The magic of the MUNY with Rob McClure, Maggie Lakis, and Mike Isaacson
The Playbill Podcast: A Show on BroadwayShow Notes
We here at Playbill hope you are having a great summer. It was a whirlwind, wonderful season on Broadway, capped by the Tony Awards in early June. We have slowed down a bit on podcast episode production to take a little break to catch our breath, but fear not -- we will be back with more Broadway show-focused Playbill Podcast episodes later this summer.
This episode is a special one, focused on a 2025 Tony Award winner: the Municipal Theatre Association of St. Louis, more commonly known as The MUNY, which received the Regional Theatre Tony Award as it celebrates its 107th season. It is the nation’s oldest and largest outdoor musical theater venue, seating a whopping 11,000 at a time, which helps the theater give away 100,000 free seats each season. But even more impressive is just how wild it is to put on a show there, where they need to make a high-quality, larger-than-life version of a Broadway show in only a matter of days.
In this episode, I talk with the creative director of the MUNY, Mike Isaacson, as well as husband and wife actor duo Rob McClure and Maggie Lakis, who are set to play stage married couple Larry and Cynthia Murphy in the MUNY’s Dear Evan Hansen. We talk about the magic of the Muny, what it’s like to put on a show so quickly, and how Dear Evan Hansen is a perfect story for today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Playbill Podcast: A Show on Broadway
"Was there ever a Cat(s) so clever?" That is what people are saying about Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the outstanding revival based on the award-winning and long-running musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, itself based on TS Elliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
If you’ve ever moved to a new town, you know how much of a pain it is. For the Emerson family in the 1980’s, they feel that in a major way as they move to Santa Carla, California. Their biggest obstacles, it turns out? The vampires who reside there.
Throughout his life, the legendary and groundbreaking playwright August Wilson wrote ten plays chronicling the Black experience, decade by decade, throughout the twentieth century; what has been referred to as The Pittsburgh Cycle. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone takes us to the earliest chapter, 1911, just a few decades removed from the end of slavery, in the middle of the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of Black Americans were making their way north.
How does a simple Chess rivalry become more than just one person against another? How about...when both players are involved in a love triangle? And the two players are American and Russian, with their nations locked in a Cold War? This is the backdrop of the musical CHESS, the epic tale by Sir Tim Rice and two members of ABBA, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus.
Have you ever wished to find yourself IN a musical? That is the fate of boyfriend and girlfriend Josh and Melissa, who get trapped in the town of Schmigadoon, influenced by the Golden Age of musical theatre (and named after the Broadway classic Brigadoon). First performed at The Kennedy Center in 2025, the stage rendition of the streaming series of the same name (on AppleTV+) has just been nominated for a staggering 12 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.