When Broadway's not the Beeline to Betterment You'd Believed
- Rebecca Burnham
- Aug 21
- 9 min read
Fourteen years in the bureaucracy-bound Chicago public school system taught Marva Collins that there had to be a better way to teach children. And peddling a Broadway musical, Marva!, has taught John Kunich a similar lesson: there has to be a better way to bring transformative stories to the stage.
Kunich describes himself as a “fish out of water” when it comes to musical theatre. Nonetheless, his musical about Marva’s incomparably successful approach to teaching inner city kids has gotten further down the path toward celebrated stages than most. He’s had a contract with some Tony Award winning producers, and has been trying for years to find a director to do his show. The lengthy delays and numerous challenges baked into this experience have enlightened him to the mountain of obstacles in the way of a Broadway hit. Not that he’s giving up on that dream, but he’s trying to blaze a new path to get to the summit sooner rather than later.
What’s driving him is neither fame nor fortune, at least not for himself. Though he claims a “king-sized ego,” Kunich’s mission and motive are not to have his name up in lights, but to inspire audiences and to raise revenue in order to resurrect and expand on Marva’s dream. He wants to reopen the life-changing inner-city schools she founded, schools that were shut down in 2008 because of inadequate finances. He is also determined to launch non-profit Marva! Skills for Life centers in the inner cities of major metropolitan areas to equip marginalized people with practical training and enable them to take hold of their own destinies and escape the cycle of poverty.
It’s a dream that Marva Collins herself approved before she passed away in 2015. A black woman from Alabama, she was raised during the Jim Crow era by parents who saw themselves and their children as anybody’s equal. She obtained her degree from Clark College, while it was still segregated. Two years later, she moved to Chicago where she taught as a substitute at a public elementary school in the inner city for 14 years.
There she learned that the striking down of segregated schooling didn’t do much to change the prospects for black children…not when by-the-book bureaucrats running the public system saw them as incapable, doomed by circumstances to struggle, fail and drop out. She believed her students were rich with potential, and encouraged her third-graders to apply their fledgling reading skills to classic texts like Don Quixote and the works of Plato. Then the school threw out phonics instruction and insisted that she trade in Moby Dick for simplistic whole language primers about Dick, Jane and Spot.
That was when she resigned her position and liquidated her pension in order to launch a private school in the upstairs apartment of her home. Her first students in 1975 were two of her own children and several from her neighborhood whose families sent them on a pay-what-you-can basis. She was strong on vision and short on funds. She couldn’t even afford a teacher’s desk. But she decided she didn’t need one. She’d be on her feet all day anyway, either teaching the class as a whole or supporting them one on one at their individual desks.
Her curriculum was based in the classics. But it wasn’t the curriculum she was teaching; it was the children. And she repeatedly reinforced a few key messages that she knew they needed to learn: success comes in “cans” not in “cannots”; your “I will” is more important than your IQ; if you can’t make a mistake you can’t make anything; and every child can be a real achiever.
The results were stunning. At the end of the first year, she signed up all her students for standardized tests. Every one of them tested at least five levels above their grade. These were not extraordinary, handpicked students. One of them had been kicked out of the public school partway through the year, for problem behaviors. Another had been diagnosed with developmental disabilities and told she would never learn to read. But every one of them succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of anyone but Marva.
Kunich, who had himself grown up in a fairly poor neighbourhood of Chicago, first learned about Marva and her school in 1979, when she was featured on an episode of 60 minutes. He was astounded that such a thing was happening in the heart of the ghetto, just a few miles from where he grew up. In 1981, when a made-for-TV movie The Marva Collins Story starring Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman aired, he was moved to tears and reached out to Mrs. Collins. She invited him to come and see the school, and they became firm friends. He brought his mother on several follow-up visits and continued to marvel at how Marva was able to inculcate not only academic excellence but also social confidence and emotional resilience in her students. On one of their visits, a little African-American boy, about eight years old, greeted Kunich’s mother, a stranger to him, with a big, spontaneous hug.
Kunich began dreaming of someday helping Marva with her work. It was around that time that some friends told him they thought the tunes he wrote in his spare time were catchy enough that he ought to write a musical. “About what?” he asked.
“You’re always talking about Marva Collins and her school. How about that?” came the answer.
That was decades ago. Beginning in March of 1996, he wrote the script and the music and lyrics for all 21 songs while juggling a 20-year career in the Air Force, a Harvard Law School education, and 12 years as a full-time law professor. He shared the ongoing work with Mrs. Collins and she sent some of his songs on to her friend and supporter, the famous record producer Quincy Jones, who then called Kunich and told him, “It’s all great, man! It’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited about anything.”
Marva’s favorite was the song that has become the musical’s finale: “Why I Teach.” It encapsulated her life so well that she asked for it to be sung at her funeral (in 2015).
Unfortunately, by the time she passed away, her school had closed because of a lack of funding. Marva didn’t want the strings that were attached to government funding. But many of her students came from homes that didn’t have the means to pay private school tuition. Donations poured in after the airing of the 60 Minutes episodes (first in 1979 and then a follow-up fifteen years later) and the TV movie. But then they dried up.
Kunich envisions raising money with his Marva! musical both to reopen Marva’s school (which would now be run by her former pupils) and to launch and sustain inner city community centers that teach the life skills necessary to help people break the cycle of poverty. However, after many frustrating experiences working with Broadway producers and agents, he has learned that he needs to pursue an alternate route to bring that dream into reality. He was stunned to discover how difficult and time-consuming it is to get a show actually produced on Broadway.
After signing with producers, he learned that they had to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in “front money” to pay retainers for the key members of the team that would bring his story to the stage. Then, they started working on signing a director. But, to Kunich’s astonishment, Broadway etiquette demands that you not approach the person you have in mind directly. You need to go through their agent and wait patiently, even if five months go by without a response. And then, if you get the word that, although the director loves your script, he or she won’t be available, you have to start all over… “because The System dictates that you never approach more than one prospective team member at the same time!” The same process repeats, but with even more complications and delays, when you start looking for a choreographer, set designer, costume designer, casting director, and eventually doing the actual casting of performers.
But those hurdles pale in comparison to “the task of finding a no-kidding vacant Broadway theatre owned by people willing to accept the risk of putting on your show.” That logjam of shows waiting and competing years and years for an available Broadway theatre reminds Kunich of reports he’s read about mountain climbers lining up just below the summit of Mount Everest, literally waiting in line to get a chance at the top. Kunich says, “There are only a few weeks every year at most when the weather is suitable for a summit attempt, and only one main approach to the top, and there are only so many sherpas available to help people with their gear, so you have this long traffic jam of people stacked up just below the Hillary Step of the world’s tallest peak. That's the way it is trying to get a Broadway theater.”
There are a number of reasons for the difficulty, in addition to the small, painfully finite number of theatres that are formally considered “Broadway”. A Broadway Musical may cost tens of millions of dollars to produce. If the show does very well, those costs are recouped, and more. Investors stand to make massive profits with hits that run for a decade or longer. But with ever-rising operating costs and so few venues on Broadway, many shows that make it all the way through the maze of pre-opening challenges fail to recoup, and end up losing money. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was the most expensive Broadway musical yet, with a budget of $75 million. With music and lyrics by U2’s Bono and the Edge, and the wildly-popular superhero Spider-Man as its focus, it looked like a sure win. But it wasn’t. It closed after 3 years with massive financial losses amounting to about $60 million. Failure to recoup is a costly fate that befalls the vast majority of Broadway shows, despite any advantages and merits they might have.
Theatre managers are “notoriously and understandably risk-averse and obsessed with the bottom line of profits and losses.” They want to bet on what seems like a sure thing, not something new from an unknown creator. So they favor big names, like Andrew Lloyd Webber, and they favor shows that already have a built-in, committed audience like jukebox musicals based on hit music (like Mamma Mia, Beautiful Noise, Wonderful World, and Beautiful), countless revivals of past hits, and a long series of stage adaptations of blockbuster movies.
In that kind of environment, Kunich says, “I hope Marva! gets to the stage while I’m still alive.” But his network of Marva! Skills for Life non-profit training centers are needed now. “There are millions of people in need who are suffering every day and can’t wait years and years for a Broadway-fueled stream of money to help them.” So he’s forming a 501(c)(3) public charity, the Marva! Skills For Life Foundation, that aims to attract enough donors to open its first center in flood-ravaged Asheville, North Carolina. This route still won’t be easy, but at least it has a chance to begin helping people much earlier than a distant Broadway success. Kunich intends to make the Asheville center his “proof of concept” location and then persuade more people to contribute to the founding of more centers in many more cities. The needs are immense, and Kunich isn’t interested in letting all those people down.
As for his Marva! musical, he has a new plan to premiere it on a less backlogged stage that doesn’t book ten years in advance, “in a community that’s not mired in dysfunctional Broadway ‘rules’”. He’s hoping that by working with community theatres, he’ll be able to create a buzz about Marva! and if that energy becomes big enough, it could open the doors to a Broadway run. His endless loop of hurry-up-and-wait has convinced him that “the gatekeepers on Broadway lack the imagination to see a vision that isn’t right there in front of them.”
But even if it doesn’t, getting the show on community stages where it can inspire audiences and expand their horizons would be a big win. Beyond that, its message may change the lives of cast and crew members, who will have the opportunity to engage with it for months, so that it becomes a part of who they are.
Inspiring the people who engage with the show should be the first consideration of those who put on theatre, Kunich says. “If people spend their hard-earned money to buy tickets to a show… they’re making a real sacrifice… and I’m convinced that most people… want to have a positive experience in the theatre. They want to be inspired. They want to feel better about themselves and their future. They want to feel that their whole family can be uplifted by this fun, lively, catchy music and its message of hope and unity and overcoming adversity rather than despair and sorrow and tragedy… I wrote Marva! specifically to have that kind of impact, that people will cry but it’ll be tears of joy.”
This is a sentiment to which I easily relate. It’s a major reason for the existence of Summit Stages.
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