Producer honored for her ‘profound and indelible mark on the Goodspeed’
Sue Frost helped along 50 new musicals, then went on to win a Tony
For 20 years, Sue Frost shepherded more than 50 new musicals at Goodspeed Musicals, where she was associate producer. She moved on in 2005, becoming a Broadway producer whose shows — including current hit “Come from Away” — have earned numerous Tony nominations.
She won a Tony award as a producer of best-musical winner “Memphis” in 2010. She and Junkyard Dog Productions, the company she co-founded after leaving Goodspeed, have productions around the world.
In recognition of Frost’s impressive work, Goodspeed Musicals honored her and her commitment to new musicals at its annual gala Saturday at Riverhouse at Goodspeed Station in Haddam.
“Tonight is our opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge great achievement in the world of musical theater,” said Michael Gennaro, Goodspeed’s executive director. “What makes this night uniquely special is we have the chance to honor one of our own, one of our family and someone who has made a profound and indelible mark on the Goodspeed we know today.”
Frost, who spends a good deal of her time in New York but still has a home in Old Lyme, said, “I am truly, truly honored to be here. The 20 years I was here was my entire life. I met my husband, raised my daughter, learned that what I really, really loved more than anything else in the world was producing. … I realized that finding new work and working with writers and working on scripts and putting creative teams together and all those things was what I really loved to do.”
She said she couldn’t have done that anywhere else but at Goodspeed. When she started at Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre in Chester in 1985, few other theaters were doing new musicals. She noted that it is vital for early-career writers to have a place to see their work staged in front of an audience; they need a place to fail because people learn from failure.
Michael P. Price, Goodspeed’s longtime executive director who retired in 2014, said Frost was partly responsible for Goodspeed’s growth as a mature, highly regarded institution. She expanded the theater’s reach; was a magnet for talent; and had an innate sense of which director could be paired with complementary designers and orchestrators.
Price said Frost is more than a theatrical manager and producer.
“She was the heart and soul of so many theatrical careers,” he said. “She nurtured writers and artists and stage managers … There are many on or off Broadway and across this country who succeeded because of the guidance of Sue, and today, Broadway is peopled by those lucky people who have been blessed by her.”
In receiving the Goodspeed Award for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theatre, Frost follows in the footsteps of previous honorees like Julie Andrews, Kristin Chenoweth, and Jerry Herman. Another former award winner, “Wicked” and “Godspell” lyricist and composer Stephen Schwartz, was among those who celebrated Frost in a video; each offered one or two words to describe Frost, and Schwartz’s were fearless and tireless.
In addition to the encomiums, the gala boasted songs from shows Frost has produced. For instance, Chad Kimball, who starred in the original cast of “Memphis,” sang “Memphis Lives in Me.” The co-creators of “Come from Away,” Irene Sankoff and David Hein, performed “Welcome to the Rock” from their musical — but created Frost-centric lyrics for the gala.
The focus of Saturday’s gala was new work, since that is Frost’s passion, and proceeds from the event will support Goodspeed’s new works initiatives.
Proclaiming it Sue Frost Day
Frost was also presented with a proclamation from the town of Old Lyme, proclaiming Saturday Sue Frost Day. The declaration noted that Frost and her family (her husband is Dan Renn, and their daughter is Mattie) are active members of the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, where Frost serves on the church’s personnel committee. It also noted that, from 2002 to 2008, she served as part of the Lymes’ Youth Service Board and was its chairperson in 2004 and 2005.
Asked in a phone interview a few days before the gala if she gets back to Old Lyme often, Frost laughed ruefully and said, “Not very much … I try to get home every weekend that I can. It’s been a challenge, honestly, since the first of the year.”
On the upside, daughter Mattie is now a student at Columbia University’s medical school, and they’ve become apartment-mates. “Even though I’m not physically in my house, I feel like I’m home when I’m with her,” Frost said.
Mattie presented the Goodspeed award to Frost on Saturday, and she reminisced about growing up at the theater. She said her mother still strives to create spaces for creative, talented, passionate people to make work about human connection and compassion.
And she “makes everyone in the room feel important, feel cared for, feel heard and feel loved,” Mattie said.
That seems to have been true of Frost’s time at Goodspeed, too.
Donna Lynn Hilton, now a producer at Goodspeed, was hired in 1988 by Frost and by the person who was production stage manager then. Hilton was the assistant stage manager and became stage manager after that person left. So Frost was her immediate supervisor for nearly 20 years.
“She is very hardworking and expected that of the rest of us, but she’s also very generous,” Hilton said in a phone interview earlier in the week. “She’s a person of tremendous integrity, and I never, ever in 20 years for a second felt disrespected or ill-treated by Sue. She gets the very best out of people. She creates an incredible work environment. And people want to do well for her and by her.”
Hilton added, “She’s funny. She has a very dry wit. She is maternal but like a mama lion maternal.”
Hilton noted that programs that Frost helped create at Goodspeed continue to flourish. Frost established an annual residency for composers, lyricists and librettists at Goodspeed, in conjunction with the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program; the Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals; and the pilot program for Goodspeed’s Musical Theatre Institute.
It has been 13 years since Frost left Goodspeed, and Frost said, “I certainly have always acknowledged and continue to acknowledge that it was an incredible training ground for me as a producer because I worked on so many new musicals and worked with so many different people. I had the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes, and you learn from your mistakes. And it’s been great for me also to see a lot of the early career writers I worked with who are now established writers. That’s always thrilling.
“Plus, working with the revivals at the Opera House (in East Haddam) with all of the amazing, wonderful, talented musical theater icons — to know them and to have those long-term relationships, it’s a great thing.”