If you go to the Kennedy Center this week, you can see a performance of tick, tick…BOOM! directed by Neil Patrick Harris, with performances from Tony-winner Brandon Uranowitz and other Broadway veterans. You can thank Jeffrey Finn that this level of theatrical star power is on display in DC pretty frequently.
Finn is a Tony-winning Broadway producer and the Kennedy Center’s vice president/executive producer of theater. As such, he has quite a few big names in his orbit. He makes use of many of those connections while working on a series called “Broadway Center Stage.” Every year, Broadway Center Stage hosts new revivals of Broadway musicals at the Kennedy Center, using teams full of Broadway talent. In the five seasons since its inception, the series has put spins on classics like The Music Man and Guys and Dolls and breathed new life into works like Chess and The Who’s Tommy.
Center Stage began as a “concert” series with pared-down staging and a focus on musical performance, but the series has recently leveled up its production values. For example, while every show has featured an onstage orchestra, recent ones have found unique ways to blend the musicians into the setting—atop the castle in Spamalot, for example, or among the turn-of-the-century shopfronts of The Music Man’s River City. “I feel like I have my dream job,” Finn says. “I love the idea of creating something on stage that has never been there before.”
Finn’s decades-long relationship with the Kennedy Center has always involved reinvigorating classic works. While living in New York in 1984, he was tapped by the DC arts center to produce a cabaret series based on the Great American Songbook. This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and Finn went on to produce works for the arts complex semi-regularly, including a revival of the play On Golden Pond, which eventually became his first Broadway production. “I used to kid that I would only leave New York City if it meant I would be taking over theater productions at the Kennedy Center,” Finn says.
This prophetic joke eventually came true. In 2016 the Kennedy Center offered him a newly created position and gave him the reins to commission and present new theatrical works, which led to the creation of Broadway Center Stage in 2018. “I choose titles by what I would want to buy a ticket to go see,” Finn says. “That’s my barometer.”
This curation philosophy has proven rather successful. Just last year, the Kennedy Center’s revival of the Monty Python comedy-musical Spamalot was transferred to Broadway, making it the first Center Stage production to do so. “We felt like we had captured a bit of lightning in a bottle,” Finn says. “When I secured the rights, I was told ‘You can do this in DC, but you cannot bring the show to Broadway,’ but then it organically revealed itself as something we needed to share further.”
Each Center Stage show goes through the same rigorous schedule: the cast has just two weeks of rehearsal in New York and three or four days in DC before taking the stage for 11 performances in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater.
Sunday was the premiere of tick, tick…BOOM!, a reimagining of the debut musical from Jonathan Larson, who went on to create Rent. It’s a good reflection of the way Finn approaches each of his revivals. Working closely with the Larson estate, Finn maintained the original, intimate story while also adding new features like a larger cast and new audiovisual elements. “It’s obviously a revival, but at the same time, it’s a brand new production that nobody’s seen before,” Finn says.
The rest of the 2024 season is set to feature similarly fresh takes on existing scripts, with a production of Bye Bye Birdie from Tony-winning director Marc Bruni and a revival of the musical Nine, based on the 1963 Fellini classic 8½.
Even as Finn puts together Broadway-caliber productions with talent from around the country, he remains focused on local theatergoers. “I’m always thinking about DC audiences first when I work on Broadway Center Stage. It’s an incredible, unique opportunity, and I would never sacrifice the level of quality we bring to productions in this city,” he says, “because DC theater fans are very savvy.”
The Broadway Center Stage production of tick, tick…BOOM! runs through February 4.
