Every show has an audience. The job of a great producer isn’t just to find that audience – it’s to make them feel it.

As a producer on the original Broadway musical 13, we were tasked with pitching ideas for the Broadway marketing campaign. I kept coming back to the same question I always ask: who is this show for? And with 13 – the brilliant concept from Jason Robert Brown and Dan Fishman, featuring an all-teen cast and an all-teen band – the answer was obvious.

Teenagers.

But here’s the thing about teenagers that we sometimes forget in this industry. They can’t own much. 

They don’t hold the credit cards.

They don’t book the tickets.

They’re often dragged along for the ride on someone else’s Broadway night out – a parent, a chaperone, a school trip. (And if you’ve ever sat next to a sixteen-year-old who didn’t choose to be there, you know that energy.)

So I asked myself: how do we make this show feel like theirs?

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The answer came fast. You let them see it first.

On Broadway, the tradition is an invited dress rehearsal – you bring in the community, fill the house with friendly faces before the audiences show up. Standard stuff. We blew that up entirely.

Instead of the usual invited dress, we opened the doors to teenagers only. For free. Publicly. We put out a press release and just . . . waited.

We didn’t have to wait long.

The response was unlike anything I expected. Throngs of teenagers, registering, excited, ready.

It looked less like a Broadway house and more like the most theatrical mall in America. (Which, honestly? Not a bad thing. That’s exactly the audience development we need in this business.)

The night arrived. The house filled up. And then came the moment I’ll never forget.

Bob Boyett, brilliant producer whose currently on the producing team of CATS: The Jellicle Ball, came up to me and said, “Ken, you came up with this idea. Would you like to introduce the event from the stage?”

I said no.

Not because I didn’t want to be there. But because I knew, instinctively, that the wrong person walking out on that stage could deflate the whole thing. The teenagers in those seats didn’t need a producer in his forties welcoming them to the show.

They needed to hear it from one of their own.

We sent out the understudies and one of them stepped up to that microphone and said:

“Welcome to the very first all-teen invited dress rehearsal.”

The roar that came out of that house . . . I’m pretty sure they heard it in New Jersey.

That was it. That was the moment. That was ownership.

Here’s what I want you to take away from this, folks.

The marketing concept has to be as unique as the art itself. Jason, Dan, and Bob had built something genuinely original – a musical by teenagers, about teenagers, performed by teenagers. (One of those teenagers, by the way, was a young Ariana Grande. You read that right.) The show had a specific, radical identity.

My job wasn’t to slap a generic Broadway campaign on top of it. My job was to find the organic match . . . a marketing idea that lived in the same spirit as the work.

And that idea was simple: the audience this show was made for should be the first people to ever see it.

Not critics. Not industry insiders. Not the usual suspects.

Teenagers.

That’s the question every producer should be asking before you open a show. Not just “who is my audience?” but “what can I give them that nobody else has given them before?”

What’s the moment that makes them feel like this show – this one, right here – was made for them?

So I’ll ask you: what’s your version of the all-teen invited dress? What does ownership look like for your audience?

Think about it. The answer might just blow the roof off the place.

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