Risky Business

Break a Leg? More Like Break an Arm. With the Broadway Musical Dear Evan Hansen a Bold Producer and a Crack Creative Team Gambled Big on the Unabashedly Emotional Tale of a Severely Anxious High School Misfit. Here’s How They Overcame Their Own Nerves to Make the Hit Happen.

- Caitlin Brody

LIKE SO MANY GREAT NOTIONS, this one began over food. Broadway producer Stacey Mindich was looking to sink her teeth (and money) into a new show, and she had her sights set on two young songwriters she had previously commissioned to adapt the 1991 film Dogfight. “I knew they had more talent in their fingertips than some people have in their whole bodies,” she says of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (now 31 and 32, respectively). She was right: The duo just took home a Golden Globe for their work on La La Land.

Mindich had long been “obsessed” with the pair’s song cycle Edges, which they wrote as undergrads, but the three didn’t necessarily start off on the right foot. Before they ever worked together, “I was a fan and sent them a check to buy a demo from their website—but I never got it,” Mindich, 52, says with a laugh. “When they realized that I was a producer, they freaked out.” (Apparently they didn’t freak out that much: To this day, she has never received the demo.) The trio reconvened in spring of 2009 for a meal on Manhattan’s Upper West Side— “They were very hungry in those days,” Mindich says—and she asked if they’d been sitting on any passion projects they simply didn’t have the means to pursue. That’s when Pasek and Paul first shared their idea for what would become Dear Evan Hansen.

Now that kernel has grown into a bona fide Broadway hit, complete with stellar reviews, more than $15 million in advance sales, and a whole lot of Tony buzz. But it took nearly eight years to get there.