'Theater Kid' is a memoir from the producer of 'Rent,' 'Avenue Q,' and 'Hamilton'
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The Tony Awards are coming up this Sunday. And if you are at all a fan of Broadway musical theater, heck, even if you aren't, you're probably familiar with the work of today's guest. Jeffrey Seller is the producer behind Rent, Avenue Q, Hamilton, and more. He's a giant in the field. And his new book, Theater Kid, is about how he worked his way up in the scene.

Because he wasn't born and raised in New York with the money to experience all the culture the city has to offer. Now, he grew up outside of Detroit in a lower-income family. His dad served warrants for a living. But Seller tells NPR's Scott Simon that his dad briefly took on another job, one that showed him both the power and the cost of making someone smile with your art. That's ahead.

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Jeffrey Seller is the producer of Rant, Avenue Q, In the Heights, and a little modest worldwide success of which you may have heard called Hamilton. He grew up in a suburb of Detroit called Cardboard Village in a home with parents who could be quarrelsome and found another kind of home on stage from an early age. Let's ask him to read a section from his new memoir where he was a kid appearing in a community theater musical. On the final weekend of the play,

I sit in the men's dressing room looking into a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. My blue eyes are illuminated by the bright lights. They are luminescent and powerful. I understand why sometimes I'm mistaken for a girl. I've had family members tell me I'm handsome, and aunts call me gorgeous. But I don't usually feel handsome or gorgeous.

At school, people reserve those adjectives for more athletic boys like my friends Bruce and Jay. Not me. However, in front of this mirror, I see me. I am ready to go on stage and bring my character to life. I feel good looking.

I feel like a winner. Jeffrey Seller's new memoir, Theater Kid. And Jeff Seller joins us now from our studios in New York. Jeffrey, thanks so much for being with us. It is my pleasure to be with you today, Scott. A teacher hung that tag on you, didn't she? Mrs. Novatsky, fifth grade. Did you, when you're growing up in suburban Detroit, feel that you didn't fit or that you didn't want to fit?

I always felt like an outsider. I was an adopted kid. I was a gay kid. I was a Jewish kid. And maybe most of all, I was a poor kid. And it was embarrassing. You used to accompany your father at night when he—boy, this sounds colorful, easy for me to say—he drove around serving warrants to people. Tell us about that, and what do you think you saw in people then? I saw people who couldn't pay their monthly bills.

I saw people who were getting divorced. I saw people who were getting kicked out of their houses.

But I also saw that my dad handled it with respect, without judgment. He was just doing his job as courteously as he could. And, of course, he was a 6'3", 250-pound giant from my eyes as a twig-like 10-year-old boy. Your father also had a brief career as a clown, didn't he? Oh, God, Scott. Yeah.

One of the most surprising things ever was when my father said, I'm going to join the Shriners so I can be in the Shrine Circus and be a clown.

and make children happy. He loved it. Your mother didn't think it was such a great idea, did she? Well, imagine what it's like where we can barely pay the bills to begin with, and instead of serving papers, he spends the basically three full weeks at the Detroit State Fairgrounds being a clown, like, in four shows a day, and spending money on his clown costume instead of the clothes we need to get through the winter.

Looking back on it now, what do you see in that period of time and your father? Well, it was the manifestation of everything that was loving and wonderful and philanthropic about my father because he loved making all those balloons for children in hospitals and taking photos with these kids with those smiles on their faces, which was so beautiful and beautiful.

He was impoverishing our family by doing it. Scott, I'm going to cry. I'm sorry. It's just like, ah. One of the things I love about the book is that you spend most of the time telling us how you get to success in New York. This is not a backstage dish dish. Go to the University of Michigan, come to New York, start working for booking agents. One day, you see a rock monologue by Jonathan Larson called Boho Days. Yeah.

But hey, what a way to spend a day. Hey, what a way to spend a day. A line in a song, what a way to spend a day.

What did that set off in you? It's setting it off right now. I'm getting chills all through my body from that notion of what a way to spend the day because Jonathan was a 30-year-old composer of rock musicals that nobody wanted to produce. And this song was all about his love of musicals. Three o'clock went to rehearse in the gym. Mike played duck.

Who didn't sing fine with him? We sang, got a rocket in your pocket and the Jets are gonna have their day. I watched this at age 25 and I said, how does this guy know my life story? I've never met him before. So I wrote him a letter the next day saying, I want to produce your musicals. I'll just say the stories of all your prize winning musicals, including Hamilton are in here.

You worked with Lin-Manuel Miranda on In the Heights. What spark leapt in your minds that made you both say, ah, a musical about the life of the first secretary of the U.S. Treasury. That's got winner written all over it. Or you could even say the first bureaucrat. Right. He created the American bureaucracy. Right.

When I am confronted with a new musical, a new idea, I am always looking for two things. One, I want to be surprised. Two, I want my ears to be pricked in a whole new way. I want to go, oh my God, I've never heard that kind of sound on Broadway before.

And the first time I heard Lynn perform a rap for In the Heights, the hair on my arm stood up. Lights up on Washington Heights, up at the break of day, I wake up and I got this little punk I gotta chase away. Pop the grade, get the crack of dawn, sing while I wipe down the awning. Hey y'all, good morning. I thought, I've never heard that before.

And what I like to say is that if in the Heights was this warm, enveloping Caribbean water rap, then Hamilton was like a lightning bolt. Pow! It absolutely compelled you from the beginning all the way to the end. What can theater unlock in all of us? Hope. A sense of belonging.

A sense like, oh, I can fit in there. I saw so many kids who experienced Rent as a safe haven where they went, oh, I can have a made family, a chosen family like this. I just want to be with those characters. And they got to be with them every time they listened to the album. And they got to be with them every time they came to see the show.

The world's a better place for Rent. The world's a better place for Jonathan Larson. The world is a better place for Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Jeffrey Seller, his new memoir, Theater Kid. Thank you so much for being with us. What a pleasure to talk, Scott. Thank you.

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