May 24, 2025 • 13 mins
For his next trick, the Tony-winning producer wants to improve the theater-going experience in New York.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greg Noble is big on Broadway. Now he wants to
go small by Chris Rouser, read by Bob Danielson. At
age thirty two, Greg Noble already knows how to make
a big, buzzy Broadway smash. His company, Seaview Productions, produced
good Night and Good Luck, which stars George Clooney and
(00:22):
is up for five Tony Awards on June eighth. This spring,
it broke box office records by bringing in more than
four million dollars a week from audiences at the vast
Winter Garden Theater. In twenty twenty four, seaviews Romeo and
Juliet enjoyed a twenty week sold out run with jen
Z superstars Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler and music by
(00:44):
Jack Antonoff. He's figured out a model to win at
the existing big Broadway game, one most investors famously lose.
So why is Noble bothering to build out his own
off Broadway Theater on West forty third and eighth Avenue
with a mere two hundred and ninety six seats. Theater
is a luxury product, he tells me. But we don't
(01:06):
treat going to the theater like a luxury experience. It
is hard to do that when you have fifteen hundred
people arriving at eight o'clock to see a show on Broadway.
You have to kind of shout at people. You have
to make the drink super quick at the bar and
give him a sippy cup. He's sitting on a tiny
couch in the middle of a construction site in an
old bank in the guts of what used to be
(01:27):
the Tony Kaiser Theater, which Seaview took over this year
from the theatrical nonprofit Second Stage Wooden boards lay on
the floor around a half finished lobby bar, just behind
where the audience will sit when the studio Seaview Theater
is complete. What he's trying to build, Noble says, is
a fertile ground for experimentation, both on stage and in
(01:49):
features like a glamorous bar that stays open late as
a post performance hangout spot. Seaview can run its own
slate of shows there free of the expense and difficulty
of Broadway. Costs to mount productions on Broadway are higher
than ever, which means tickets can be stratospherically expensive. A
seat at Noble's good Night and Good Luck a staged
(02:10):
version of the two thousand and five Oscar winning film
will set you back one hundred and ninety six to
eight hundred and forty nine dollars. Noble has heard the complaints,
and it's not even the most expensive ticket out there.
The costs off Broadway are still pretty manageable, he says.
So many things that have been on Broadway over the
last couple seasons, like Stereophonic Dead Outlaw, Oh Mary, have
(02:33):
been huge hits off Broadway where they've been able to
create energy to then move up town. Studio Cview, which
is being renovated under the eye of set designer Scott Pass,
will be ready on May twenty third, a mere three
weeks after our construction site conversation. Then John Krasinski will
tread the boards before a live audience and previews for
(02:54):
a one man show, Angry Allen, a work by British
playwright Penelope Skinner and directed by Salem Gold, who has
worked with Noble on Romeo and Juliet and other projects.
The new theater will have accessible ticket pricing at about
sixty nine dollars for some seats and ranging up to
above three hundred dollars. Those audiences can coexist in one space.
(03:15):
Noble says. Greg is very astute about playwriting, says Gold.
He sniffs out creators like Skinner before their household names
and connects them with heavy hitters. He's doing something no
one else is doing, making high brow work that has
a successful economic and artistic model. Gold says he's a unicorn.
Greg Noble has been hustling since the second grade, when
(03:38):
one of his childhood friends was diagnosed with Adrina Luko dystrophy,
an extremely rare and eventually fatal condition. He and his
friends sold lemonade on street corners in the summers, raising
money for research. Growing up in a theater loving family
in Bucolic, Connecticut, Noble soon had the idea to turn
the lemonade stand into a backyard stage, with the neighborhood
kids putting on shows and donating the tickets sales to
(04:00):
cancer research. Over a decade, the Lemonade gang raised about
two hundred thousand dollars. By passing a college degree, Nobel
hustled his way into a co producer role with the
madcap new musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder,
which was performing in Hartford in twenty twelve, the team
was having trouble with funding a Broadway transfer, and Nobel
(04:22):
raised one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars from his
homegrown network in just two months. In return, The Gentleman's
Guide lead producers brought him into their meetings. The Zany
Little Show, put together on a seven point five million
dollar budget, went on to earn a small profit and
more importantly, four Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical.
(04:42):
This made Noble the youngest producer to ever win a
Tony at the age of twenty two. Then the phone
started to ring. He launched Seaview Productions in twenty twelve
with partner Yana Sha, the mother of a childhood friend,
and since they have produced hit shows including playwright Jeremy
o'harris's Sla The Dance Fable, Illinois Stereophonic, a Tony Award
(05:04):
winning play with live music loosely based on the story
of Fleetwood Mac and Parade, a Tony winning musical by
Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Yury. Sometimes producing means developing
a show from its inception. Other times it means finding
a great project midstream and enhancing it for the biggest Stage.
As with Stereophonic and Parade, he is able to capture
(05:26):
an excitement, a classiness, and something that feels like a
real artistic triumph. Says Parade director Michael Arden. I just
want to do every project with him, honestly. The first
big celebrity show Noble lead produced was Seawall A Life
with Jake Gillenhall and Tom Sturage in twenty nineteen, and
it presaged a series of successful big name short run
(05:48):
theatrical events, as Noble calls them. In twenty twenty, Noble
and Shay sold fifty percent of Seaview to Sony, they
retained the other half. Predicting whether a show will be
a success or failure is impossible no matter the star wattage,
so choosing which shows to back and build out comes
down to an ineffable mix of shrewd, calculation and gut.
(06:10):
When describing him, Nobles collaborators invariably use words like showman,
dynamic and charismatic, and producer from another era. This gift
of the old razzle dazzle is key in the most
crucial part of a producer's job, convincing investors to back
his projects to the tune of millions of dollars per production.
(06:31):
Big expenses include sets, marketing, and union labor across actors, crew,
and other creative talent like musicians. That's a big reason
why musicals are much more expensive to put on than plays.
As rent, the theater owner typically gets a single digit
percentage of the box office hall. In Seview's model, the
investors own fifty percent of the show and the producers
(06:53):
own fifty percent of it. We go and we raise
all the capital from outside investment investors in twenty five
thousd to two hundred fifty thousand dollars checks. On the
equity side. All the investors are paid back first, Nobel
explains many of them are bundlers of the smaller increments,
and then everything is split fifty to fifty after that
between producers and investors. All of that means producers don't
(07:17):
make money until the show has recouped its investment, which
conventional Broadway wisdom says only happens about twenty percent of
the time. A play like good Night and Good Luck
can be expensive to put up, even for a limited run.
It has a big pask designed set with digital screens
and an eighteen person cast, so it needed a lot
of backers for a capitalization of nine point five million dollars,
(07:41):
but putting it in a huge theater like the Winter Garden,
which has fifteen hundred seats, meant that there was the
potential to make a lot of money. Still, Noble says
the show's roughly four million dollar weekly haul was so
big he'd never even have predicted it in models he
presented to potential backers, we'd have gotten laughed out of
the room. In fact, when courting investors in theater, Noble
(08:03):
is very clear we start with you should be prepared
to lose every dollar. He says. If you're not prepared
in that way, then we just shouldn't have a conversation
about investing on Broadway. Noble has a pretty good track
record and says that Ceview will probably make about five
million dollars this year, but he has certainly had shows
that have lost their investments, like the original bio musical
(08:25):
about Polish painter Tamra de Lempika, who fled Russia during
the Revolution and landed in Paris, only to see the
Nazis take over during World War Two. After more than
ten years of workshops and performances, Lempika opened on Broadway
with a nineteen point five million dollar capitalization. It was
an electrifying mess. Some soaringly beautiful music, triumphant performances, and
(08:49):
a magnificent jangle of a set wasn't enough to offset
its tonal and historical misses. During one musical number set
around nineteen forty, Nazi soldiers vogued to techno music in
other eyeshadow and corsets. The show lasted only forty one
performances on Broadway. I love what me ultimately put up
on stage, says Noble, who had started with the project
(09:10):
at the very beginning as an assistant to the writers,
but there had been endless delays as theaters became unavailable
or an actor or director was on another project. The
protracted journeys of musicals can mean that what ends up
on stage just becomes a different version of the nascent idea.
With his own stage at Studio Cview, Noble can solve
at least one part of this problem, and he gave
(09:32):
the investors who supported Lympeka first crack at putting money
into good Night and Good Luck, a project based on
a beloved film and led by an A list movie star.
In other words, as close to a surefire hit as
you can get. We sent an email to all of
our Lympika investors and we said, you took this risk
with us, you lost everything. Noble says, you guys are
(09:52):
all in the first position to invest in whatever you want.
Trusting Noble's hit making formula to make good in the
long term means investors also trust him to experiment with
lesser known quantities. Director Shira Milakowski remembers meeting a twenty
one year old Noble when he was an assistant to
writer Griffin Matthews and Matt Gold, the Lempika composer. He
was walking their dogs, she recalls, even then he was
(10:15):
signing his emails Greg Noble producer. We all made fun
of him, and then within two years he was like
the hottest producer on Broadway. In twenty nineteen, Milakowski was
directing a wildly original, immersive theatrical experience that was so
far off Broadway it was in Brooklyn in a gay
nightclub in Williamsburg, called three Dollars Bill to be precise,
(10:35):
Oscar at the Crown was set in a dystopian future
where reality TV and the complete works of Oscar Wilde
are some of the only surviving cultural artifacts. It was
also a dance party. Finding backers for it wasn't the
easiest sell. I was trying to get a lot of
producers there, but I knew Greg was the one who
would actually get it. She remembers. Noble is a good
(10:56):
time guy. He owns his own piano bar in the
theater district, called a Freaky Tiki. He came to the
second to last of Oscar's six performances. She watched Noble
dance in the crowd, and he rushed up to her
at the bar afterward. He was like, this is great.
It's so exciting. She says. Everything she ever wanted a
producer to see in it came tumbling out of his mouth.
(11:17):
It's different, it's commercially viable. I totally understand what you're
trying to do. It needs a lot of work, but
I know what the work is. He turned the sixth
Night Show into an open ended run that lasted months
and was set to transfer to Manhattan when twenty twenty
rolled around and scuttled theater for everyone. Oscar at the
Crown is about to open in London. Nobel's specific talent
(11:40):
as a producer is not only that he can raise funds,
colleagues say, it's that he can connect. It's all about
how you assemble the team, says b Carrazzini, a producer
with ATG Entertainment who worked with Noble on Parade in
the last five years. It's pairing a newer writer with
an established star and director. Greg is good at finding
(12:00):
the right ways of combining those pieces to make sure
we're always seeing and hearing new talent off Broadway. Now
more than ever, is going to be a vital ingredient
to launching new work. Nobel says, I want Studio Cview
to be a key part of that landscape. And while
he's cutting down on backing pricey new musicals for now,
he has one major project coming to Broadway later in
(12:22):
the year, The Queen of Versailles, a musical based on
the twenty twelve documentary of the same name, with music
by Wicked Stephen Schwartz, direction by Parade Tony winner Michael Arden,
and starring Kristin Chenowith. It has strong ingredients and previewed
to decent reviews in Boston, but Nobel remains pragmatic about
the show's half life. We believe and hope that the
(12:44):
Queen of Versailles will go beyond Kristen's fifty two week run,
but economically, we're building a model for it that it
gets out in the year and with the little studio Seaview,
Nobel looks forward to taking more swings, small and big.
That's what keeps the theater industry aliae, he says. We're
all just blind optimists at all times, and we get
blinded by what could be, he says, and that is
(13:06):
both so dangerous and also the only thing that fuels
this multi billion dollar industry.
Greg Noble is big on Broadway. Now he wants to
go small by Chris Rouser, read by Bob Danielson. At
age thirty two, Greg Noble already knows how to make
a big, buzzy Broadway smash. His company, Seaview Productions, produced
good Night and Good Luck, which stars George Clooney and
(00:22):
is up for five Tony Awards on June eighth. This spring,
it broke box office records by bringing in more than
four million dollars a week from audiences at the vast
Winter Garden Theater. In twenty twenty four, seaviews Romeo and
Juliet enjoyed a twenty week sold out run with jen
Z superstars Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler and music by
(00:44):
Jack Antonoff. He's figured out a model to win at
the existing big Broadway game, one most investors famously lose.
So why is Noble bothering to build out his own
off Broadway Theater on West forty third and eighth Avenue
with a mere two hundred and ninety six seats. Theater
is a luxury product, he tells me. But we don't
(01:06):
treat going to the theater like a luxury experience. It
is hard to do that when you have fifteen hundred
people arriving at eight o'clock to see a show on Broadway.
You have to kind of shout at people. You have
to make the drink super quick at the bar and
give him a sippy cup. He's sitting on a tiny
couch in the middle of a construction site in an
old bank in the guts of what used to be
(01:27):
the Tony Kaiser Theater, which Seaview took over this year
from the theatrical nonprofit Second Stage Wooden boards lay on
the floor around a half finished lobby bar, just behind
where the audience will sit when the studio Seaview Theater
is complete. What he's trying to build, Noble says, is
a fertile ground for experimentation, both on stage and in
(01:49):
features like a glamorous bar that stays open late as
a post performance hangout spot. Seaview can run its own
slate of shows there free of the expense and difficulty
of Broadway. Costs to mount productions on Broadway are higher
than ever, which means tickets can be stratospherically expensive. A
seat at Noble's good Night and Good Luck a staged
(02:10):
version of the two thousand and five Oscar winning film
will set you back one hundred and ninety six to
eight hundred and forty nine dollars. Noble has heard the complaints,
and it's not even the most expensive ticket out there.
The costs off Broadway are still pretty manageable, he says.
So many things that have been on Broadway over the
last couple seasons, like Stereophonic Dead Outlaw, Oh Mary, have
(02:33):
been huge hits off Broadway where they've been able to
create energy to then move up town. Studio Cview, which
is being renovated under the eye of set designer Scott Pass,
will be ready on May twenty third, a mere three
weeks after our construction site conversation. Then John Krasinski will
tread the boards before a live audience and previews for
(02:54):
a one man show, Angry Allen, a work by British
playwright Penelope Skinner and directed by Salem Gold, who has
worked with Noble on Romeo and Juliet and other projects.
The new theater will have accessible ticket pricing at about
sixty nine dollars for some seats and ranging up to
above three hundred dollars. Those audiences can coexist in one space.
(03:15):
Noble says. Greg is very astute about playwriting, says Gold.
He sniffs out creators like Skinner before their household names
and connects them with heavy hitters. He's doing something no
one else is doing, making high brow work that has
a successful economic and artistic model. Gold says he's a unicorn.
Greg Noble has been hustling since the second grade, when
(03:38):
one of his childhood friends was diagnosed with Adrina Luko dystrophy,
an extremely rare and eventually fatal condition. He and his
friends sold lemonade on street corners in the summers, raising
money for research. Growing up in a theater loving family
in Bucolic, Connecticut, Noble soon had the idea to turn
the lemonade stand into a backyard stage, with the neighborhood
kids putting on shows and donating the tickets sales to
(04:00):
cancer research. Over a decade, the Lemonade gang raised about
two hundred thousand dollars. By passing a college degree, Nobel
hustled his way into a co producer role with the
madcap new musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder,
which was performing in Hartford in twenty twelve, the team
was having trouble with funding a Broadway transfer, and Nobel
(04:22):
raised one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars from his
homegrown network in just two months. In return, The Gentleman's
Guide lead producers brought him into their meetings. The Zany
Little Show, put together on a seven point five million
dollar budget, went on to earn a small profit and
more importantly, four Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical.
(04:42):
This made Noble the youngest producer to ever win a
Tony at the age of twenty two. Then the phone
started to ring. He launched Seaview Productions in twenty twelve
with partner Yana Sha, the mother of a childhood friend,
and since they have produced hit shows including playwright Jeremy
o'harris's Sla The Dance Fable, Illinois Stereophonic, a Tony Award
(05:04):
winning play with live music loosely based on the story
of Fleetwood Mac and Parade, a Tony winning musical by
Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Yury. Sometimes producing means developing
a show from its inception. Other times it means finding
a great project midstream and enhancing it for the biggest Stage.
As with Stereophonic and Parade, he is able to capture
(05:26):
an excitement, a classiness, and something that feels like a
real artistic triumph. Says Parade director Michael Arden. I just
want to do every project with him, honestly. The first
big celebrity show Noble lead produced was Seawall A Life
with Jake Gillenhall and Tom Sturage in twenty nineteen, and
it presaged a series of successful big name short run
(05:48):
theatrical events, as Noble calls them. In twenty twenty, Noble
and Shay sold fifty percent of Seaview to Sony, they
retained the other half. Predicting whether a show will be
a success or failure is impossible no matter the star wattage,
so choosing which shows to back and build out comes
down to an ineffable mix of shrewd, calculation and gut.
(06:10):
When describing him, Nobles collaborators invariably use words like showman,
dynamic and charismatic, and producer from another era. This gift
of the old razzle dazzle is key in the most
crucial part of a producer's job, convincing investors to back
his projects to the tune of millions of dollars per production.
(06:31):
Big expenses include sets, marketing, and union labor across actors, crew,
and other creative talent like musicians. That's a big reason
why musicals are much more expensive to put on than plays.
As rent, the theater owner typically gets a single digit
percentage of the box office hall. In Seview's model, the
investors own fifty percent of the show and the producers
(06:53):
own fifty percent of it. We go and we raise
all the capital from outside investment investors in twenty five
thousd to two hundred fifty thousand dollars checks. On the
equity side. All the investors are paid back first, Nobel
explains many of them are bundlers of the smaller increments,
and then everything is split fifty to fifty after that
between producers and investors. All of that means producers don't
(07:17):
make money until the show has recouped its investment, which
conventional Broadway wisdom says only happens about twenty percent of
the time. A play like good Night and Good Luck
can be expensive to put up, even for a limited run.
It has a big pask designed set with digital screens
and an eighteen person cast, so it needed a lot
of backers for a capitalization of nine point five million dollars,
(07:41):
but putting it in a huge theater like the Winter Garden,
which has fifteen hundred seats, meant that there was the
potential to make a lot of money. Still, Noble says
the show's roughly four million dollar weekly haul was so
big he'd never even have predicted it in models he
presented to potential backers, we'd have gotten laughed out of
the room. In fact, when courting investors in theater, Noble
(08:03):
is very clear we start with you should be prepared
to lose every dollar. He says. If you're not prepared
in that way, then we just shouldn't have a conversation
about investing on Broadway. Noble has a pretty good track
record and says that Ceview will probably make about five
million dollars this year, but he has certainly had shows
that have lost their investments, like the original bio musical
(08:25):
about Polish painter Tamra de Lempika, who fled Russia during
the Revolution and landed in Paris, only to see the
Nazis take over during World War Two. After more than
ten years of workshops and performances, Lempika opened on Broadway
with a nineteen point five million dollar capitalization. It was
an electrifying mess. Some soaringly beautiful music, triumphant performances, and
(08:49):
a magnificent jangle of a set wasn't enough to offset
its tonal and historical misses. During one musical number set
around nineteen forty, Nazi soldiers vogued to techno music in
other eyeshadow and corsets. The show lasted only forty one
performances on Broadway. I love what me ultimately put up
on stage, says Noble, who had started with the project
(09:10):
at the very beginning as an assistant to the writers,
but there had been endless delays as theaters became unavailable
or an actor or director was on another project. The
protracted journeys of musicals can mean that what ends up
on stage just becomes a different version of the nascent idea.
With his own stage at Studio Cview, Noble can solve
at least one part of this problem, and he gave
(09:32):
the investors who supported Lympeka first crack at putting money
into good Night and Good Luck, a project based on
a beloved film and led by an A list movie star.
In other words, as close to a surefire hit as
you can get. We sent an email to all of
our Lympika investors and we said, you took this risk
with us, you lost everything. Noble says, you guys are
(09:52):
all in the first position to invest in whatever you want.
Trusting Noble's hit making formula to make good in the
long term means investors also trust him to experiment with
lesser known quantities. Director Shira Milakowski remembers meeting a twenty
one year old Noble when he was an assistant to
writer Griffin Matthews and Matt Gold, the Lempika composer. He
was walking their dogs, she recalls, even then he was
(10:15):
signing his emails Greg Noble producer. We all made fun
of him, and then within two years he was like
the hottest producer on Broadway. In twenty nineteen, Milakowski was
directing a wildly original, immersive theatrical experience that was so
far off Broadway it was in Brooklyn in a gay
nightclub in Williamsburg, called three Dollars Bill to be precise,
(10:35):
Oscar at the Crown was set in a dystopian future
where reality TV and the complete works of Oscar Wilde
are some of the only surviving cultural artifacts. It was
also a dance party. Finding backers for it wasn't the
easiest sell. I was trying to get a lot of
producers there, but I knew Greg was the one who
would actually get it. She remembers. Noble is a good
(10:56):
time guy. He owns his own piano bar in the
theater district, called a Freaky Tiki. He came to the
second to last of Oscar's six performances. She watched Noble
dance in the crowd, and he rushed up to her
at the bar afterward. He was like, this is great.
It's so exciting. She says. Everything she ever wanted a
producer to see in it came tumbling out of his mouth.
(11:17):
It's different, it's commercially viable. I totally understand what you're
trying to do. It needs a lot of work, but
I know what the work is. He turned the sixth
Night Show into an open ended run that lasted months
and was set to transfer to Manhattan when twenty twenty
rolled around and scuttled theater for everyone. Oscar at the
Crown is about to open in London. Nobel's specific talent
(11:40):
as a producer is not only that he can raise funds,
colleagues say, it's that he can connect. It's all about
how you assemble the team, says b Carrazzini, a producer
with ATG Entertainment who worked with Noble on Parade in
the last five years. It's pairing a newer writer with
an established star and director. Greg is good at finding
(12:00):
the right ways of combining those pieces to make sure
we're always seeing and hearing new talent off Broadway. Now
more than ever, is going to be a vital ingredient
to launching new work. Nobel says, I want Studio Cview
to be a key part of that landscape. And while
he's cutting down on backing pricey new musicals for now,
he has one major project coming to Broadway later in
(12:22):
the year, The Queen of Versailles, a musical based on
the twenty twelve documentary of the same name, with music
by Wicked Stephen Schwartz, direction by Parade Tony winner Michael Arden,
and starring Kristin Chenowith. It has strong ingredients and previewed
to decent reviews in Boston, but Nobel remains pragmatic about
the show's half life. We believe and hope that the
(12:44):
Queen of Versailles will go beyond Kristen's fifty two week run,
but economically, we're building a model for it that it
gets out in the year and with the little studio Seaview,
Nobel looks forward to taking more swings, small and big.
That's what keeps the theater industry aliae, he says. We're
all just blind optimists at all times, and we get
blinded by what could be, he says, and that is
(13:06):
both so dangerous and also the only thing that fuels
this multi billion dollar industry.
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