Goodspeed names new team to lead theater
Goodspeed Musicals has announced that Donna Lynn Hilton is its new artistic director and David Byrd its new managing director.
Those aren’t just new leaders, they’re whole new job titles at the Goodspeed, which for more than 60 years had a single executive director at the helm.
Hilton is the first female leader in the theater’s history, and the first not to be named Michael. Michael Price was executive director from 1959 to 2014, followed by Michael Gennaro. In February 2020, Gennaro announced that he would retire at the end of that year.
Byrd starts in his Goodspeed position in mid-February, while Hilton has already begun. Someone will eventually be brought on board to cover the producer role she previously held.
The new co-leaders were chosen following a national search, though Hilton has been with the Goodspeed for decades and Byrd has previous Connecticut theater credits on his resume. They had not met prior to being given the jobs.
Prior to the search, the Goodspeed decided to change its leadership model from a sole executive director to the paired model of an artistic director and a managing director, followed by many major regional theaters around the country.
Hilton has worked at Goodspeed since 1988, advancing from stage manager to producer, the position she’s held since 2017. Among her recent responsibilities were to produce the musicals staged at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam and the smaller Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, as well as oversee two musical theater development programs: the Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals and the Johnny Mercer Writers Grove.
Artistic directors typically finalize a theater’s season, and Hilton has been actively involved in Goodspeed’s season planning for years. Indeed, she was involved in putting the (delayed) 2020 season together and describes it as representative of “what a Donna Lynn Hilton season would be like.”
The difference now is that she doesn’t need to convince others or work around existing projects. “My passion will be able to speak first,” she says. Price and Gennaro were both very collaborative, very open to my ideas,” she says, “but there were opportunities I was not able to pursue.”
Asked to name a project that exemplifies what she has been able to bring to the Goodspeed in the past, Hilton immediately answers ‘Showboat.’ From having stage managed a production decades ago, she was convinced that the classic musical, with its imposing setting and large cast, could work on the intimate Goodspeed stage. She asked Rob Ruggiero (a frequent Goodspeed director and producing artistic director of TheaterWorks Hartford) to direct, though he had no prior experience with the show. The production was a massive hit, and Ruggiero’s adaptation of the script was used for a subsequent production in London.
Hilton also gives “Holiday Inn,” adapted from the Irving Berlin-scored movie, as an example of a project she initiated. After the stage version had its world premiere at Goodspeed, directed by Gordon Greenberg, it went to Broadway and a national tour.
Hilton plans to continue hiring Ruggiero, Greenberg and others whom she calls “the Goodspeed stalwarts” — directors Jenn Thompson and Gabriel Barre are others — for future projects. “But I’m also going to bring new voices into the fold,” she promises, including more women and artists of colors on shows’ creative teams. “I will approach it like this: ‘Hello, Mr. or Ms. Director. What are you interested in doing?’ Whether it’s new works or classics.”
Getting to know the audience is also of huge importance to new managing director David Byrd. “In my career, the areas that have been the most fulfilling have to do with community engagement. It’s really important to my work. So is financial stability, being sure that everything is in order, so we can plan strategically.” A self-described optimist, he says “I feel it’s important to lift those up around me. The human capital piece of our work is never lost on me. Lifting up others is something I take great joy in.”
Byrd received his MFA in theater management from the Yale School of Drama in 2006. From 2010-13 he was the marketing director at Westport Country
Playhouse. Other theaters he’s worked at include Triad Stage in North Carolina, the Clarence Brown Theatre at the University of Tennessee and Virginia Stage Company, where he’s been for the last three years.
At Goodspeed, “my focus,” Byrd continues, “is on getting us open, but also finding a model for what sustainability is now.” Like Hilton, he is committed to developing new works, often a risky proposition but one he feels is crucial to the Goodspeed mission.”
“Fundraising is a big part of all of this,” Byrd says. He sees the current shutdown as a useful time to reconsider how the theater works. “It’s quiet right now, but anything but quiet because we are trying to survive. When the planes are grounded, it’s time to fix the planes.”
Goodspeed has been dark since March due to the coronavirus. The 2020 schedule was reworked several times in hopes of reopening, but ultimately canceled altogether. A series of outdoor concerts were held on the Goodspeed Opera House lawn over the summer. The current plan, announced in September, is for the theater to reopen in June 2021 with a two-show season (shortened from the usual three mainstage Goodspeed Opera House musicals). Patrons will be given the option to see the shows live or stream them at home. “Realistically, none of us are certain that the plans to return in summer will work out,” Hilton says. “Right now, we’re not allowed to do any more than we could last summer.”
The live or streaming options, the outreach to audiences, the strengthening of the overall operations mark the change in leadership. “I will be using everything I know from my 32 years at Goodspeed,” Hilton says. “I know Goodspeed so well. I know these audiences so well. I have this innate ability now to understand what they will respond to. I am assisted by that history.”
More information on the Goodspeed is at goodspeed. org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@ courant.com.