Eagles off Broadway

There’s a saying in the American theater: “You can make a killing but not a living.” It’s a pointed joke about the art form’s economic realities. When most people think about theater, it’s while watching the Tony Awards or reading about the incredible success of blockbusters like Hamilton. The reality, however, is that theater’s glamour and riches are reserved for a lucky few. Many productions are staged far from the lights of Broadway, by smaller nonprofit theaters supported largely by donations, not ticket sales. And even on Broadway, some shows can close within months, long before recouping their initial investment. The composers, lyricists, and playwrights of hits such as The Lion King and Wicked can find massive success but, by and large, going into theater is a risky endeavor. And yet, because the theater is such a powerful tool of art, commentary, and self-expression, it maintains its hold on talented people from all across the world. They spend their days creating audacious plays and musicals that they hope will push the art form forward while captivating audiences through the power of live performance and inspirational storytelling. To help prepare these strivers, the Boston College theatre department gives young artists the opportunity to direct, design, and create their own works. Each year, about a hundred students take classes in the department or perform or work backstage in its productions.

Many of these Eagles go on to successful careers in the theater. Ahead, we’ll meet three such BC graduates. Michael Quinn ’19, Patrick Lazour ’13, and Will Nunziata ’06 are each in a different decade of life and stage of career, but all three are pursuing their passion and realizing some of the returns that keep artists motivated, from securing grants and winning prizes to the simple thrill of sharing their original works with audiences. In a field in which the opportunities can sometimes seem dim, Quinn, Lazour, and Nunziata are shining a bright light.

Michael Quinn ’19 arrived on campus in 2015 from his home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Quinn had enjoyed performing in shows while in high school, so in his first year at BC, he enrolled in the theatre department’s introductory course, Dramatic Structure and Theatrical Process, which was taught by Professor Scott T. Cummings. There was just one problem: Quinn feared the class might be too elementary.

“I was a total idiot,” Quinn recalled. “I thought I knew everything about everything.” He quickly realized how much he had to learn, however, and soon became interested in writing plays of his own. In his junior year, one of his compositions was selected for the theatre department’s New Voices festival, a biannual event that features productions of original plays written by undergraduates. Quinn’s play Get It Together explores the emotions of complicated relationships by following a pair of high school crushes who, on a college break, return home to the outskirts of Philadelphia. As the play’s performance at the Bonn Studio Theater neared, Quinn worked closely with Cummings to hone the dramatic structure and theatrical process. After that experience, Quinn recalled with a laugh, “You’re like, Oh wow, these people actually teach you so much.” Since graduating, Quinn has continued to rewrite Get It Together. The play has evolved from one act to two and enjoyed productions in New Jersey and California. Wherever it’s performed, Quinn insists on keeping it authentically Philadelphia, right down to the brand of beer that’s used as a prop. “In LA, we were going to beer distributors being like, ‘You guys carry Yuengling?’” he said. “They were like, ‘You will not find that west of the Mississippi.’ So my mom stuffed Yuengling cans with newspaper and mailed them over there.”

Following those early productions, the play had a run last fall at The Flea, a tiny New York theater with an outsize reputation that was founded by, among others, the actress Sigourney Weaver. “Forty-six seats in a theater is intimate in a way the play demands,” Quinn said. He added that having the play performed at an esteemed off-Broadway theater provided him with a sense of arrival.

That production wasn’t the only milestone for Quinn last year. His next play, The River East, was shortlisted for the Yale Drama Series Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious playwriting awards. Out of two thousand entries, just nine were shortlisted. “I was literally shaking and crying,” Quinn said of receiving the news. He quickly emailed Cummings at BC to thank him. “You changed my life when you picked Get It Together for New Voices all those years ago,” he wrote.

“This is a big win,” his former professor replied, “and remember: on to the next thing.” And Quinn is. He’s working on both a staged reading of The River East and a new documentary play.

Quinn’s writing reveals a sharp ear for youthful, contemporary dialogue, and explores the desire to find a more meaningful life away, if possible, from where you grew up. The River East and Get It Together, for example, both follow young people from Philadelphia who have left in pursuit of a fresh start. But Quinn’s hometown is never far from his heart—or his craft. “Philadelphia isn’t well-defined in literature,” he said. “For a writer, you can bend it to your vision, whereas with New York you’re competing with every New York story ever written.”

It’s a clever strategy for helping your work stand out, which can lead to some of the recognition that Quinn said is so important for a young artist. Playwrights sometimes require validation through community, accolades, or commissioned productions to be able to see themselves as legitimate writers. “When you’re at the beginning of your career, it’s like you have no evidence you’re good at this, that’s the hardest,” he said. “When you’re twenty-two and just out of college, you really do have to have faith that things are going to work out.”

As he looks ahead to what comes next, Quinn said he remains motivated primarily by the art itself. “What I’d like out of a successful career is to work with great actors,” Quinn said. “Bigger audiences and venues are good, but what’s most important is to write more good plays.”

A few years ago, Patrick Lazour ’13 lost two family members in close succession. The death of loved ones, he understood, is a shared and unavoidable experience, but he was struck by the isolated nature of how we grieve, and how little we talk about it. “Illness and dying are universal,” Lazour said, “yet so often these experiences are kept in whispers.” 

Lazour and his brother Daniel set out to write a musical, Night Side Songs, that explores the layers of death and dying. The musical is scheduled for productions this year at three of the nation’s most prestigious venues, a rare feat for a new musical. “It feels incredible,” Lazour said. “It’s not something that happens every day.”

Night Side Songs, which has already completed a January run at Lincoln Center, is scheduled for the Philadelphia Theatre Company starting in February, and this spring will move to the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, a powerful artistic incubator that has sent several shows to Broadway. In collaboration with those theaters, and in keeping with its themes, the musical will also tour hospitals, community centers, and houses of worship.

“We wanted to make a musical that could be performed anywhere—that audiences could feel a part of,” Lazour said. In fact, those in the audience are invited to sing along. “For a show about illness, it has a real playfulness,” he said.

Broadway has become increasingly reliant on musicals that are adapted from movies, books, or songs from pop stars (Aladdin, The Outsiders, and & Juliet, to name a few), but Lazour writes original works even though they typically have less commercial appeal. “I was chatting with our director, and she was joking, ‘Okay, you’re thirty-three, it’s time for you to sell out,’” he recalled with a laugh. “Creating original work is hard on the pocketbook but simply the most thrilling act of creation there is.”

And Lazour has certainly found success doing it his way. He and his brother received a Jonathan Larson Grant in 2021—just five are given each year—and their professional debut, We Live in Cairo, won the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater in 2016. 

Lazour began writing We Live in Cairo while at Boston College. He was an active student in the theatre department—his musical The Grand Room, about a wealthy family during the Great Depression, premiered in 2012 in the Bonn Studio Theatre—when he was moved one day by a photograph he saw in Professor Peter Krause’s political science class. The image depicted young activists organizing around a computer screen, its glow illuminating their determined faces. “That photograph inspired the musical,” Lazour said. We Live in Cairo traces the relationships of young activists during the Arab Spring, the Middle East political uprisings of the 2010s that toppled, among others, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Lazour started working on the musical while on the Heights and continued after graduating and moving to New York City, where his brother was finishing up at Columbia. For a few years, Lazour worked a day job at a press agency and spent nights fine-tuning the musical.

Then, he got his big break. With the $40,000 prize from the Richard Rodgers Award, the Lazour brothers organized what’s known as a workshop, a reading designed to catch the attention of potential producers, of We Live in Cairo. A producer from A.R.T. enjoyed the presentation so much that he gave the musical its professional debut, a full production at the Cambridge theater in 2019. That production led to connections with still more producers, and funding for the development of the brothers’ future shows. These commissions from larger theaters, including New York’s storied Lincoln Center, allowed Lazour to leave his day job and write full-time.

Even as Lazour has found success elsewhere, he has continued to build his relationship with A.R.T., where he has developed other works. And as Lazour prepares for the upcoming productions of Night Side Songs in Philadelphia and Cambridge, he’s also working on new projects, including musicals for both the stage and the movie screen. 

“Musical theater is a commercial venture, but it’s also a wild, experimental form with ingredients galore—dialogue, song, dance, dream ballets,” he said. “The project of taking these elements and creating something is challenging as hell but unbelievably satisfying.”

Will Nunziata ’06 was well into his career as a professional singer by the time he decided to fully transition to theater. He’d spent years on tour with his twin brother Anthony Nunziata ’06, performed in the nation’s finest venues, and then, in 2016, fulfilled a lifelong goal of singing at Carnegie Hall. With that dream realized, Nunziata recalled, “it was time to go after the next one.”

For Nunziata, that meant the notoriously challenging field of theater. “As much as I loved to perform,” he said, “it was creating, writing, and directing that always were my bliss.” Nunziata grew up loving theater, and got his first experience with theater while at BC, where he had the opportunity to direct a production of a musical comedy called Bat Boy. The project allowed him to tell stories, collaborate with other creative people, and shape performances. “This combines everything I love,” he recalled thinking at the time.

Nunziata’s decision to follow his passion has been rewarded. Last year, he made his off-Broadway debut, directing White Rose: The Musical, and in February he directed his latest work, Figaro: An Original Musical, at the London Palladium, home to many of England’s top productions.The London performances are an important step in the development of Figaro: An Original Musical, which traces a young woman’s rise to stardom as a singer. New plays, and especially musicals, require lots of development before they find a producer and venue. The Palladium booking allowed Nunziata to present a couple of early performances of his new musical, with full set, costumes, and choreography. That staging, he said, allowed potential investors in the musical to see “what it will look like when it moves to a commercial theater or one in the West End,” which is London’s equivalent to Broadway. Nunziata began working on Figaro: An Original Musical during the pandemic, in collaboration with the songwriter Ashley Jana. Staging a musical, with its many moving parts, is a herculean effort, and after years of rehearsals, recordings, and rewrites, Nunziata said it was moving to finally bring all the elements together for an audience. Although the two disciplines require different skills, Nunziata said his experience as a singer helped to prepare him for his work as a director. “I know what it’s like to stand downstage with all the vulnerability and the nerves,” he said. That awareness now guides the way he coaches actors. “I want to give other people their ‘downstage center moment,’” he said. “And if I can do that as a writer, director, and creator, God bless.”

Nunziata said that even though he understands the commercial realities of theater, and that there will always be a financial incentive to create musicals that are remakes of popular movies or books, his artistic compass leads him in the direction of original new works. “Let people see something new, universal, familiar yet different,” he said. As he continues the evolution of Figaro: An Original Musical, he’s also hard at work on two additional original projects, both of them to be staged in London. This year he will direct the UK debut of White Rose and the premiere of Faygele: A New Play.

Walking away from an established career as a singer may have seemed like a risk, but for Nunziata, the move feels more like a homecoming. “Theater is in my blood, and it’s always been whispering to me to go into it fully,” he said. “I’ve truly felt this calling for a very long time.”

Whether it’s a new play or musical, he said, he wants “to create art that entertains, inspires, and allows people to realize that they can do anything they put their mind to.” Nunziata’s work also has a message for audiences, he said: “It’s never too late to go after their dreams.” ◽