Sue Frost on Her One-Show-at-a-Time Pledge to Original Broadway Musicals

Veteran producer Sue Frost has built Junkyard Dogs Productions around a single rule: original musicals only, no plays, no revivals, no jukeboxes. On Variety's Strictly Business podcast, the Broadway League chair-elect framed that 19-year discipline as both a business gamble and a calling. "It's a crazy business model, but somebody's got to do it," Frost said.

Frost launched Junkyard Dogs in 2006 with several partners, after producing more than 50 brand-new musicals during a tenure at Goodspeed Musicals. The company has since backed two of the most durable new tuners of the past two decades: "Memphis" and "Come From Away."

Why one show at a time?

Frost explained the bottleneck by quoting back her partners' original logic. "My partners and I decided that we were only going to do original musicals because they're the hardest thing to do and they're the most rewarding," she said. "And that's why we did one at a time, because they take a lot of attention, they take a lot of love and a lot of care, but they have the ability to just have such an incredibly long life."

That long-tail bet has shaped a small but distinct roster:

• No plays. The banner does not stage straight plays.
• No revivals. Re-mounts of earlier titles are off the table.
• No jukebox musicals. Compiled-catalog songbooks are excluded.
• Originality as a mandate. Every project must be a new work.

What 'The Heart' adds to the slate

Junkyard's next production is "The Heart," a musical adapted from Maylis de Kerangal's celebrated 2014 novel. Roundabout Theatre will open the run on Oct. 8. De Kerangal's book, a shortlisted finalist for the Prix Goncourt in France, has not previously been adapted for the Broadway stage.

How Broadway's audience is shifting

Frost, who takes over as chair of the Broadway League, pointed to a demographic pivot in Main Stem ticket buyers. Post-pandemic attendance has settled into a younger profile, she argued, and a cohort of older subscribers has not returned.

"It proves that if you've got something people want to participate in, they will come," Frost said. "I think that the [Broadway] demographic is changing a little bit. Our audiences are definitely skewing younger. There was a group of people who just didn't come back after the pandemic."

She framed the gap as an invitation rather than a crisis. "But I think there's a whole new audience out there," she added. "It's our job to make sure that we're welcoming them in and figuring out how to talk to them. What do they want and how do we make this a wonderful experience for them?"

What the model costs — and what it returns

The Goodspeed years seeded Frost's conviction. She told the podcast she produced over 50 brand-new musicals there, and watched several "beautifully crafted" works fail to reach a New York stage. That attrition, she said, pushed Junkyard toward a high-touch production model: one title at a time, hands-on through development.

The trade-off is throughput. A producer who stages revivals or jukebox titles can mount two or three shows a season; Frost typically delivers one. The upside, she argued, is longevity — a hit original can run for years, tour internationally, and license regional and school productions for decades.

What to watch next

"The Heart" opens at the Roundabout on Oct. 8 and will test whether de Kerangal's literary register translates to the Broadway musical. Frost's tenure at the Broadway League, which she will assume as chair, will run alongside the company's continued bet on new work. If the next two Broadway seasons confirm the post-pandemic audience tilt she described, Junkyard's one-at-a-time pipeline may look less like a contrarian model and more like a template for the next generation of independent producers.