I’m going to tell you something I said in an advertising meeting that made the whole room go silent.

We were talking about Daddy Long Legs – this gorgeous, intimate two-person musical by Paul Gordon and John Caird. (Yes, that John Caird – the man who directed Les Misérables.) The score is stunning. Megan McGinnis was in it. I loved everything about this show.

And then I said: to a lot of people, this show is going to feel boring.

Dead silence.

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Someone said, “Did you just call your own show boring?”

I said, “No. I said it’s going to feel boring to people who haven’t seen it. That’s a very different thing — and it’s a problem we need to solve.”

Here’s the thing about being a producer. You have to be willing to do a SWOT analysis on your own work. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. The business world does this as a matter of course. In the theater, we resist it, because it feels like a betrayal of the art. But ignoring your weaknesses doesn’t make them disappear. It just means you’re the last one to know about them.

So what were the weaknesses of Daddy Long Legs? Let me count them. It’s based on an early 1900s novel. There are only two people in the entire show. It’s a unit set. It’s off-Broadway. It’s sweet and romantic and intimate and beautiful — and to the portion of the audience who wants Cats or Mamma Mia or something with 30 people and a chandelier dropping from the ceiling, that description is going to read as . . . a hard pass.

I had to steal that audience. And to steal them, I first had to show them.

This was 2015. Before Zoom. Before FaceTime was everywhere. Before livestreaming was something anyone in theater had ever attempted. And I had this thought: what if we put the show on the internet — live, as it was happening — so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could watch it in real time?

Someone immediately asked, “How much do we charge?”

I said: nothing. We give it away for free.

(And yes, I watched a few faces in that room do some very interesting math.)

But here’s my logic. My problem wasn’t revenue from a livestream. My problem was that not enough people knew they wanted to see Daddy Long Legs. The show had to speak for itself. So my goal wasn’t to monetize the stream — it was to get as many eyes on it as possible, because I was convinced that if people saw it, they would show up at the theater.

I think about Hamilton and what’s happening right now with the Disney+ version. All those people who could technically watch Hamilton at home . . . are still buying tickets to see it live. Leslie Odom Jr.’s final week grossed almost $5 million. Those people knew they wanted to see it live because they’d already fallen in love with the show some other way. That’s exactly the theory I was operating on with Daddy Long Legs a decade earlier.

So we did it. We announced that Daddy Long Legs would be the first Broadway or off-Broadway show ever to livestream from New York City.

The first. Ever.

The press coverage was immediate. The signups were enormous. And every single person who registered gave us their contact information — which meant we now had a direct line to an audience we could keep marketing to, not just that week, but for as long as we wanted to talk about this show.

Here’s where it gets really good.

150,000 people tuned in. From 135 countries.

One hundred and thirty-five countries, folks. We polled them afterward, and the results were exactly what I’d hoped: a significant number said they were more interested in seeing the show after watching the stream. Many of them had never heard of Daddy Long Legs before that night.

And ticket sales went up. We used that registrant list to market directly, and it sold. And sold. And sold.

The livestream didn’t cannibalize our audience. It created one.

There’s a lesson here that I think applies to every producer wrestling with a show that has a marketing challenge — which, let me tell you, is almost every show. When you have a product that people don’t know they want yet, your job isn’t to sell harder. Your job is to remove the barrier between the audience and the experience. Give them a taste. Trust the work. Then make it easy to buy a ticket.

Oh, and one more thing. That livestream? It eventually led to Daddy Long Legs being picked up by BroadwayHD, where you can watch it right now. Go find it. You’re going to love it.

So here’s my question for you: what’s the real weakness of your show? Not the one you admit to your friends — the one you actually say out loud in the advertising room. Because that’s where the strategy starts.

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