This is a time of year that Mike Isaacson doesn’t need any distractions. The Muny, the beloved St. Louis theater where he is artistic director and executive producer, kicks off its season next week with the premiere of Bring It On, followed in rapid succession by six other shows. All musicals of Broadway caliber, each has singing, dancing, sizable casts, and elaborate sets—yet each has basically 11 days to come together, days that overlap with other shows opening and closing and vying for space on The Muny’s campus in Forest Park. It’s a lot.
But when The Muny found out it was getting this year’s Regional Theatre Tony Award, there was no question Isaacson had to be there for the award ceremony on June 8, never mind the month’s madness. He flew out Saturday with an early morning flight back to St. Louis on Monday—planning, he joked, to head straight to the airport from the afterparties.
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For Isaacson, the award wasn’t just confirmation of all the work he’s put into keeping The Muny—America’s oldest and largest outdoor musical theater—relevant. It’s also a great reminder of what the place means to St. Louis, and beyond. That includes, as The New York Times detailed in a glowing piece last weekend, not just visitors but also the Broadway stars who routinely spend their summers here, performing in it.
“The thing that really I did not anticipate after the announcement was the literally thousands of people around the country, some around the world, who feel connected to this moment,” he says. “This theater has affected so many lives—-people in the seats, people who’ve worked here, and they all feel a part of this, which actually makes me the proudest. It is theirs, it is ours. It is a big idea that has involved so many and that’s really satisfying.”
As Isaacson explains in a new episode of The 314 Podcast, The Muny is that rare theater that doesn’t take any government funding. It’s not part of St. Louis’ Zoo Museum District (which benefits from the city’s earnings tax) and doesn’t have any grants from the National Endowment for the Arts or Missouri Humanities Council. “It’s a huge anomaly,” he acknowledges.
What it does have is vast public support, dating back to its early years, when locals dubbed “Muny guarantors” put up the money for each show. “They’d do the ticket sales, and if there was a deficit, they divided it up between all The Muny guarantors and people wrote a check,” he explains—something that he sees reflected even today in “the attachment” people feel to the place, “the sense of, ‘This is our theater.’” You can see it in The Muny’s first big capital campaign, a $100-million effort launched in 2018 and fully funded by 2022. People are still willing to open their pocketbooks for an institution they treasure.
That they not just treasure it, but routinely show up every summer, is a credit to Isaacson, who came to The Muny in 2012 after 15 years at the Fox Theatre. He has worked tirelessly to keep the shows fresh and make sure The Muny is challenging its audiences to try newer fare in addition to the old chestnuts—a push that has brought the kind of young, diverse audience that most theaters could only dream of. That he’s managed to do it even while keeping older audiences happy is a credit to his ability to find the broad middle even in a rapidly changing artistic universe.
Isaacson recalls spending his first few years pushing The Muny to be better. At that time, he recalls, The Muny had fallen back on too many old classics, and things felt a little tired. That’s even as Broadway shows had stepped up their touring productions.
“People were seeing more shows, and everything was bigger and better,” he recalls. “So we needed to catch up. That was my opinion and what I hoped to do.” He adds, “To be honest, I had no idea whether I could do it.” But when they did, St. Louis was right there with them: “ I could tell right away the audience was like, Oh, let’s go. You could just feel this energy.” The Muny never looked back.
Isaacson shared more about his journey on the podcast, including his own unique journey to working in the theater (believe it or not, he started as a freelance theater critic) and why he has remained committed to St. Louis, even as he has earned the kind of national kudos that would make it easy to move to a bigger city.
He says he came to St. Louis for college at Saint Louis University after a peripatetic childhood and found what he’d been looking for. “The city gave me my life; my deepest friendships; the love of my life, my husband; everything,” he says.
Isaacson is a firm believer that St. Louis natives aren’t always aware of how good they have it. “I think it’s easier to love St. Louis if you’re not from here,” he says. But even as the region struggles with its identity and its future, he feels hopeful. ”If we can change the Muny, which is the ocean liner metaphor for St. Louis, the rest is possible,” he says.
He adds, “ There is a kindness and an ethic to the people here, and I cherish that. And it is a culture we have backstage. And I feel like that is singular to what happens here. And I’m not very articulate about it, but for the most part, I see people really endeavoring with goodwill. Mistakes are made, maybe frequently—but no one’s giving up.”
Hear Fenske’s interview with Isaacson on The 314 Podcast.
