“Get Them While They’re Young”: MTI’s Broadway JR. Inspires Next Generation

THE LITTLE MERMAID JR at the Junior Theatre Festival. Photo by Marcus Woollen.

If you attend a Broadway show this August in New York we hope you hold onto your Playbills! In the August editions of Playbill, MTI’s Chairman and CEO Freddie Gershon is highlighted for his creation of the MTI Broadway Junior Collection in a wonderful article written by Adam Hetrick. Here’s an excerpt:

In the mid 1990s, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim — two giants of the American theatre who, among many other credits, collaborated on West Side Story and Gypsy — posed a question to Freddie Gershon, the CEO of Music Theatre International: Where was the next generation of theatregoers going to come from?

The musical’s decline from pop culture was apparent. “How could you miss it?” says Sondheim even now. “It’s been going on for 40 years.” The absence hadn’t gone unnoticed by Gershon, either. “When I grew up, Broadway musicals were on the radio,” he recalls. “The Billboard hits of the 1950s and ’60s were the shows of Broadway. The Top Ten songs were ‘Stranger in Paradise,’ ‘Steam Heat’ and ‘You Gotta Have Heart.’ That was the music of America. You can’t hear it now.” With that in mind, Gershon came up with the answer: bring Broadway to the next generation…