05-05-2025
'Hamilton,' 'Rent' producer Jeffrey Seller, a metro Detroit native, gets candid in memoir
About a year before his bar mitzvah in 1977, Jeffrey Seller was in Hebrew class at Temple Israel synagogue when the teacher, in the midst of talking about the history of the Warsaw Ghetto, asked whether anyone knew a place in America that had similarly poor conditions.
Nobody spoke up, so the teacher gave the example of a nearby Oak Park neighborhood behind an A&P grocery story on 9 Mile, where the houses were small, not made of bricks and had no basements and garages. 'There's a colloquial name for it,' he said. 'They call it Cardboard Village.'
As Seller describes in his new memoir, 'Theater Kids,' he was afraid that someone would find out he lived there. 'I stayed still and silent, holding my breath, trying to resist the formation of tears behind my eyes, hoping that this discussion would pass, hoping I would not be discovered,' he writes.
Last week, speaking by phone, Seller says that this was one of the most difficult vignettes to put down on paper for the book, which officially debuts May 6.
'That story is so painful to me, I wish I made it up,' he says. At the same time, Seller has empathy for the teacher, who would be sad to know about Seller's reaction. "This is how poor we were and how it was. The idea that any of the students at Temple Israel could possibly have lived in that neighborhood was so far beyond his comprehension.'
Seller is scheduled to kick off his book tour May 6 at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts in West Bloomfield as part of the Detroit Jewish Film Festival. He will be in conversation that evening with another Detroit native, Tony nominee Douglas Sills of HBO's "The Gilded Age."
Seller says it is fitting for him to return to the suburbs of Detroit for the event because that is "the place in which the whole book starts."
'Theater Kid' (subtitled "A Broadway Memoir"), is the coming-of-age and career success story of Sellers, who grew up to become an icon of contemporary musical theater as a producer of the Tony Award-winning shows 'Rent,' 'Avenue Q,' 'In the Heights' and 'Hamilton.' The productions that Sellers has overseen have accumulated 22 Tony wins, earned a gross of $4.6 billion from the Broadway productions and subsequent tours and drawn more 43 million audience members.
Seller is recognized as the only producer with two Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals to his credit, 'Rent' and 'Hamilton,' both of which were groundbreaking cultural achievements. With "Rent," he also helped create a discounted ticket lottery to make his musicals more affordable for a wider audience.
As described by its publisher, Simon & Schuster," "Theater Kid" reveals Seller's early years as 'a kid coming to terms with his adoption, trying to understand his sexuality, and determined to escape his dysfunctional household in a poor neighborhood just outside Detroit.'
What sets the memoir apart from other works about a difficult childhood that fuels a determination for better future is Seller's approach. He writes "Theater Kid" with the vividness of a graphic novel, the immediacy of a play, the intensity of a big-screen movie. Candid, sometimes explicit about his sexual awakening, fearless about revealing his family's chaos and conflicts and yet filled with love for even his volatile father, 'Theater Kid' reads like the autobiography of someone who has lived with hard truths and made peace with them through his artistry.
'I don't know that the world needed another memoir about being poor, gay, adopted, coming to New York, realizing the American dream. We've had a lot of those,' says Seller during a phone interview.
'What I thought the world needed at this moment was, if I was going to do this, the only way that I thought to justify it is to go all the way into the core of my insecurities, shame, and deepest feelings and expose me as nakedly as I could. Because I thought that would illuminate the story in a way that makes it, hopefully, pertinent and essential.'
Seller, 60, an alumnus of Oak Park High School and the University of Michigan, divides the book into three acts, which is fitting given how many of the anecdotes seem like scenes from one of his Broadway hits. Act One is mostly about his family and his school years. Act Two covers his move to New York City and his experiences with 'Rent.' Act Three includes the journey of 'Hamilton' and Seller's search for his biological parents, a quest that 'wouldn't stop chasing me as I passed forty years old and became a parent of two beautiful adopted children.'
Growing up, Seller was captivated by theater and absorbed everything he could about it, from the Tony Awards on TV to touring productions at the Fisher Theatre and cast albums of Broadway hits. He was a sponge for learning the process of creating and staging shows, whether he was acting with Royal Oak's Stagecrafters youth troupe, singing in the children's chorus of 'Carmen' with Michigan Opera Theatre or working as the drama director at Camp Tamarack in northern Oakland County during summer college breaks.
An early chapter recalls his pivotal moment of winning a role in fourth grade as a sailor in the annual Purim play at Temple Israel (then located in Detroit, now in West Bloomfield), which was a mashup of the story of Queen Esther and the musical 'South Pacific." Recalling the magical process of rehearsing and performing, he writes: 'Being in a play for the first time makes me happy. Wait. That's not good enough. Being in a play changes my life; I am filled with purpose for the first time.'
From then on, Seller was devoted to learning more about the basics of the craft that would make him famous. He recalls appearing in eighth grade in a Stagecrafters production of a children's play called 'Popcorn Pete' and noticing that 'one, the title was no good, two the play wasn't very good and three, the audiences were very small.' Seller asked who chose 'Popcorn Pete' and found out that there was a play-reading committee, 'I said, 'I want to be on the play-reading committee.' That was my first leap into producing," he notes.
Seller is generous about thanking his various teachers and mentors for their support. (He titles one chapter 'Miss Shively' after a Frost Middle School teacher.) But while his world was opening up on the stage, he faced problems at home. His father, left with brain damage after a devastating motorcycle accident, occasionally served court papers and summonses and later took up a side gig performing as a clown. His mother worked steadily at a drugstore to support them. When his father lost his temper at their Cardboard Village house with no basement for tornado protection, Seller writes, "he is like another tornado from which we cannot hide."
Seller looks back on his dad's bad choices with compassion. 'My father's presence was gigantic, both physically, vocally, emotionally and behaviorally. Here I was a twig, and he was a 6-foot-3, 250-pound man with a booming, sometimes scary, often times loving voice," he says. "My father was a man not in control of himself, a man out of control. The consequences of which resulted in two bankruptcies, one motorcycle accident, a family on welfare, and a tremendous amount of pain and suffering"
He continues: "And yet, this was also the man who said the same four words to me over and over any time I asked if I could go to an audition or rehearsal or a new place, which was, 'Get in the car.' He drove me to every one of those auditions and every one of those rehearsals.'
Asked how long it took to write the memoir, Seller says it was somewhere between five and 30 years. He elaborates by explaining that he struggled with putting his memories on the page. It took about five years to complete the book, but two of the childhood tales it includes are from a writing class he attended at New York City's New School in the 1990s.
He says he followed one guide while writing the book and that was being truthful. "I was always guided first by the truth and I thought, we'll deal with everybody else's feelings later.' Such transparency 'was essential to the existence of the book,' according to Seller, because he wrote it "in so many ways for younger people, particularly for young gay men who don't know anything about what they're about to encounter.'
He adds, 'I thought if I show how it went for me, it will affirm their feelings and show them that they're going to figure it out, too.'
Seller's father died 10 years ago, long before there even was a memoir. He says he deeply wanted to share "Theater Kid" with his mother, who passed away about a year ago from pancreatic cancer. Because of her fast-moving illness, he never told her about the book.
'I really, really looked forward to sharing it with my mom, knowing that it would be painful for her, it would stir up a lot of painful memories for her and that it would stir up her own sense of shame and guilt, but it would also activate her pride and her love,' he says. 'In all the years I was writing it, I didn't talk about it because I didn't know if it would ever be published anyway. I wrote it for me without regard to its ultimate destiny.'
Seller dedicates the book to the memory of his mother and father.
These days, Seller, who calls southeast Michigan an essential part of American arts, is spending a lot of time in the Motor City with 'my new partner in life and love,' Yuval Sharon, the acclaimed artistic director of Detroit Opera.
'How lucky am I that my own hometown of Detroit helped me come together with the new love of my life,' he says, crediting Mary Kramer, a Detroit Opera board of directors vice chair and former publisher of Crain's Detroit Business, with introducing him to Sharon.
He says he also has a standing date, for the fourth year in a row, to teach a course in politics and theater at the University of Michigan once a week during the fall semester.
Speaking of politics, Seller is still immersed in the intersection between it and "Hamilton." Recounted in "Theater Kid" is the behind-the-scenes story of the time Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the show in 2016.
It was Seller who wrote the first draft of a short speech that actor Brandon Victor Dixon ended up reading from the stage to Pence at the end of the performance. It addressed concerns regarding the Trump administration's commitment to upholding "our inalienable rights" and shared the hope that "this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us."
In March, plans for "Hamilton" to be performed at the Kennedy Center as part of the 250th anniversary commemoration of the Declaration of Independence were canceled as a result of President Donald Trump removing Democratic members from the center's formerly bipartisan board and making himself its chairman. Says Seller: "We were not going to let that now deeply politicized, right-wing organization use the profits from 'Hamilton' to further its agenda. … Making the decision was easy. Implementing it required care and thought.'
Given the imprint that "Hamilton" and "Rent" have made on the evolution of theater, it's fair to ask: Does Seller have some sort of zeitgeist meter that can sense when musicals are going to be transformative?
'I am just following my heart and hoping that others are affected by my shows in the same way I am,' he insists 'I don't know what the zeitgeist will be tomorrow. I only know what thrills me, surprises me and pleases me. I just try to make the show that will please me the most and then am lucky when it pleases thousands, or tens of thousands, or in the case of 'Hamilton' or 'Rent,' millions of others as well.'
Seller says his faith in the future of art is steadfast. 'I always have faith in the next generation to innovate and to bring forth, ingenuity and creativity and new ways of looking at the confusing world in which we live.'
Being a producer seeps into everything that Seller does, he concedes, from planning an impromptu brunch to making decisions for the audio version of 'Theater Kid.' Although the custom for authors is to read their memoirs in their entiretly, he says he didn't want to just hear his own voice.
Instead, he gathered a cast that includes Seller, "Hamilton" star and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, and actors Darren Criss, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renee Elise Goldsberry, among several others, to play different characters.
Says Seller, 'The audiobook is kind of like a stage reading. … I couldn't resist."
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'Hamilton' producer's memoir is candid about turbulent metro Detroit years
