Podcast Episode 120 – President of Columbia Live Stage, Broadway Producer Lia Vollack
I’ll admit. I was one of them.
I talk a bit about it in this podcast, but I was one of those Broadway Producers who watched the movie companies march onto our turf with trepidation.
But when people like Lia Vollack are part of the brigade, we’ve got nothing to fear, because we just have a new member of the family (and in Lia’s case, she’s just returning to the fold).
Lia runs the live entertainment arm of Sony Pictures (after years as the President (!) of Worldwide Music), and yep, that means she was one of the leads on Groundhog Day! But Sony has a lot more where that came from, and I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from Lia and her corporate crew over the next decade.
In the meantime, you’ll hear a lot from her on this podcast including . . .
- How being terrified as a child led her to fall in love with the theater.
- How graduating from high school at age 15 prepared her for a career in film and on Broadway.
- What Broadway can learn from the way Hollywood tests its products.
- The best place to train (literally!) if you want to be a Producer. (Hint: it ain’t college.)
- One of the best responses to the Genie question yet.
I’ve often said that the success of a movie company, or any corporation, is solely dependent on the person they put in charge of that department…and their experiences with theater before they worked for that corporation.
Lia is an excellent example of who to have run your theatrical shop for you, as you’ll soon hear.
(Oh – and I know, the volume on the podcast is a bit low. Sorry about that. We’re still tweaking this new microphone, but we will get it!)
Click here for the link to my podcast with Lia.
Listen to it on iTunes here. (And if you like the podcast, give it a great review, while you’re there!)
Download it here.
Sorry about the sound issues in this podcast. We found the bug and fixed it in later episodes. It gets better, I promise 🙂
Podcasting
Ken created one of the first Broadway podcasts, recording over 250 episodes over 7 years. It features interviews with A-listers in the theater about how they “made it”, including 2 Pulitzer Prize Winners, 7 Academy Award Winners and 76 Tony Award winners. Notable guests include Pasek & Paul, Kenny Leon, Lynn Ahrens and more.