Dale Franzen: Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves

“I would just say this,” Tony Award-winning producer Dale Franzen told me last week. “I’m not interested in excluding gender. I’m interested in including gender. I want the table to get bigger. It’s not OK that 23 percent of Broadway producers are women. It doesn’t make for great art and it doesn’t make for equal representation. And we need to change that. So I’m very proud that this show is part of changing that.”

The show to which she is referring is Hadestown, the musical that won 8 Tony Awards including Best Musical. It was Franzen’s first credit as a producer of a Broadway show. It was also the first musical for composer, lyricist and book writer Anaïs Mitchell – who won the Tony Award for Best Original Score. Lastly it was the first Tony Award for director Rachel Chavkin. She had directed one show previously on Broadway, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, which also earned her a Tony nomination for her work.

Hadestown is still playing at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. The national tour has already started and is now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles through May 29th. The immediate stops after LA are San Diego, San Francisco, Spokane and Seattle.

There aren’t a huge number of musicals where the book, music and lyrics are all written by one person. The Music Man, currently playing on Broadway, is one of the few. But Franzen felt the only appropriate choice artistically was to give Mitchell, whose CD of the songs got into Franzen’s hands leading to this show, the first crack at doing it all.

“I think the really deep part of Anaïs’s work is poetry,” Franzen told me. “Her poetry is very unusual, not to mention the fact that the whole show rhymes. When we started thinking about developing it into a more traditional Broadway musical, which was not our original intent, we talked about should we bring in another writer? What should we do? We loved her poetry so much that we were very worried that somebody else would come in and diminish that. For us a big part of the storytelling was how she was telling the story.

“Anaïs is a genius. I don’t say that lightly. The whole structure of Broadway or even a folk opera was not her world. She’s a folk singer who is used to singing a ballad with a band or a guitar. So she had a huge learning curve, but she’s very smart. This show was about the art and the story. We didn’t even want to go to Broadway. That wasn’t even part of the vision when we started this off.”

Franzen and Mitchell had discussed some kind of “funky, found space kind of event,” she revealed. But success begats other opportunities. The enormous popularity of Hamilton allowed other projects that might not seem like obvious choices to get a chance. Hadestown was just one such musical.

“I think the most exciting part of the journey was expanding the table. We had many people who made their Broadway debuts in this show creatively and on stage, including myself. I think it speaks to how Broadway needs to grow and change to grasp what’s happening in the world.”

Franzen is involved as a co-producer with two shows that are part of this Broadway season: the beautiful revival of Caroline, Or Change and a revival of for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. She also has her hand in a third show that just opened to rave reviews in England, Prima Facie starring Jodie Comer. What do they have in common besides Franzen? Jeanine Tesori wrote the music for first show; the late Ntozake Shange wrote the second (which is directed by Camille A. Brown who co-directed and choreographed Fire Shut Up in My Bones) and Prima Facie was written by Suzi Miller.

“I would say I am much more leaning into stories like that that I feel have such a harder time of being told. Let’s be honest, men aren’t telling those stories. They keep telling the stories that they want to see and I think that women have been shortchanged. I want to be part of changing that. That is not to say that if I’m sent something that I feel is really extraordinary and it happens to be written by a man or it’s a male story that doesn’t mean I won’t get involved. But I would say right now what I feel drawn to moving our stories forward.”

The choices Franzen has made, so far, have not been safe bets. Hadestown was certainly a big gamble. Does that mean Franzen will continue to take big risks and avoid the tried and true? Even she doesn’t know what the future will hold, but she is certain about her present.

“I shouldn’t say this because who knows, but I sincerely doubt you will see me going down the tried and true. There’s plenty of people who will do that. I recently said to my investors on for colored girls that I think of them as art investors, not commercial theater investors. And I said to them this is as high risk as Hadestown. The chances of this working are just as as steep. So the reason that you do it is to move the art forward; to have the first Black woman choreographer/director in 65 years and to be part of that history. But yeah, I doubt you’ll see me investing in shows that I know we’ll get the money for because, number one, I’m not interested. And number two, that’s just not my mission. I come out of the gritty, grimy nonprofit [world]. We have always struggled. And if I’m not going to take risks at this point in my life, there’s no point.”

For the full touring schedule for Hadestown, please go here.

Main Photo: Morgan Siobhan Green and Nicholas Barasch in the Hadestown North American Tour (Photo by T Charles Erickson/Courtesy Center Theatre Group)