It took me about nine months to get Mr. Emanuel “Manny” Azenberg to agree to do a podcast.  It was a tough negotiation, but hey, you think the man who produced almost 100 Broadway shows and worked with everyone from David Merrick to Mike Nichols to Neil Simon would be a pushover?

Everyone in this business knows Manny,  and everyone respects him.  He’s the Oracle of Broadway, having seen it all, done it all, and still doing it to this day.

If I could have 25% of the career that Manny had, I’d be a happy boy.

We’re talking buckets of awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Tony, the respect of the greatest artists we’ve had, and an IBDB page that looks like an Encyclopedia of Broadway.

And during all this producing and managing and oracle-ing, he also hosts an intimate invite-only industry trip deep into Israel every year, that gives all who go a great sense of “Oh, right, struggling to put on a play ain’t nothing compared to the real struggles of so many around the world.”

The only thing better than a recorded conversation with Manny is an off-the-record conversation with Manny.  🙂  But hey, you take what you can get when you’re talking to one of the best that Broadway has ever had.

Listen in to hear Manny talk about:

• The greatest things he learned from David Merrick and Alexander Cohen, and what Merrick would think of Broadway today.
• How he feels about having so many producers on a project . . . and could we ever go back to just one?
• How playing baseball with Robert Redford changed his life.
• His mantra that helps him get over the shows that don’t work.
• What his Yale class thought when they read Brighton Beach Memoirs and how that taught him to evaluate shows.

And buckets more.

Listen in, because the Oracle is about to speak.

Click here to listen.

Listen to it on iTunes here.  (And if you like the podcast, give it a great review, while you’re there!)

Download it here.

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