Year of the Producer: Eureka Moment – Joseph Smith on How to Succeed in Business…

Joseph Smith is the new chief executive of the 2012 Whatsonstage.com Awards adopted charity Stage One, which supports new producers and productions for the commercial theatre industry. He takes over today, the same day as nominations open and the 2012 Whatsonstage.com Awards campaign gets officially underway – good timing!

Since 2006, Smith has been executive producer for Old Vic Productions, where his current and most recent production credits include Billy Elliot – The Musical worldwide, Jerusalem, Clybourne Park, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

His other producing credits, with partner Michael McCabe (with whom he runs McCabe/Smith), include Million Dollar Quartet and Spring Awakening in the West End. And, like many UK producers, he has increasingly found himself producing across the Atlantic on Broadway.

Here, as part of our ongoing Year of the Producer series, Smith tells us the ‘Eureka Moment’ he decided to back the current Broadway revival of musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which is currently running at the Al Hirschfeld theatre starring previous Whatsonstage.com Award winner (and Harry Potter star) Daniel Radcliffe.

Six days before Christmas 2009 my business partner and I found ourselves on the way to New York to see a private reading of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It was probably the worst time to be leaving London with no planning done for Christmas and no presents bought.

What had driven us to go for those two days was that Daniel Radcliffe was reading and singing the part of J Pierpont Finch, the lead in the show, a role played previously by Robert Morse and then Matthew Broderick. Could he do it? We had to find out as if the reading went well and with a fair wind there was a real chance the project would come together for the 2011 season on Broadway.

It was a freezing day in New York, memory says it was either raining or snowing but certainly the wind was howling a gale and we made our way to a rather ordinary looking rehearsal room way west of Times Square on 42nd street.

There were very few of us in the room but what happened that day inspired everyone. Daniel completely inhabited the role and sang with a sweet voice and acted the hell out of the part. It was clear to me from that reading that he would be a revelation in the role and had the presence to be able to take it on as well as lead the company and project from the front.

We met hastily afterwards with our co-producers in various rooms and corridors and within a short time we had signed up and committed to taking a lead producing position on the show if it was to happen.

I’d been inspired by the reading and the magic that happened in the room that day. It left me completely prepared to commit everything to the project and take a big risk on raising, with my partner, a large slice of the nearly $10m capitalization the project would take to mount. Armed with the experience of attending the reading and channelling that inspiration I never doubted for one moment the musical would succeed. Certainly everyone involved from the creative team to the actors to the producers have always had a shared belief that what we saw in the rehearsal room that day would turn out to be such an artistic and commercial success.

Christmas shopping that year was done tearing around department stores in the hours I had spare before the flight back – Toys R Us saved my life! It had turned out to be a really worthwhile trip.

Joseph Smith will be talking more about the work of Stage One at the industry-attended launch party of the Whatsonstage.com Awards, which takes place at Café de Paris on 2 December 2011 (for your chance to attend, click here).