It has become fiendishly expensive to produce, and has more competition than ever. And yet the believers still believe. Why? And does the world really want a new musical about ... Abraham Lincoln?! (Part one of a three-part series.) SOURCES:Christopher Ashley, artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse.Quentin Darrington, actor.Joe DiPietro, playwright and lyricist.Crystal Monee Hall, composer, singer, actor.Rocco Landesman, Broadway producer, former owner of Jujamcyn Theaters, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.Alan Shorr, Broadway producer.Daniel Watts, writer, choreographer, actor.Richard Winkler, Broadway producer. RESOURCES:3 Summers of Lincoln (2025)“Live Performance Theaters in the US - Market Research Report (2014-2029),” by Grace Wood (IBISWorld, 2024). Leadership: In Turbulent Times, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018).Big River (1984) EXTRAS:“How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway,” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).“You Can Make a Killing, but Not a Living,” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
Chapter 1: Why is live theater still thriving?
Making something out of nothing is hard. In the beginning, all you have is your imagination. It's your only tool, your only muscle. But if you are determined and lucky, that thing in your imagination can become real. And then if you are very lucky, people will pay to see it.
There's been theater since the beginning of man, really. What is theater? What is going to theater and being in a theater? What is it? What happens? What transpires at that moment? It's the same as the oldest human endeavor of all, which is gossip. Theater is gossip. This is a crazy idea, I know, except that it's true. What do you do when you go to the theater? You overhear conversations.
It's staged, but people are talking to each other and you're listening to them. You're making assessments about their moral character, about their intentions, about what's going to happen. This guy's not trustworthy. She's ambitious and is concealing it. He's got designs on this.
There's nothing more human and more basic to what human beings do than observing people interact and talking about it among themselves, gossiping. So theater is the most fundamental art of all. That is Rocco Landesman.
Chapter 2: How did Rocco Landesman start his career in theater?
I'm a Broadway producer and the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. I've known Rocco for a long time. He was one of the first important people I got to know when I was starting out as a writer in New York. And he was easily one of the most interesting, too. Very sharp and also very blunt, with a reputation as a bit of a rogue, which he seemed to enjoy.
When he was starting out, the thing in his imagination was a musical that he wanted to call Big River. The plan was to take an American literary classic. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It was my favorite novel. And set it to music with new songs by the country legend Roger Miller.
I thought, and still do, think that Roger Miller is the greatest songwriter in American history.
When Landesman heard that Miller was playing a club date in New York, he went to the show and afterward he talked his way backstage.
I said, I'd like you to write a Broadway musical. He basically didn't know what I was talking about. Not only had he never written a Broadway musical, he'd never seen one. So he kind of pawned me off into his wife, Mary. And she said, well, write a letter. I wrote him a letter and didn't get a reply. And your credentials as a producer at this point were what? Basically nil.
I had been a professor at the Yale School of Drama for a number of years. I had no producing credential of any kind. My credibility was zilch. So I read a letter and don't get a reply. I read another letter and don't get a reply. I read another one and months go by and nothing's happening. I keep writing.
And finally, I got a note call actually from one of his managers who said, you seem to be pretty insistent about this and pretty serious. Why don't you meet with Roger and tell him what you have in mind?
So Landesman flew out to Reno where Miller was performing. And once again, he went backstage afterwards.
It was one of the thrills of my life to be backstage with Roger Miller with his guitar and singing his songs. He didn't remember the lyrics to all of the songs, but I knew them all. So whenever he would come to a point where he couldn't remember a line, I knew it. And he said, so what's this about a musical? How does that work? I said, well, you have a book and you have a score.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of producing Broadway shows?
But of course, Landesman did have a career, a big one. He produced several more hits, a Guys and Dolls revival, Angels in America, The Producers. And he wound up running Jujamson Theatres, the third largest Broadway landlord. So when a Freakonomics Radio listener wrote in to say that they'd always wondered about the economics of live theater and that we should make a series about that.
Rocco was one of the first people I thought of, not just because he knows things. There are plenty of people in the industry who know things, but because he is willing to say them, which many people are not. For instance, I asked him about a couple of recent Broadway disasters, $25 million musicals that bombed.
It's a terrible investment, the Broadway theater. It's about like horse racing. I've owned racehorses and I've owned theaters and I've produced Broadway shows. 15 to 20% of the shows that are put on Broadway earn their money back. And it's the same with racehorses. 15 to 20% of the racehorses that race at the tracks earn their oats.
Okay, so with such a terrible ROI for Broadway production... Why do people invest? They can't help themselves.
They fall in love with the shows. So today on Freakonomics Radio, investors who fall in love with shows, performers who fall in love with the stage, and audiences who fall in love with the whole enterprise. There is, of course, one huge problem.
The problem is that it's very, very expensive. There's no economy of scale. And there's no economy of mechanization. It's handmade, live every night.
So here's the question. In a time with so much entertainment, including an infinite stream of digital and virtual entertainments, how can it be that this very expensive, handmade, live every night thing even exists? Theater isn't going away. People telling stories is not going away. We take a hard look at theatrical finances. Are you trying to get me killed?
We try to figure out what drives these creators. I feel like every theater maker has a secret desire to change the world.
And we follow one new musical from the very beginning.
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Chapter 4: How did the idea for 'Three Summers of Lincoln' originate?
DiPietro remembers exactly how he started down this career path. His parents took him to see the musical 1776 on Broadway.
It was the first show I saw as a 10-year-old. I can still remember where I was sitting in the mezzanine and the lights came up on the Continental Congress. I was like, put a fork in me. I'm done. I'm going to be a part of this somehow.
He's now been writing for more than 30 years. His credits include the musical Memphis, for which DiPietro won two Tony Awards, and All Shook Up, an Elvis Presley jukebox musical. So what is this new show he's working on, Three Summers of Lincoln?
Three Summers of Lincoln picks up in the second summer of the Civil War when things are going terribly and there is no end in sight. It is a brutal, bloody war. Lincoln needs to figure out how to end this, and he just can't. The South is fighting stronger than he thought. Where'd the idea come from? Was this sprung from the brain of Joe DiPietro? It did not spring from my brain.
Quite the opposite. I was sitting at home in the first December of the pandemic. Theater was dead. I make my living as a writer on royalties from my productions all over the world, and there were exactly zero productions happening. It was a scary, uncertain time, and I got a call one day out of the blue from two producers I know and who invested in my shows named Richard Winkler and Alan Shore.
Alan Shore, I am the general partner for Three Summers of Lincoln.
Richard Winkler, general partner of Three Summers of Lincoln. This was our idea from the very inception. It all has to start with the idea and the art, and then you figure out how to finance it.
Richard Winkler worked for years on Broadway as a lighting designer.
I met hundreds of producers. who I didn't think had very good taste and spent money in stupid, ridiculous ways, I kept thinking that I wanted to be a producer. When I turned 60 and had this realization that I don't want to be in the theater till midnight anymore, I said, well, I'm going to try this.
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Chapter 5: Who are the creators behind 'Three Summers of Lincoln'?
When do you want it? And they said, we want you to write a musical about Abraham Lincoln. I don't think I said this out loud, but my first thought was absolutely not. That is a terrible idea. I'm just thinking, like, how does Lincoln sing? What is it about? And the Civil War? It was so awful. I was just thinking, like, no.
Joe said, no, no, no, this is not a good idea. I don't want to do this. We talked him into a conversation with somebody else.
That was Doris Kearns Goodwin was the other conversation.
Yes. And they got along like a house of fire. And then Joe said, well, let me do some research.
And then I thought, well, you know, so many great musicals start out as terrible ideas, right? Name some. A hip hop musical about a founding father. Terrible idea. A musical about the sinking of the Titanic. That's a terrible idea. A musical about cannibalism. And it becomes Sweeney Todd. So you're like, all right, maybe that instinct, you should be a little more open.
The hip-hop musical about a founding father was, of course, Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton was such a sensation that it seemed to change the rules for producers, creators, performers, the audience. It opened up new possibilities. But for Joe DiPietro, there was a puzzle to solve. Alexander Hamilton had been relatively obscure to most people. Abraham Lincoln, quite the opposite.
There are more books published about Abraham Lincoln than anyone except for Jesus. And they're all, according to my calculation, about 800 pages long. I was like, I don't want to sit in my house during the pandemic reading 800 page books about the Civil War. Like that is not fun.
When you feel like you're getting overwhelmed by American political history, it must be nice to have Doris Kearns Goodwin on your side.
She wrote a book called Leadership in Turbulent Times, which is about what she considers to be the four most effective presidents. I read this one chapter which said, during the last three summers of the Civil War, Mary Lincoln dragged Abraham to a place called the Soldier's Home, which was the first U.S. home for indigent soldiers ever.
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Chapter 6: What is the role of a Broadway producer?
Let me write an outline and see if I get hooked.
DiPietro did get hooked, but he's a playwright, not a composer, and a musical isn't a musical without music. So coming up after the break.
A nation on the edge, on the verge, the center can hold when two ideas can merge.
I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back. The playwright Joe DiPietro had been commissioned to write the script for a new musical about Abraham Lincoln. DiPietro is white, as was Lincoln, but the story is really about slavery, ending slavery. And the other main character is the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Given the subject matter of the show, I was like, oh, it would be great to have a lyricist who would look at the subject matter from a different perspective than I did. Daniel J. Watts was a star dancer in a Broadway show I wrote called Memphis back in 2009. He was fantastic and has been in probably dozens of shows by now.
He also at the time was a spoken word artist, a budding spoken word artist. I went to see his spoken word performances and I was like, wow, God, he's really good. And so you thought, oh, he can write. I thought he can write. I think I called him out of the blue in the pandemic when theater was literally dead. There was no hope and no future. And we were all broke.
He was like, hey, there's this project I'm working on and I need a co-lyricist. I recognize that I cannot speak for a lot of these people. I'm wondering if you would be interested. And that is Daniel Watts. I am a co-lyricist and co-choreographer for Three Summers of Lincoln.
As a kid growing up in the Carolinas, Watts played sports. He took dance and gymnastics. He has always had a high level of energy. Everyone was like, sit down. Daniel, sit down. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I got things to do. Watts has been performing on Broadway since 2006. He was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Ike Turner in Tina, the Tina Turner musical.
He has also appeared in The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple, and yes, Hamilton. So what did he think about the idea of a Lincoln musical?
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Chapter 7: How do musicals like 'Hamilton' influence new productions?
It's like really short sits in cities like we would sleep on the floor of a bus. I mean, like a Greyhound bus. We didn't feel it at all. Could I do it today? Hell no. But then I was ready for the world, honey. I was a road dog. After I did that non-equity tour for a year, I went directly into the Broadway show. And you started as a swing, is that right? I started as a swing.
I mostly played Joanna, Mrs. Jefferson, the Seasons of Love soloist. I closed it out, so I was there for about the last four or five years.
Rent, like Hamilton, was another huge and groundbreaking Broadway hit, the kind of show that changes how people think about what's possible. Later in this series, we'll hear from Jeffrey Seller, a lead producer of both Rent and Hamilton. For Crystal Monet Hall, performing in a Broadway hit was a great gig, but even a union acting job barely covers the rent when the rent is in New York City.
Almost every theatrical performer has a side hustle. Hall taught herself guitar and began writing songs. She went on tour with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, and she released a record of her own. At one point, she moved to California, but she soon came back to New York. She performed in the Alicia Keys jukebox musical Hell's Kitchen at the Public Theater before the show moved to Broadway.
And then she got a call from Joe DiPietro and Daniel Watts about a new musical they were writing called Three Summers of Lincoln.
Here's DiPietro again. She had a self-titled debut album. And I was like, oh, I really like the sound of this. And I love what she does with melody. And so we had a chat and we gave her the script and we said, pick two or three songs and write something and send it to us. What'd she pick? What I very clearly remember her picking is the opening number, which is called 90 Day War.
Initially, the Civil War, everyone thought it would last 90 days. And so by the second summer of the Civil War, it was over 400 days. And the big thing is an opening number. You want to introduce the sound of the show. All of those people sitting in the audience say, OK, you're writing a show about Abraham Lincoln. Prove that this is a good idea. Prove that this isn't Hamilton.
Prove it's not 1776. Prove you have your own voice.
The first lyrics in 90 Day War are a nation on the edge, on the verge. The center can't hold when two ideas can't merge.
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Chapter 8: What is the collaboration process for writing a musical?
You hear about writers getting $50,000, $100,000 for movie stuff. For theater, they're much more... Like 10, 20, if you're starting out, I'm at the point where I can ask for above 50 or so. And here is Crystal Monet Hall.
The creative team, you get your upfront to work on the show, whatever that is. And that depends on, you know, how much cachet you have and how long you've been in the business and what you can command. But after that, you don't get paid. You don't get any money as you're going. You hope that it is something that is very, very lasting and that you will be able to get all of that back in.
But that's not necessarily promised. It's a hope and faith thing. You know, you got to love it. You got to love it.
Are you willing to tell me what you're making for composing Three Summers of Lincoln?
I can say that first-time composers are generally making for an upfront between 18 and 25,000. Right now, I am inside of the dream. And that's Daniel Watts.
Like, I literally flew in yesterday morning from Chicago because I'm on a TV show called The Chi. I was like, hey, guys, I got to go fly back here to jump right into a workshop of a musical that I'm the co-lyricist and co-choreographer of. Little me is like, yeah.
Older me is like, Daniel, you're doing a lot. How does your salary shooting a TV show compare to your salary and the time it takes also creating a musical?
Oh, it's night and day. It's just different economics. You know, when it comes to theater, there is a fixed amount of tickets that can be sold. There's only so much money that can come in. Also in theater, you can only get paid if you're there. So if you miss a show, you lose pay. You get docked. That's just the economics of it versus TV film.
I can show up and hit it and then I don't have to remember anything. I can leave it. I shot my whole episode in two days. That was two days of shooting. And I make a lot more money doing that. And there's also a residual check on the other side once it airs.
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