Sam Rudy, Press Agent for the Musical Hamilton, Shares Insights into Promoting Broadway Productions

Broadway press agent Sam Rudy began talking with the East Stroudsburg University students gathered in the Smith-McFarland Theatre of the university’s Fine & Performing Arts Center by warning them he might have to answer his phone.

“I was looking forward to a nice, relaxed day,” he said. “But it might be CNN calling.”

One of the productions Rudy represents is the Broadway musical Hamilton. The night before he arrived at ESU, the cast of the show  staged a memorial tribute to the recently deceased rock star, Prince.  The videos of the performance went viral on social media.

“Hamilton is a global phenomenon,” Rudy said. “The reach of the musical is so tremendous, especially to young people who are obsessed with it in a healthy way.”

Rudy learned first-hand about the power of the show when he talked at a high school in Pasa Robles, Calif. The students greeted him with the opening rap from the musical.

“This is happening 3,000 miles away from Broadway,” he said. “This is the power of art—to effect change, to make people think about issues and Hamilton does that.”

Rudy discussed a grant-funded partnership between New York City schools and the musical that is helping to ”engage young people on an important subject—American history—through making them see the nation being born right on stage.”

Prior to the performance, the students spend six to eight weeks studying a mixture of American history and theatre and then create an original, three-minute rap based on a selection from the cast album. One student from each school is then chosen to perform his or her rap on the Broadway stage after seeing the musical.

“With very little previous exposure to theatre, what these kids created was astonishing,” Rudy said, talking about the first school matinee on April 12.

Not all of the productions that Rudy handled in his 35-year career were so easy to publicize. Edward Albee’s drama, The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, was particularly difficult. The play–which features a family in crisis because the husband, a middle-aged architect, who has fallen in love with a goat–was written to question the limits of a liberal society.

“Edward Albee believes that theatre has a responsibility to send audiences home in a way that is different from the state in which they had arrived,” Rudy said. “The play’s subject matter, and the fact that it opened “cold” on Broadway—without out-of-town or workshop productions, and a poor response from initial reviews, made the show difficult to sell.”

A Penn State graduate in journalism who grew up on a central Pennsylvania dairy farm, Rudy confessed that sometimes he has to remind himself of how successful his career has been.

Hamilton is the latest show that Rudy represented to win the Pulitzer Prize. He also was press agent for two other Pulitzer-winning dramas, Albee’s Three Tall Women and How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel.

During his 25 years as press representative for the Vineyard Theater, an off-Broadway company, Rudy publicized the Tony-award winning musical, Avenue Q, which moved to Broadway and became one of its longest-running musicals and then reopened off-Broadway where it is currently running.

For Avenue Q, with both people and puppets in its cast, Rudy found that people were more interested in the puppets than the actors. He found press opportunities for the puppets to help publicize the production.

Rudy took many questions from more than 50 students at the two-hour session sponsored by ESU’s Department of Theatre with the support of an ‘entrepreneurship across the colleges’ grant.  “Every work of art is different and people respond to a variety of things,” he said.

During a short break in the discussion, ESU musical theatre majors Sam Kashefska, a freshman from Scotrun, Pa. and Cherval Royster, a sophomore from Philadelphia, Pa., performed the opening number from Hamilton delighting both Rudy and their fellow students.

In advising students who are planning theatrical careers, Rudy noted that “great theatre happens everywhere.” There is a mountain of opportunities in commercial theatre and the landscape is constantly changing.

“Theatre doesn’t have a corporate structure,” he added, “It’s a small community, you need to get your foot in the door so when an opportunity comes, you can go for it. You don’t know what the next phone call will bring.”

CNN didn’t call while Rudy was talking, but the Associated Press did.  He checked his message, and then continued to talk with the students. “I’ll get back to them later,” he said, to the cheers of the audience.

One Response to “Sam Rudy, Press Agent for the Musical Hamilton, Shares Insights into Promoting Broadway Productions”

---

Search

Recent Posts