economic perspective, there’s no point.”
This self-described “working-class Jewish girl” got her start when she won $1,000 on “Hollywood Squares” in the 1970s. She used the money to start a business selling home cosmetics.
After success in that field, she decided to leave her job and go to medical school. But kids — and a divorce — intruded.
“I was a single mother, and I had to find a day job,” she says.
Waxman went to work for a company that recruited executives in health care. A few years later, she started her own health-care head-hunting company, which she sold for a tidy profit 10 years later.
She also met and married Albert Waxman, a scientist.
He helped develop — and holds the patent for — real-time ultrasound. They divorced in 1992, after 14 years of marriage — and then, just two years ago, remarried.
“Some people think my husband writes all the checks, but that’s not true,” she says. “Al would never invest in the theater. I don’t have to go to him for money, thank God, because if I did, we’d be divorced again.”
Waxman, who began investing in plays more than a decade ago, recently teamed up with veteran producer Elizabeth Williams. Their company paid the superhot London theater Donmar Warehouse — which is run by Sam Mendes and developed “Cabaret” and “The Blue Room” — about $600,000 for the right to option all their productions for a commercial run.