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I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is September 8th, 2015, and my guest is Mitchell Weiss,

35-year veteran of Broadway as a general manager, company manager, house manager,

and the co-author with Perry Gaffney of the business of Broadway, Mitch, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you, Russ. Quite good to hear.

So let's start with your career. How did you get started and give us some flavor of your experience,

so which is quite wide?

I always wanted to work on Broadway. I grew up in New York. I didn't quite know what I was going to end up doing.

I was a piano player, and my first jobs in Summer Stock was as a musical director.

But the choice was, do I want to be a big fish in a little pond, or am I fine with being a little fish at a big pond?

And there were certain people on Broadway that were my idols, like Harold Prince and Steven Sandheim and Joseph Pap.

And I was willing to empty their garbage cans for free, and I went and told them that,

and I walked into their offices, and tried to make friends with the receptionists,

and do everything I could coming out of college, and eventually got one of those jobs as an assistant press representative,

which of course was nothing that I knew anything about nor understood.

Yeah. That was a Harold Prince, Steven Sandheim musical, award-winning musical called Pacific Overtures, back in 1976.

Great experience. I met a lot of people. I learned a lot of things for life, not just the business.

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