Meet Mr. Broadway
Tony-winning producer Stewart Lane (CFA’73) has another idea. Think Netflix.
Stewart F. Lane isn’t crazy about the term “Broadway impresario,” a label that is often applied to him. It can conjure some unsavory stereotypes, like David Belasco’s “casting couch” and the vindictive, high-profile antics of “abominable showman” David Merrick. Then there’s Lane. Mercurial playwrights like him. Directors like him. As the New York Times has reported, stagehands from the powerful Local One union like him. Even the press likes Lane the man, although critics continue to eviscerate his shows as they see fit. The Times calls the prolific, multiple Tony-winning producer a Broadway powerhouse and headlined an at-home-with piece about him and his family’s upper East Side town house, “A Producer and a Gentleman,” a flat-out compliment as well as a playful nod to his latest Broadway hit, The Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.
Lane (CFA’73) has given himself and his website, www.mrbroadway.com, the well-deserved moniker “Mr. Broadway,” a name he shares with a popular deli and the protagonist of a 1960s TV show. He is a largely hands-on producer who has been nominated for nine Tonys and taken home six, four of them, including one for Gentleman’s Guide, for shows coproduced with his wife and business partner, Bonnie Comley. Joined at the hip like romantic leads at a curtain call, the two have several productions in the works, among them Lane’s long-gestating passion project, A Moment in Time, a musical he crafted around the songs of the late John Denver. Google images of the pair and out pour scores of photos: Lane, tall, broad-shouldered, strong-jawed; Comley, luminous in form-fitting evening gowns, her signature waist-length blonde hair billowing over her left shoulder. There are photos of Lane, Comley, and both, smiles beaming and arms full of Tony trophies. The high-profile pair steps out constantly, both as Tony nominee voters and to support colleagues. “We see everything,” says Comley, a UMass Lowell graduate who studied business (she earned an MA from Emerson College in 1994) and is accustomed to playing the superego to her husband’s creative id.
The latest venture of the two may be their most ambitious yet. In October 2015 they launched BroadwayHD.com, a Netflix-like subscription or pay-per-view destination that now offers more than 150 feature-length performances. (Subscriptions cost $169.99 a year, or $14.99 a month, and shows can be rented for $7.99.) As the list of streamed Broadway productions grows (many, particularly the Shakespeare canon, were filmed by PBS or the BBC), Lane believes they are stoking a hunger for Broadway entertainment that is likely to be quenched in the form of follow-up ticket sales to those who can manage it. And in the days of the $800 Hamilton ticket, it will convey the Broadway experience to those priced out of it.
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