Hi, I'm Stage in Stages, Lynn Manuel Miranda, and you're listening to The Hamelcast.

Boots and cuts.

Boots and cuts.

I'm going to.

Hi, everyone.

Welcome back to the Hamelcast.

I'm Jillian, and I know I rarely jump on the mic to do an intro like this when it's a one-off episode, but I did things a little differently this week. You're about to hear an hour-long conversation with Jeffrey Seller, prolific producer of Rent, Avenue Q, in the Heights, Hamilton, the Cher show, and the revivals of Westside Story and Sweeney Todd, just to name a few. Altogether, his shows currently have 22 Tony Awards, and he's the only Broadway producer to have put up two Pulitzer Prize winning musicals, Hamilton and Rent. Jeffrey has recently written his memoir, Theater Kid, which I highly recommend. You know how I usually start the episodes by asking people to tell me their life story? Yeah, if you want Jeffries, just read the book. It's all in there. Or listen to the audiobook, which is super fun because it's packed with familiar voices. So normally I do this little intro while Jeffrey's in front of me, but we had such a limited amount of time that I didn't want to waste a second of it, mostly because I wanted this episode to be about the listeners, specifically the Patreon peeps. In a few months, January 2026, this podcast will turn 10 years old, which I know is crazy. But so many of the Patreon Peeps have been here since the beginning, and I knew how excited they were that Jeffrey was going to record with me. And when I put out the call for questions like a week before this recording, it became very clear right away that this episode belonged to them. Their questions are always so great, and this time was no exception, so I wanted to turn it over to the peeps to get in as many other questions as possible. Full disclosure, I couldn't get to all of them, and I'm sorry about that, I really am. But hey, the good news is that pretty much anything you could possibly want to know about and from Jeffrey is in his book. All right, so now they're all on the same page, let's just get to the show.

Enjoy.

Okay, Jeffrey Seller, hi.

Thank you so much for being here.

It's an honor to speak to you, really.

Jillian, I'm so happy to be here with you and your peeps today. It's a beautiful Monday in June,

and I'm looking forward to this talk. Me too. Well, first of all, you have a new book out called

Theater Kid. Indeed. It is excellent. Thank you. It's really, um, fantastic to get such an insight to you

because you're such a giant in this community and in this industry. And so to really hear you,

also the audiobook is fantastic, but you really hear your voice even like jumping off the page.

So thank you for sharing all of this with us. Thank you for listening and reading.

My first call was don't bore them.

Look, I think that's impossible. God forbid I should bore the reader in the same way that as a producer,

I have to entertain the person who made the effort to buy the ticket and, um, and travel to the theater.

And, uh, writing a book is the same way. It's just a different experience because after you

write it, it's a very solitary experience between book and reader. Yeah. The same could be said for

...