There’s No Business Like Show Business

Jennifer Melin Miller’s skills in strategy and marketing took her from theater fan to Tony Award-winning producer

Each month when Jennifer Melin Miller (BBA ’94) heads to New York, she has a very specific goal: to fall in love.

Her trips to the Big Apple have nothing to do with romance, however. They have everything to do with finding a play in development that moves her and sparks a desire to invest or take on a bigger role in bringing it to the stage. It’s a formula that brought her a Tony Award last June and puts her behind the scenes of popular theatrical productions on Broadway and beyond.

“People ask if it’s my experience with arts that has made me successful in investing or producing on Broadway, but what it comes down to is business,” says Miller. “Each show is like an individual company that is being run.”

Miller earned the Tony Award as a co-producer for the musical Hadestown, which won eight awards including Best Musical. That musical featured fellow Badger André De Shields (BA '70), who was an original cast member and won a Tony as Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

Miller’s production company, Minneapolis-based North Star Theatricals, has also invested in and/or produced several shows since 2015, including Jagged Little Pill, Mean Girls, Hello Dolly!, and Waitress. A producer’s role can be as simple as investing, or a more involved role that Miller equates to being on a corporate board. As a co-producer of Hadestown, Miller’s role went beyond investing to advising on strategy and marketing, too.

“The business of Broadway is fascinating,” she says. “I always say I’m a businessperson and a talentless theater fan.”

Yet a show needs the talents of someone who believes in it and helps bring it to the stage, and doing so has been a dream come true for Miller. She began going to shows while growing up in the Twin Cities. Her parents were in business and she chose that same path, majoring in marketing and management at WSB. An interview set up through WSB’s career center got Miller thinking about living and working in New York. She moved two weeks after graduating to work for News America Marketing and indulged her theater fandom as best she could.

“My office was near Times Square, and any time I had the money, I’d go to the half-price ticket booth to get tickets to anything I could,” she says.

Miller stayed in New York 12 years, with marketing and advertising roles at The New York Times Company, Hearst Magazines, Time Inc., and American Media. She returned to Minneapolis and became senior vice president of international development at Minnetonka Moccasins, a footwear manufacturer. She also earned an MBA at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In 2014, she founded her own company, JMM Consulting. Miller works with one client at a time advising in marketing, managing teams, business development, or strategy.

It was her work in footwear that helped Miller take a big step into the theater world. Heading to Europe for a shoe industry trade show in 2012, she asked a theater director friend to suggest a show for her to see in London. She bought a ticket to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time without knowing anything about it.

“I remember sitting there crying so hard, and I was by myself,” she says. “I was weeping and hanging on to the person sitting next to me, a complete stranger.”

Convinced the show would one day come to Broadway, Miller wanted to invest in it and asked her friend to help her make connections to do so. She invested and her instinct proved correct—the show arrived on Broadway in 2014 and won a Tony Award for Best Play.

Miller had been turned away from past efforts to invest in shows because she had no experience in it. With Curious Incident, her friend vouched for her, and the show’s success sent her on her way. A year after forming North Star for her own theatrical investments, she launched a production partnership, Stone Arch Theatricals, to make larger investments in shows.

For Miller and her partners, the investments are a passion project, not something they liken to a wealth management plan.

“Nobody has a crystal ball, and you can’t make money on them all,” Miller says. “You know enough about the industry and the market to make an informed decision. You take risk in a different way because you really love it.”

Future projects for Miller include this fall’s scheduled Broadway debut of MJ, the Michael Jackson musical, and The Devil Wears Prada, which has its pre-Broadway run in Chicago scheduled for 2021. She also is looking for a project to develop as executive producer, in which she would essentially be the project’s CEO. Like any good love story, it’s worth waiting for the right one to come along.

“It’s been such a gift to be able to spend my time in something I love and care so much about,” she says.