Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
ACT I
The boy runs down the drive, shouting excitedly. He’s just discovered that his hero is coming to Phoenix, where his family has recently moved, and his father’s managed to get tickets to the opening performance.
For years, while living in Chicago, Mike Isaacson had religiously watched WGN-TV, the station where his grandmother once took him to see a show so popular there was a seven-year wait for tickets. He’d worn a plaid jacket and a straw boater, posing for a photo as other children gawked. For there, behind the boy, had stood a man wearing an unmistakable orange wig, a red suit with an ornate collar, and a jovial expression: Bozo the Clown.
This is the character that Isaacson will describe years later as his “Rosebud,” that fondest embodiment of a simpler, cherished time. One day, he will buy the original paintings from the Little Golden Books series depicting the clown, and keep a miniature Bozo doll in his office.
Yet during this fleeting moment in the early 1970s, when the boy finally reunites with his red-nosed icon in Phoenix, how does he respond?
His face drops as he watches the show, studying the clown’s every move. This isn’t Bozo! This is a third-string impostor. After the show is over, the actor playing the beloved clown comes out to greet his young fans. There stands the boy, looking deflated.
“How did you like Bozo?” the man cheerfully asks.
The boy doesn’t hold back: He tells the clown in no uncertain terms. For nearly 15 minutes, the 8-year-old runs through a litany of mistakes and stage directions that Bozo botched.
As the man hears this ardent second-grader’s detailed critique, it becomes apparent: This boy knows more about Bozo than he does.
***
At 47, Mike Isaacson has won multiple Tony Awards without ever leaving St. Louis. He’s produced musicals that defied odds and earned $1 million in a single week. He’s hobnobbed with A-list actors and fat-cat financiers, though he’s never hesitated to usher when needed. He’s played the role of reporter and publicist, critic and the criticized.
Isaacson’s smart and loves ideas, but he operates on instinct. He has no impulse to conform to a crowd’s mores, but he’s hypersensitive to an audience’s reaction and can gauge emotional tone in an instant. He’s all energy, pounding his fingers in a staccato, driving rhythm, and he cuts through fuss and politicking. He can take a roomful of neurotic people and convince them they’re all on the same side, pull their energy into a shared goal that suddenly feels like the most exciting and meaningful thing they’ve ever done.
He’s a tenacious reader, of news, blogs, biographies—none more beloved than Stephen Sondheim’s. He and longtime partner Joe Ortmeyer host Mad Men parties at their Central West End condo and chauffeur actresses like Sutton Foster and Kristin Chenoweth to the airport. When they see a musical together, Isaacson and Ortmeyer maintain the Four-Block Rule: Never start talking about the production until you’re at least four blocks from the theater, because you never know who’s standing nearby.
Isaacson is neither stern nor soft—not Citizen Kane, nor Bozo either—making it hard to define his managerial style. He shepherds a production in countless ways, looking at costume sketches and set designs, talking to directors and actors, refining every stray detail. He’ll say what no one else in the room will, then break the tension a second later with a joke. He’ll push his colleagues on a project, but remain friends afterward.
He’s a workhorse, but he doesn’t mind it. He’s constantly on the phone, checking email, refilling his coffee mug, downloading new music, flying to New York and London. At press time, he was overseeing productions of TRACES and Bring It On: The Musical (which comes to Fox Theater this month)—even as he begins a high-profile job as The Muny’s third executive producer in its storied 94-year history.
The one constant—in a career that’s gone from McDonnell Douglas to Saint Louis University president Lawrence Biondi’s office to the Fox and The Muny—is that Isaacson defied mainstream logic every step of the way. As he says, “I’ve made a lot of choices that made no sense to anybody but me.”
***
For Isaacson, childhood was a nomadic experience. His father, Bill, worked in human resources for the meatpacking industry during a time when meatpacking was shrinking, so the family bounced around: Sheboygan, Wis., Naperville and Deerfield, Ill., Phoenix, back to Chicagoland.
It was in Illinois that a young Mike saw his first musical, a community-theater production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. “But the one that rocked my world,” he says, “was A Chorus Line at the Shubert Theater in Chicago in ’77.” The production resembled a Broadway audition and shared the emotional stories of a group of performers’ journeys to the stage.
Mike’s own journey took a sharp turn when his family moved to Milwaukee, just as he was entering junior high. “The move from Illinois to Wisconsin was very difficult,” he recalls, “but after you move around a lot, you learn that even though you are in a different culture and place, the social drama’s always there—so you just cut through it and create the reality you need to create.” With few friends, Mike spent much of his free time at the library. He’d check out records from Broadway musicals and study the liner notes.
“I did the shows in high school, but I never had any delusions of becoming an actor,” he says, recalling a particularly embarrassing turn as “the worst Pippin in the history of American musical theater.”
Instead, Mike observed. He recalls studying two “hilariously hip women” who temporarily replaced the drama teacher while the school staged a production of Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. It was “a trainwreck of a musical,” he says, in which the directors overlooked a key plot point. During rehearsals, Mike warned the women, but the show continued as planned—and on opening night, the audience sat in utter silence. “They called an emergency meeting the next day and said, ‘We got the meaning of the show wrong,’” he says, laughing.
Mike also began reading Variety and theater reviews in newspapers like The New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, teaching himself about “this intriguing thing” while stuck in Wisconsin, miles away from the bright lights of Broadway.
***
He was supposed to be a lawyer.
“My parents had a mandate: If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to law school,” he recalls. His two brothers both followed the prescribed path, with his older brother Bob studying at SLU. When offered a scholarship, Mike decided to go there as well—though as an English major (“Really as a stall”).
He moved to St. Louis in fall 1982, at the same time that Fox Theatre was preparing to reopen. When a campus tour guide mentioned that the theater was seeking ushers, Isaacson promptly left the tour to sign up. That same week, during freshman orientation, he traveled to The Muny for the first time to see A Chorus Line, the play that had hooked him years earlier. He’d later use the name of a friend’s father to get into The Muny and sit on the east wall, observing the stage and the audience.
That fall, Isaacson also frequented the Fox, sitting in the nosebleeds and returning night after night to observe the way certain actors connected with the audience. “When you see a show more than once, you can really begin looking under the hood and see its mechanics and architecture,” he says. Asked what he looks for when studying a performance, Isaacson emphasizes that a musical is greater than the sum of its parts.
“You look at how a show is leading to these truths, these moments that are powerful and really affect us as an audience,” he says. “‘Content dictates form,’” he adds, quoting Sondheim, “so each show sets out on its own path based on that.”
As he discusses the story’s importance to a show, Isaacson’s own knack for storytelling becomes apparent. It was equally apparent to SLU communications professor Avis Meyer, who encouraged Isaacson to join the student newspaper after reading his work. Isaacson obliged, reviewing theater and film: “I’d read a lot of theater reviews, so I’m sure that subconsciously I was copying everything that [New York Times columnist] Frank Rich had ever written.” Isaacson’s column in The University News—which ran across from (now–Missouri Lottery director) May Scheve’s column, titled “If I May”—was called “If I Mike.” (He cringes recalling the name.)
During Isaacson’s junior year at SLU, he and a friend created a production of Godspell—casting the parts, selling tickets, finding musicians, transforming Xavier Hall into a black-box theater. “It was totally joyous and fun,” he recalls. “You just do it, which is the best education there is.” The next year, they produced Grease. “Obviously, I didn’t review my own musicals,” he says.
In his column, Isaacson frequently criticized SLU’s head of campus ministry, Don Sutton. During Senior Week, as graduation approached, Isaacson went out for drinks one night and later decided to steal the sign from Sutton’s office door. The next day, he discovered Sutton was looking for him. He hesitantly picked up the phone, fearing he was about to learn that he wouldn’t receive a diploma.
“What are you doing with your life?” Sutton snapped.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Isaacson, unsure what the Jesuit was asking him. “Looking for a job.”
“I was at a meeting yesterday and sitting next to the vice president of communications at McDonnell Douglas, and he was reading your work in the paper,” Sutton said. “I don’t know why, but he thought it was really good. There’s a job opening, and he wants to know if you’re interested.”
Bewildered, Isaacson hung up and called to schedule an interview at McDonnell Douglas. When he arrived at the aviation company’s offices the next day, he sat down in the VP’s office and gazed out at the airport.
“Do you think you can write about airplanes?” the man asked.
“Well, I guess so,” Isaacson replied.
“That’s the spirit!”
Roughly four months into the job, he grew bored. He climbed onto his desk and disabled the Muzak—but the company turned it on again. Finally, he decided to branch out. At the time, fellow SLU alum Jeff Fister had recently acquired the West End Word, so Isaacson called to ask about writing theater reviews. When Fister told him the budget was limited, Isaacson replied, “Don’t worry about it. I just want the tickets.”
In the years to come, he would hold Tony parties at his apartment—but he never dreamed he’d win one. He lived on bagels and Domino’s and flew to New York whenever he could, seeing two or three musicals a day for a week, but he never dreamed he’d produce one.
Just a year after Isaacson joined McDonnell Douglas, the company began laying off employees—a process Isaacson had witnessed his father endure years earlier. “It solidified a sense of drive I’d always had,” he says.
It was time for his next move.
ACT II
In 1987, the Rev. Lawrence Biondi arrived at SLU’s campus.
A native of Chicago, the university’s new president had ambitious plans for the university and midtown. “You could see this energy, like, ‘Who’s on board?’” recalls Isaacson, who found a job in his alma mater’s publications office in 1989. “Up until that point, there was really no strategic thinking going on.” Isaacson soon transferred to SLU’s media-relations department, where he worked for two years, smoothing a few crises alongside Biondi and the trustees.
One day, several years into the job, he bumped into Biondi, who offered to buy him lunch.
When Biondi asked how things were going, Isaacson froze. He’d recently received an offer from a local PR firm and was debating whether to take it.
“Oh no,” Biondi said. “You’re not leaving, are you?” After Isaacson hesitantly revealed that he’d received the offer, Biondi asked, “If you could do anything, what would you do at the university?”
“Well, your office is a mess, your letters are terrible, your speeches are not good…” Isaacson blurted.
Biondi stared at him. “Why don’t I know this?”
“You’re the president,” said Isaacson. “No one’s going to tell you the truth.”
Several months later, Isaacson joined the president’s office as
Biondi’s assistant. Somebody less blunt or savvy would have tried to “handle” the man and only incurred his wrath, but Isaacson managed to polish Biondi’s communication without dulling it. “He was setting a new bar, which he was just destroyed for in his early years,” Isaacson recalls. “You look at some of those early statements he made about what the university could be, and he was trashed for it. Now, people go, ‘OK.’”
What was the most important thing Isaacson learned from Biondi?
“Really having brass balls,” he says. “Saying, ‘No, this is what I believe we can do,’ and understanding that you can’t look at it at any one point, but you have to look at it over an arc.”
Working alongside Biondi, he also learned to motivate a team of complex individuals. “People do respond to passion,” Isaacson says, “but you also have to bring them into it.”
In 1995, Isaacson was suddenly shifted to a new position—vice president of institutional advancement—which he quickly grew to disdain. He stayed at the college long enough to finish his MBA, before making a move that everybody told him was “nuts.”
One day, he called David Fay, then president of Fox Associates, and invited him to lunch. (At the time, in addition to freelancing for the West End Word, Isaacson had been writing theater reviews for the Riverfront Times and had developed contacts in the local theater scene.)
“I’ll cut you a deal,” he told Fay over lunch. “I’ll work for you for free throughout the summer. Give me a project and get a sense of whether you like what you see, and if it works, you’ll hire me in August.”
“He’s very direct in what he wants and how he goes about doing business,” Fay told the St. Louis Business Journal years later, recalling that lunch. “I asked him, ‘When you graduate, what do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to work for you.’ He struck me as the kind of guy we ought to take a gamble on.”
Isaacson spent the summer researching the commercial viability of productions for Fox Associates. He’d see shows in New York and Chicago, drive to Actors Theatre of Louisville, and report back to Fay. At the end of the summer, the Fox created a full-time position for him.
Richard Baker, who’s now president of Fox Associates, recalls when Fay first told him about Isaacson. “He said, ‘Here’s a guy I hired, and I don’t know what he’s going to do yet,’” recalls Baker. “Apparently, he’d talked himself into a job.”
***
The first Broadway show Isaacson produced was Jekyll & Hyde.
“That was wild,” he recalls. “It was like everything you imagined, and suddenly you were in the room—I was terrified.” He followed the lead of managing partner Scott Zeiger, taking it as a “master class on how to run a Broadway show.” The show ran for 3½ years.
The same year he produced Jekyll & Hyde, in 1996, Isaacson saw a half-hour production of Thoroughly Modern Millie at a festival in New York. The musical opened with Millie Dillmount arriving in New York from Salina, Kan., standing with her suitcases and staring out into oblivion, and essentially saying, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going to get there.” It was an idea that immediately connected with Isaacson. “It had style and a real heart to it,” he says, “which is something that really matters to me.”
When Isaacson returned to St. Louis from New York, Fay asked whether he saw any shows worth producing. “Yeah, Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Isaacson said. Granted, it was risky: At the time, Rent and Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk were dominating Broadway, and many critics believed musicals had changed forever. Nonetheless, Fay encouraged Isaacson to take the lead—a dramatic shift from the multiple layers of approval at SLU. “The Fox was completely entrepreneurial,” says Isaacson. “It was like, ‘Here’s the ball. Go for it.’”
Fay might have initially thought Isaacson could help with fundraising, given his SLU connections, but Isaacson quickly branched into the theatrical side. “As opportunities arose, he just grasped them,” recalls Baker.
Isaacson was quick to volunteer when the theater was short on ushers. “He liked that kind of thing, because it put him in touch with the audience,” recalls former colleague Jana Scharnhorst. He also began booking shows at the theater and producing other musicals: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Along the way, Isaacson met others in the industry. “Theater’s really about relationships and honoring them,” he says. And those relationships would prove crucial in the years to come: He met Chenoweth, director Michael Mayer, director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell, and composer Andrew Lippa while working on Charlie Brown—which closed in New York after only three months. “The hardest part is picking yourself up and believing in yourself and moving on,” he says.
All along, Isaacson continued to work on Millie. “A new musical takes five to seven years,” explains Isaacson, who’s compared the creative process to designing a car or an iPod. Decades ago, he says, musicals ran for six months and were meant to be expendable. Today, the requirements have changed, demanding far more in terms of the set, music, and story.
For Millie, the duo assembled an impressive creative team. Writer Dick Scanlan took the script of a “horrible movie” (Isaacson’s words) and brought out the core of the story. Michael Mayer, whom Isaacson had met while writing for the RFT years earlier, agreed to direct. And Jeanine Tesori composed the music.
“Mike works at a cellular level,” says Tesori, who lives in New York and later worked with Isaacson on Caroline, or Change. “When he’s with a show, he’s parenting that show with the fierceness of a dad on the playground—he’s fully involved and fully present. He understands when to swoop in and when to back off. He has great taste and great timing, and he remains friends with all of his creative teams.”
It’s not easy, juggling the creative and financial demands in the world of Broadway—not to mention the personalities. “Talented people don’t always understand their own talent; it can overwhelm them, so you have to work to give them faith in their own work and confidence and support,” says Isaacson. “In this business, you have to understand that different people require different things, and I’m very comfortable with that.”
The company began auditions for Millie in 2000—just as Fay left Fox Associates over a reported contract dispute. If the show was to go on, Isaacson had to work closely with fellow producer Kristin Caskey, who was based in Chicago at the time. It was “a shotgun professional marriage,” Isaacson once said. “And the best arranged marriage I’m ever going to have,” Caskey adds.
“What I love about Mike is that he’s very funny, so even when there’s great tension, he can just come out with a one-liner that completely breaks the tension in a second,” she says. “Within that intensity, there’s always compassion. He’s incredibly articulate and will not shy from any dialogue, which makes you feel safe, because you know the communication will always be there.”
During rehearsals of the pre-Broadway run in San Diego, the actress who was initially cast to play the lead role was replaced with Sutton Foster, a relative newcomer whom Time magazine would later describe as “a big reason the show is just about the cutest thing to hit Broadway since Annie’s dimples.”
Thoroughly Modern Millie opened on Broadway in April 2002. Two months later, Isaacson sat inside Radio City Music Hall at the Tonys as the musical’s name was called over and over: Rob Ashford for choreography, Foster for lead actress… Finally, as Isaacson squeezed hands with Caskey, he heard its name again, this time for Best Musical. “I will never forget Mike jumping up and down when they announced the show had won,” says Caskey.
Afterward, at the postshow party, there was a giant Tony Award made of cheese, Tesori recalls. “I still have a picture of Mike standing next to that award,” she says with a laugh. “I think there’s a metaphor there… I’m not sure whether it’s that success is fleeting or what.”
Beyond the critical success, though, Isaacson realizes that a musical has a far more lasting impact. “For him, it’s very much that they’re like children,” says Caskey. “When you create a show, you’re getting married to the show, you’re living through it, and then you raise it and it goes off on its own, but you’re always connected to it for the rest of your life. In many respects, it’s part of his legacy.”
Isaacson produced other acclaimed shows in the years to come—Caroline, or Change and ’night, Mother—but it wasn’t until 2007 that he had another major commercial success: Legally Blonde, based on the 2001 movie starring Reese Witherspoon. When fellow producer Hal Luftig suggested it as a musical, Isaacson’s initial reaction was “Ew,” he once told Universitas, SLU’s alumni magazine. “I remembered the film as kind of pleasant, and funny, but I was not enthused.” Insisting he watch it again, Luftig mailed Isaacson a DVD. When he finally sat down to see it and began to pay attention to the story of Elle Woods, a sorority queen who follows her ex to Harvard Law School—only to have her heart broken, then shatter others’ stereotypes—he paused the film and called Luftig to admit it had potential.
“I loved that it was counter to all of these images that most young women are receiving about what they’re supposed to be, and I have three young nieces, so that mattered to me,” says Isaacson. “The show, unlike the film, really begins to examine the idea that life is the sum of the gifts that we give each other.”
And Legally Blonde was a gift that kept on giving, reportedly grossing more than $1 million a week at points and going on to tour the country for nearly three years. In the theatrical world, it was the equivalent of hitting the jackpot. “It’s like going to a casino in terms of the odds,” he says. “One out of seven shows returns its money on Broadway.”
In January 2010, Isaacson was in London, overseeing a production of Legally Blonde, when he found his next project. Following the advice of a friend, he traveled to Donmar Warehouse on his day off to see Red, a one-act play about the life of Russian-American painter Mark Rothko. Immediately after the curtain dropped, Isaacson rushed to the lobby and called Caskey. “We’ve got to do this,” he said. “We’ve got to bring this to Broadway.” Within minutes, they were committed to Red.
“It totally comes down to gut,” he explains. Beyond believing in the artists and their vision, “It’s the core material—generally, for me, there has to be an idea in it that I can relate to.” When the play opened in New York that April, it struck a nerve with many others as well—that summer, it received six Tony Awards, including Best Play, an award that Isaacson stood onstage to accept. “I have almost no memory of it,” he told the Post-Dispatch the next day. “But you are aware of all the people around you, the people you worked so hard with. When you’re up there, you’re all thinking the same thing: ‘Can you believe this?’”
Even today, it’s hard for him to believe: “I had watched the Tony Awards for years, but I never thought it would be possible. Never.”
What came next once seemed equally impossible.
ACT III
“Ironically, this is the first job I’ve actually sort of interviewed for,” says Isaacson, sitting inside his office in Forest Park, located just behind a stage that 11,000 people gather nightly to see during the summer. “Everything else has been a job I created, except McDonnell Douglas.”
In a way, the interview had started informally over breakfast several years earlier, when Muny president Denny Reagan mentioned that longtime executive producer Paul Blake might be retiring soon. Recalls Isaacson, “One day, Denny called me and said, ‘It looks like we have an end date for Paul’s retirement. Will you help me with the search?’”
Isaacson asked what The Muny was looking for. “If it’s exactly what Paul did in the manner that Paul did it, it’s probably a list of five or six guys, and I can give that to you right now,” Isaacson said. “If you’re looking for something different, what is that?” When Reagan indicated it was the latter, the two began a conversation about defining that something. The time frame changed when Blake extended his contract, but Reagan and Isaacson would occasionally discuss the future direction of The Muny—until it became apparent that Isaacson might be the right fit for the job.
“One day, we were sitting there, and it sort of hit us both,” says Reagan. “We thought about it a little bit, and what really attracted me was that he was a St. Louisan; St. Louis has never had an executive producer who lives in St. Louis.”
That also meant figuring out how the job would change. Eventually, Isaacson agreed to work full-time for The Muny while remaining part-time with Fox Associates. Isaacson also planned to shadow Blake for a summer, to study the mechanics of the outdoor theater. “I thought it was incredibly important, because Paul had fine-tuned the way he does things around here after 22 years,” says Reagan. “It was important for him to take a look at that system and see what he wants to change.”
Ironically, the first show of the 2011 season was Legally Blonde—ideal because Isaacson knew the creative team and could hear its perspectives. He watched Blake orchestrate the shows each week, learning the nuts and bolts of the theater’s production cycle, a nine-week half-marathon of sorts in which he often worked from 9 a.m. to midnight or longer when transitioning between shows. “It does become sort of like a factory,” Isaacson says, “where the donuts need to be made at a certain point.”
He also observed Blake’s approach. “Paul had the theory that he was the impresario, and he ultimately made every aesthetic and business decision in the show,” says Isaacson. “That’s not what I see as the role of the producer… My hope is that ultimately, when you have seven different shows, you have seven different voices onstage.”
When the 2011 season ended in mid-August, Isaacson began making changes. He hired a full-time production manager. For three of this summer’s shows, he plans to use a 48-foot turntable that was once rarely used to transition between scenes. And whereas Blake typically didn’t select his directors until spring, Isaacson had finalized this summer’s lineup by mid-December. “The man is so organized that it’s kind of fun watching it all come together,” Reagan says. “He thinks about every single aspect of the production—in some cases, it’s the old way, in some cases the new way.”
“I would imagine that his pace is slightly faster than they’re used to,” says Baker. “He’s intense, and his intensity can sometimes be taken as something else, but I think he’s grown over the years to where that would never be a problem at The Muny. I think it’s good for any organization to occasionally get some new blood in there and challenge you and say, ‘Just because we’ve done it this way forever, why?’”
The 2012 lineup is a clear indication of Isaacson’s approach. “It keeps the traditional, but also shows there’s a new sheriff in town,” notes Baker. The RFT has already pronounced that sheriff “the anti–Paul Blake.”
Using a combination of instinct, subscriber surveys, and past shows, Isaacson created a schedule that he hopes will feel fresh, but “right in the wheelhouse of what The Muny is.” The lineup—running across the wall behind his desk—includes new productions like Aladdin, Dreamgirls, and a reimagined take on The Pirates of Penzance, as well as shows that are more familiar to Muny audiences, like Chicago, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and The King and I. And leading off the season? Thoroughly Modern Millie.
“Originally, we had it in a different slot, and Denny said, ‘You need to lead with Millie,’” says Isaacson. “‘It’s good leading with a show that’s new but old-fashioned, and it will tell the audience who you are.’”
Given Isaacson’s background, one of the easiest parts of his job has been lining up performers and directors. Gary Griffin, who collaborated with Isaacson to make his Broadway debut with The Color Purple in 2005, will direct Aladdin. For The King and I, Isaacson’s working with the team that created sets for the Rep’s critically acclaimed Sunday in the Park With George. And as the RFT’s Dennis Brown has noted, “I would not be surprised to see Sutton Foster reprise her star-making turn in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
Isaacson says The Muny’s atmosphere is what makes the place so magnetic for performers. “One thing that’s amazing about this audience is that they approach a show with a real open heart, and for a performer, that’s incredible,” he says. “When you really put it out on the stage, this audience gives it to you, and that’s unlike anything—and that’s not hyperbole—in the world.” Last summer, he encouraged the actors to come early and watch the audience line up a half hour early for the free seats. Afterward, he reminded them, “Don’t you dare think about slacking on that stage.”
He’s quick to talk about the rich history of a concept that he admits is absolutely far-fetched. “If you look at it logically, it makes no sense: Outdoor theater. Summer. Seven shows in nine weeks. Really? What are we smoking? And yet, because it is so rare and grand and unusual and crazy, it’s completely special, and the audience knows that.”
He describes what it was like to sit in the audience last summer, on a night when “it was just nothing but bliss. The show was great, the audience was great, everything was there, and everybody knew how lucky we were to have this, and I was like, ‘OK, don’t screw this up.’”
Yet he’s also careful to not become too sentimental—or play it too safe. “The great thing about The Muny is that it’s truly beloved,” Isaacson says. “The challenge is to keep that love present, not nostalgic, and to make the work really, really exciting that night onstage.”
He compares it to what he learned from watching Biondi so many years ago. “When you have an institution, you have to know and honor the history, but you figure out, ‘What are we now, and what do we need to be to ensure we’re still here [in the future]?’
“To me, our productions need to be world-class within five years—there’s no question that I want to put the accelerator down,” he adds. “I’m not sure how I’m going to get there, but I want people to eventually be like, ‘If you’re going to The Muny, don’t even care what the show is, because it’s that great.’”
Why does The Muny matter so much to him?
“I think we understand something about ourselves when we come here,” he says.
And what’s that?
He pauses, takes a long sip of coffee.
“That we’re all connected. We’re all outdoors, and there are so many of us. There’s a fascinating dynamic of a Muny show: It starts at 8:15, and the sun’s not down until 8:45ish, so everybody goes into the cave together. Everybody’s subdued during the first half hour of the show, but eventually, when we’re all in the darkness together, we’re aware of each other, but we’re in that place where we can really experience the show. That’s really powerful.”
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to reflect that theater director/producer Jerry Mitchell did not direct A Chorus Line in Chicago in 1977; Mitchell coincidentally saw the same production as Isaacson, whom he later worked with on Legally Blonde. The original story also indicated that Isaacson is overseeing a touring production of Mad Hot Ballroom; that musical is currently in development. We sincerely regret the errors.
