Tea for Two

What does it take to get seventeen Tony Awards on Broadway? The Village Theatre and 5th Avenue – together.

It takes a village to raise a musical – famously, Issaquah’s own Village Theatre. Its Village Originals series has launched fifty new musicals in the past nine years, six of them in the last month.

But it really takes a bigger village to make modern musicals. A tiny cohort of theatres nationwide braves near-hopeless odds to produce them, including the Village Theatre and Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre. Think of them as a two-headed local monster cranking out national hits – an astounding seventeen Tony Awards and forty Tony nominations in seven years, fourteen of them for onetime Village Originals.

Levi Kreis as Jerry Lee Lewis and Tom Skerritt’s niece Jessica Skerritt in Village Theatre’s Million Dollar Quartet: Three Tony nominations, a million dollars in ticket sales (and Kreis performs on Jerry Lee’s new album Mean Old Man). Photograph by Jay Koh; property of Village Theatre.

Though decidedly independent, sometimes they function as a team. “Next season’s Next to Normal, born at the Village, lauded on Broadway, returning to Seattle on our stage, is a great example of our growing influence on the national scene,” says 5th Avenue publicist John Longenbaugh. Village subscribers get a 20 percent discount on N2N tickets at the 5th. 

Each theatre has a vital role to play in a high-risk arena. “To do a new musical costs more than two million dollars, sometimes a lot more,” says 5th Avenue executive producer and artistic director David Armstrong. “We’ve done ten new musicals in ten years.”

 “We work with new musicals in their infancy,” says Village publicist Michelle Sanders, “at varying levels – readings, workshops or developmental productions – and sometimes these new musicals even move onto our mainstage. Armstrong observes, “There’s no income from the early development they do.” Basically, Village is betting on a crazy dream. 

“The Tony Award says we are a good market with a sophisticated, ticket-buying public that’s able to see if a show’s going to work,” says Sanders.

And when some aspect of a show doesn’t quite work, who gets called in for rewrites? In the case of the 5th Avenue’s latest Broadway-bound musical, Catch Me If You Can, which suffered from an unfocused book, it’s Pulitzer-winning Village Theatre alum Brian Yorkey, according to the New York Post.

Why would anybody trust his or her world premiere to a theatre in a town like Issaquah, whose entire population is less than one-tenth the size of the 5th Avenue’s annual audience of 287,000? Sanders chalks it up to “our great track record and wonderful Seattle talent pool.” The 5th Avenue’s track record, starting with the company’s bizarrely unlikely triumph Hairspray in 2002, probably helps attract talent across the lake as well. 

Back in the 1960s, a millionaire patron urged Seattle Times drama critic Wayne Johnson to quash the idea of a second theatre besides the Seattle Rep, saying, “Seattle can’t support two theatres.” It turns out that we need multiple theatres to thrive. And few are more needed – from here to Broadway – than that two-headed beast, the Village Theatre and the 5th Avenue. •