Look at a Roundabout season, and what pops out are the boldfaced
names. In 2005 and 2006, for instance, Gabriel Byrne, Harry Connick
Jr., and
Alec Baldwin did turns on the company's stages. In 2007,
Swoosie Kurtz,
Blythe Danner, and
Audra McDonald are performing.
Early on, Haimes recognized an important fact in making theater
economically viable: Celebrity matters in filling seats. But the
eyepopper of a monetary factoid is that the top pay Haimes offers
is $1,100 per week. "You can only imagine how much more Harry
Connick Jr. makes giving concerts," says Haimes. This is where his
personal secret sauce comes in: "I spend a lot of time cultivating
relationships with the actors, actresses, and directors I want to
work with," says Haimes, who says he might invest months in piecing
together a package that would bring, say, Byrne to act in Eugene
O'Neill's little-performed play
A Touch of the
Poet, a production that Roundabout staged on its Studio 54
stage in its 2005-2006 season. Haimes snares the big names by
promising artistic freedom coupled - importantly - with limited
runs that rarely take up more than four months of a top-grade
actor's year.
Haimes still has big dreams, big goals. And that's expensive. "I
want to get the funding to do more large-cast plays. A typical
Broadway play might have five actors. There are older plays I want
to do that have 20 or 40 actors. You don't see those shows on
Broadway anymore." Unless, of course, it is Haimes producing, as he
did with the
Threepenny Opera, a musical
that Roundabout staged in 2006 with dozens of parts.
Other marquee names: Lynne Meadow, Manhattan Theatre Club; Oskar
Eustis, the Public Theater
Playwright
Doug Wright