Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at what the spring has in store for Rick Miramontez, a leading Broadway press agent.
Rick Miramontez is both a night owl and an early bird.
He has to be. As the president of DKC/O&M, the theatrical public relations agency he founded in 2006, he is always on call. His agency represents eight shows currently running on Broadway, including “Hadestown” and “MJ.”
And the nine-day stretch from April 17 to 25 — when 12 plays and musicals will open by the cutoff date to be eligible for Tony Award nominations — is the equivalent of the theatrical Super Bowl.
“It’s absolutely seven days a week right now,” Miramontez said in a recent phone conversation from his office, which sits in a penthouse on West 39th Street above the Drama Book Shop.
April is always a busy time for Broadway openings. Like the crush of Oscar hopefuls that open in late December, productions want to open as close as possible to the Tonys deadline to be fresh in the minds of nominators and voters. Tony nominations will be announced on April 30, and the televised awards show takes place on June 16.
But this spring seems especially crammed, even though Broadway attendance still has not returned to prepandemic levels, and grosses were down 14 percent as of early March compared with the same period in 2020. There are 36 shows running on Broadway — and producers and investors are anxious about whether there are enough ticket buyers to support them all.
“If we have lost some of the traditional audience — and I do believe that is true — then what we have right now is a challenge to figure out where to make that up and find a new audience,” said Miramontez, whose agency represents five of the new shows this season. They include an Eddie Redmayne-led revival of the musical “Cabaret”; “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz; and the Off Broadway smash “Stereophonic,” a behind-the-music play about a disputatious band recording a studio album.
A typical day for Miramontez begins at 4 a.m., he said. He maps out a schedule for the day and checks in on his four email accounts — he has two assistants to help monitor the main one, which, on one recent weekday, had received 425 messages — before taking a 20-minute taxi ride from his home in Lower Manhattan to the office.
He starts the day there with a meeting with some members of his team of 19, most of them in their 20s and 30s. Though they work for the same agency, the publicists represent competing shows, so they keep their Tony campaign strategies close to the vest.
“Ideally each representative handles a couple of shows — and not more than a couple — because they really are in charge of the day-to-day details,” Miramontez said.
Shows become the babies of publicists. They devise strategies to help find an audience, including writing news releases, pitching stories to journalists and coordinating press nights.
“It’s incumbent on me to keep their plate full but not overextend them,” said Miramontez, who is in his 60s and began his career as the press director of the Center Theater Group/ Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles in 1982. He later ran one of the most famous press campaigns in Broadway history from 2011 to 2014 while representing the accident-plagued musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
After all his shows open and nominations are announced, it’s a six-week race to the finish. Celebrity audience members will be courted. Photo ops will abound. Billboards in Times Square are likely to light up with the faces of actors, including Redmayne and Daniel Radcliffe, a star of one of this season’s hottest tickets, a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”
Sleep, needless to say, will be scarce.
But a Tony would be worth all the effort, Miramontez said, if one of his shows were to take home the coveted prize for best musical, which still holds a lot of weight. An award means a bump in ticket sales and improved marketing for road tours.
“I think the prestige of a Tony Award for the life of a show is priceless, quite frankly,” he said.
Weather
It will be a mostly cloudy day with temperatures in the high 50s. At night, temperatures drop to the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until April 23 (Passover).
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Instinctive
Dear Diary:
I took the Q to Brighton Beach in June 2022. I was on my way to a cafe I had been to as a child.
There was one problem: I didn’t know the name or the exact address, only that it was somewhere in that neighborhood and had a blue awning.
I had been introduced to the cafe by the woman who cared for my grandmother after Alzheimer’s disease had incapacitated her.
Both women had left my life by then, but as I walked west that day looking for the blue awning, I was accompanied by a new woman. Although I did not know it then, she would become the apple of my eye.
After getting off the train and descending to street level, we began to wander along Brighton Beach Avenue.
In the distance, I saw a speck of bright blue, and we walked toward it. Soon, we were standing in front of a cafe, and I knew it was the place.
— Jake Stevenson
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. Alyson Krueger will be here tomorrow. S.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
