Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Everything is Possible

A personal recollection, if you'll indulge me. Way back when I first started covering the Broadway by the Year concerts, I met a young woman whose enthusiasm for musical theater gave me hope for the future of the artform. She was a college student, I learned, and as we met up at shows and events around the city, I was repeatedly amazed at her wealth of knowledge about musical theater. Even before graduation, she was already deeply involved in the professional theater community, and in the very few years since, Jennifer Ashley Tepper has produced several off-Broadway shows. On Sunday night, she will be presenting an original concert at the Laurie Beechman Theater.

At 23 (almost 24, she adds quickly--"But that shows you how young I am, that I just said that!"), Tepper's CV is enviable to people twice her age. At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she majored in dramatic writing, but also studied directing and producing. "NYU's great in that I kind of turned it into what I wanted to be learning," she says. "For my thesis for dramatic writing, I adapted Ted Chapin's book Everything was Possible into a screenplay. It taught me more about useful theater history and adapting history into a dramatic form."

While at the university, Tepper and some like-minded friends (including Jay Johnson of Hair and Bryan Fogarty of Second Stage) formed an organization called "ACTZ" to produce musical theater showcases. Tepper selected several songs for the show, and contacted the songwriters. "I decided to write to everyone who had a song in the show, so literally everyone from Brian Lowdermilk to Marvin Hamlisch got a letter from me...saying that our organization was benefiting Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS. I think I even mentioned that it was a bunch of kids from NYU who loved musical theater and just wanted to create stuff. And we raised a lot of money, too, for BC/EFA," she adds proudly. Even better, quite a few of the songwriters actually came to the showcase, including Lowdermilk and Hamlisch.

That early experience with producing launched Tepper's relationship to [title of show], which continued through the musical's Broadway run. "It was 2006 and everyone was obsessed with [title of show] at the Vineyard, including me," she recalls, "And a ton of the kids in the show--by 'kids' I mean kids my own age--loved it and I really wanted 'A Way Back to Then' to be in [it]." Tepper had already met the musical's creators casually and told them how much she enjoyed their work, and was able to contact Jeff Bowen to get permission to include the song in the revue. "And it wasn't published yet, they were still working on those things, so they were very sad that it couldn't be in the show. But when the show came around, I invited them anyway and they all came, which was so above and beyond and nice and amazing. Actually, Jeff and Hunter [Bell] came and [director] Michael [Berresse] was doing A Chorus Line, and one of the songs in our show was 'What I Did for Love,' and I will never, ever forget that Jeff held up the phone for Michael to hear it."

From that point on, Tepper kept in touch with all of the [title of show] group. At the end of the summer, Bowen and Bell wanted to hire what Tepper calls "an intern helper monkey" to help with what became The [title of show] Show on YouTube. She spent the next year working with them on the project, and when the show was announced for Broadway, Berresse brought her along as his assistant, giving her a chance to be involved in both the show and the business.

Not long after [title of show]'s Broadway run, Tepper became a part of what has colloquially become known as the Joe Iconis Family, a group of people who regularly work on musicals and concerts by the award-winning composer and lyricist. "I had worked with Sarah Katz on [title of show], she was one of our producers, and she was going to produce Things To Ruin at Second Stage, and that was when I first got involved, because we had talked about me being a part of it. And that was the first time I actually worked with Joe, although I knew all of them before that, which, that was fun."

The process of creating a show with both groups, Tepper says, was remarkably similar. "It's amazing to have a group of people that are like a family, but that all believe in the same kind of theatre and all have their own language with each other," she says. "Those guys love musical theater and...they go and create something so unique and original. And it's a great thing." Using her knowledge of the business, Tepper began producing Iconis' shows. "Nobody loves musical theater more than Joe Iconis. Nobody," she says. "He would vie for the crown with even some of our biggest 'Tossers.' He's great that way, and in the same way that I love producing his stuff, because I feel like he has new things to say and he's not afraid to say them. He's ridiculously honest, which is another [title of show] thing," she adds. "Everything that Jeff and Hunter write comes from their gut, and everything that Joe writes comes from his gut, and if I was going to make a list of 10 musical theater writers that have that, I feel like, as much as I love musical theater, it would be a challenge."

As a fledgling producer, Tepper's involvement with Iconis and frequent Iconis director John Simpkins has helped her spread her wings. "He lets me produce in a way that I feel is very unique to us," she says. "We have a level of trust because, I think, we see eye-to-eye on so many things." The three, she says, are "on the same wavelength" while each focusing on their individual responsibilities for the project. "And it definitely taught me how being a producer is like pulling all of the strings, making sure that every aspect of what's going on is going on completely, and as perfectly as it can be," she says. "And it's taught me a lot about that, because I think I was always doing producing without knowing it. I feel like, in a way, being the assistant director is more akin to producing than it is directing, which is so weird. It's all about communicating with the creative staff or the director, holding all of the pieces together and doing administrative stuff for the director. And working with Michael Grief or other directors that I've assisted, I feel like I've done a good deal of holding things together, which is what a producer does. So it's just a path, a winding path."

Tepper's latest producing challenge is an original concert, inspired--of all things--by a project she started on Facebook, collecting what she describes as "rare and inspiring" photos of Broadway shows. She began working with her close friend Kevin Michael Murphy and musical director Caleb Hoyer to select songs from shows that they felt were inspiring, even if they only ran briefly--hence the title of the concert: If It Only Even Runs a Minute, from a somewhat tragically prescient lyric in Merrily We Roll Along. "We're calling it 'An Evening of Rare and Inspiring Songs, Anecdotes and Photos,'" Tepper says. While she was reluctant to reveal too many details about who would sing what, she did say that Autumn Hurlbert from Legally Blonde will be singing "Lila Tremaine" from Fade Out, Fade In, and that Jay Johnson would be singing a song from Marilyn: An American Fable.

As a young producer, Tepper feels that producing a show doesn't need to be overwhelmingly difficult. "Jeff Bowen says that he gets messages all of the time, people asking him, 'How do I start writing? How do I start my career as a writer?' And he always says, 'This is so ridiculous, but you just start writing and you keep writing.' So I think, if you want to produce in New York and if you want to be a part of that theatre process, then get involved. You network enough that you find people that have similar headsets--NYMF is a great outlet--and you just do it...Find people whom you love to collaborate with and just do something, even if it's a reading for twenty people in your living room. I love that about people in New York and people in the theater industry, because that's how it all starts."