Kate Cannova
Interview Highlights
We need more access in the theatre industry. Period.
Being a woman is amazing and it’s also really hard.
We need to get out of a competitive mindset and start pulling other women forward. A win for one of us is a win for all of us.
We need to do a better job of supporting moms in theatre and other male-dominated industries.
Find Kate Online:
Website: www.katecan.com
Kate’s Current and Upcoming Work:
“I wake up every day and feel proud of my work, my family and who I am - that is my biggest accomplishment.”
Bio
Kate Cannova (she/her) is the founder of Kate Cannova Productions, a New York City-based production company working globally in three areas of focus: theatrical production, event planning and production, and exhibition production. We strive to bring a variety of voices and visions to life because storytelling is our cornerstone, whether on stage, on your special day, or for your brand.
Broadway productions include: Funny Girl, The Kite Runner, Head Over Heels, The Visit (Tony nomination), The Scottsboro Boys (Tony nomination, Olivier nomination, Evening Standard Best Musical), The Anarchist. Kate is currently developing two new musicals: Trails (By Jeff Thomson, Jordan Mann and Christy Hall) and Cursed (by Zach Adam and Eidan Lipper). She is also thrilled to be a part of the team behind the Museum of Broadway, opening this fall.
Kate has nearly 20 years of experience in management consulting and marketing, leaving her role as a VP at TBWA in 2019 to embrace the flexibility and demands of being her own boss (or at least being second-in-command to her 5-year-old son). She is a two-time Tony nominee, an Olivier nominee, and an Evening Standard winner.
Kate is a proud graduate of the University of Southern California School of Dramatic Arts and has a Master’s Degree in Producing and General Management from Columbia University. She serves on the USC SDA Alumni Leadership Council and is the recipient of She Runs It’s Working Mother Of the Year Award.
Kate’s Career Journey and Current Projects
Amy: We are here with the amazing Kate Cannova! Kate, can you please introduce yourself, share your pronouns, and tell us a little bit about what you do in theatre?
Kate: I’m Kate Cannova, I’m a she/her, and primarily, I spend my time on Lenape land, so thanks for that, and I’m a producer.
Hayley: Can you tell us how you got into producing?
Kate: It started in college. I went to college in LA, after having grown up in New York as part of the Broadway community. Being in Los Angeles as a theatre major as opposed to a film major, I got into producing primarily to give myself and my fellow theatre friends performance opportunities. So I did that alongside being an actor for a long time.
In the late ‘00s, I came back to New York after being in LA for nearly a decade, and I went through some physical difficulties that made it nearly impossible for me to sustain a performative career - I actually blew up a vocal cord. So I made the transition to producing full-time, and it also came through the self-realization that I probably shouldn’t have been a performer to begin with. I realized that my talent comes more from putting the right creative teams together with the right actors with the right material, that stuff is my wheelhouse. Now the singing is reserved for the shower and karaoke.
So I started producing in 2002, but I really left the other areas in 2008. In 2009, I went fully over to the dark side and, like so many people, producing was the Superman to my Clark Kent of a day job for about a decade. I formed my production company in 2013, and then in November 2019 I finally cut the corporate umbilical cord. I left my corporate job just to focus on my production company, and then…
Amy: Timing is everything.
Kate: Yup! Four months later, it all came to a screeching halt. So that was weird. We did what we could during the downtime. I learned how to make an amazing thing without ever being in the same room as another human. It drives your purpose, it gives you something to do, and it is also inspiring to see how people handle crises.
People often forget that a large part of what producers do is crisis management. It’s the backbone of the entire endeavor. So much of what we do is about driving community in a shared space, and it was just trying to do that in a different way. Instead of being in a shared space in a room, we were in a shared space on a Zoom!
I’ve done tiny things, I’ve done Broadway, West End, streaming stuff and since we’ve been back, I’ve been pretty busy! I was very fortunate to be on the team that helped bring A Commercial Jingle For Regina Comet to life, which we produced off-Broadway in the summer of last year. We were the first new musical show to open after the shutdown. I think there were maybe two other shows running off-Broadway at the time. It was super inspiring, our little tiny show with a cast of three and a band of three put fifty people back to work. At a time when people felt so lost, to be able to do that was incredible.
I did Regina, now I’m working on Funny Girl, Kite Runner, the Museum of Broadway which is being run by two incredible women…it feels like we haven't been open that long, but I’ve been jam-packing everything I can into this time.
And as much as I had planned on leaving my day job at the side of the road and focusing on this one thing, in a post-pandemic world, that’s just not a reality. So I’m working, I still have private clients, and I’m producing, and it’s a lot. I don’t sleep much. I’m trying to figure out what’s the new normal. Is there a new normal? I’m not sure that’s a thing.
Hayley: Can you tell us more about the Museum of Broadway?
Kate: I don’t think a lot of people realize that there is no museum for Broadway. There isn’t a central repository for the history of the art form, how a show gets made.
The Museum of Broadway effort is being led by two really incredible women. We went to college together at USC. One of them has a marketing background, and the other was a music industry major in school and has had a really prolific career as a Broadway producer. As small as our industry is, it can be hard to get everybody on the same page and say yes. And because it is a historical effort, we’re dealing with people who are alive, people who are no longer alive, estates… It is so complicated and such a herculean undertaking. It really took this dynamic duo of women to get everyone to say yes and buy in. They made it so easy for the rest of us to support their vision for the Museum.
It takes the historical piece and marries it with a more commercial, immersive, Instagrammable experience. It’s always exciting to be a part of something that has never been done before. Especially with the Tonys coming up, you will start to see more coming soon!
Kate’s Creative Mission
Amy: Kate, what would you describe as your creative mission?
Kate: I don’t know that I have a singular answer or that the answer would even be the same every day. When you are in the theatre, the driving energy is always about storytelling, but it’s not just the storytelling so much as the resulting impact of the storytelling. It can change from day to day, but the idea that you are changing the way people feel about themselves, the world, others, and their circumstances can be very powerful.
I’ve had the benefit of working on what some people might call controversial, weird, “commercially unattractive” pieces, but they’ve changed people’s life experiences. A really good example of that is the Broadway production of Head Over Heels. It was a celebration of authenticity and being true to yourself. It’s very profound to look around a room and see people seeing themselves represented on stage for the very first time. And it manifested in a very concrete way why representation is so important.
Don’t get me wrong, I love sequins and tap shoes – I’m here for that. But the idea that you could make someone’s life a little better or easier, or expand their world view, even if it’s for 90 minutes with no intermission and then they go on with their life, it’s so important. And doing that while honoring a diverse slate of artists and creators. I’ve set some goals and boundaries for myself when I look at the hiring process, origin of work, casting, investors to make sure that there is representation in every corner of the room. If you can find a good story that has an impact that can be put together in a way that is broad and diverse, that’s a pretty good day.
It all has to start with the story. Story comes from so many different places. I don’t necessarily go around looking for specific writers or types of source material. It comes down to how the story is brought to life and who is participating in that.
Thoughts on Womanhood, Identity, and Pandemic Parenting
Hayley: Kate, how do you feel about being a woman? How does womanhood fit into your identity?
Kate: This is an amazing question. I feel amazing about being a woman. I also sometimes feel really shitty because I’m a woman. I started my creative life very young, but I also had a 20-year career in corporate America in heavily male-driven industries. Things are never straightforward between women and men, and it’s actually even less straightforward between women and women. I’m a cynical New Yorker, but it feels to me that this whole idea of women elevating, amplifying, and raising up other women actually feels relatively new.
For me, working in corporate America in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, there was this idea of, “I suffered as a woman to get here, so I’m not going to turn around and give you a hand.”
Hayley: Amy and I talk about this all the time.
Kate: Yeah, there was no reaching back to pull somebody forward. Especially in the theatre community, it can feel like there is a finite amount of resources to go around. And there’s not that many of us women, certainly not many female lead producers. So there’s often this feeling of if she gets a theatre, a Tony, a huge accolade or whatever – that means that I don’t get it. And that can fuel really unhealthy competition.
Especially in the arts, there is this crazy perception that you should feel grateful to be there no matter how shitty your pay is or how horribly you’re being treated. There is this idea that if she gets something, then there is no opportunity left for me. It would be so nice if we could get to a place of celebrating each other’s successes and buying into the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Amy: Yes!
Kate: I also think, biologically, women are wired for things like crisis management and multitasking because we are mothers. That’s how the planet survives, through women’s ability to multitask. I think there are things about us that innately make us great theatre artists. But we’re still really bad at dealing with motherhood as theatre artists. There’s never a place to pump or nurse. There’s never child care at auditions. When you get a job out of town, no one’s ever thinking about the fact that you might have to bring an infant with you.
And then there is a tremendous amount of mom guilt. I see my kid for an hour in the morning, then I work all day, and then maybe I see my kid for an hour or two in the evening. And if I have to be in the theatre, then I miss that hour or two in the evening. Which is shitty for me and my kid and my husband who has to deal with bed and bath and dinner all by himself. There’s a tremendous amount of guilt around that, especially because there is still this perception that leading a creative life is frivolous and self-indulgent, which is fucking bullshit.
If you think about the last couple years, in lockdown, in all the pandemic trauma, where did people turn to? They turned to the arts. Because that’s what saves your soul and reminds you that you’re a person. But there is still this perception, especially in the theatre, that we should go get a “real job.” So then many of us have a “real job” in addition. And then we are doing double duty and still trying to be a good mom and potentially pretending to be a preschool teacher in lockdown when you definitely are not. But you know, I definitely wouldn’t want to be a man.
Hayley: Phenomenal answer.
Amy: That is all really real.
Kate: My son just turned five and just got his second Covid shot, and the first thing he said to me was, “Mommy, now I can go to the theatre!”
Hayley & Amy: Aww!
Kate: For a while, he kept talking about my other son…and I was like, I’m not pregnant, I’m not getting pregnant, I am one and done. It turns out he was talking about Regina Comet! When I would leave to go to the theatre at night, he would say, “Mommy, are you going to see your other son?”
Amy: That’s so sweet and so sad.
Kate: It is. It’s been so tough to be the mom of an under-five in the last few years.
Amy: It has, it feels like everyone’s messing with us!
Kate: Yeah. My kid’s school shut down in March 2020 just like everyone else. I’d say the first five or six weeks, it kind of seemed okay. But when it became apparent that theatre was not going to be reopening anytime soon, I started panicking. I had just left a cushy corporate job. It was a very strange time to be the owner of a small business. I started taking on all these clients, because I was thinking what if we don’t reopen? What if all these investments, all this work, this time spent in development all goes in the shitter? What if the company goes under? What if, what if, what if – and so you think well, I just have to make money.
As a producer in the commercial theatre, we have a very strange relationship with money because we lose it most of the time – statistically speaking. So every engagement that came my way, I just said yes to, whether I had the bandwidth or not. To be transparent, May to August 2020 was the darkest time in my entire life. In August, my kid’s daycare opened, and it was like the heavens opened up and the angels sang.
But yeah, I was working 20 hours a day, I was home alone with my kid, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing with my child. Like, am I supposed to teach a 3-year-old to read?! I built like 400 indoor obstacle courses, and the dog was losing her mind. If the daycare had not opened, we would have had to make a really major change. I just couldn’t do it anymore.
Right before the lockdown, I met these authors who wrote this lovely new piece. We couldn’t do the reading that we wanted to do, but we thought, let’s do something with it. We put together a concert and streamed it for Broadway Cares. It was a huge amount of work and it took forever, but it was also like a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. It gave us something to do and create…When you get to spend your days listening to the voices of Alex Wyse, Bonnie Milligan, Donald Webber, Jr., Tom Alan Robbins, Devin Ilaw, and Asmeret Ghebremichael, it’s amazing. It felt really good to make something.
How to Improve the Theatre Industry
Hayley: Kate, if you could make one change to the theatre industry, what would you do?
Kate: I think there are a lot of little things you can do that can have a huge impact, but we have to commit to making change and then be accountable. For example, I require a minimum of 40% of my hires on all my teams to be women and people of color. That’s not actually hard to commit to. My dad used to say, “You should never waste a crisis.” And unfortunately, with all best intentions laid bare, the only way we were gonna make huge changes to this industry was for it to grind to a screeching halt. And it did. But I’m not convinced that we’ve leveraged it as well as we should have.
If there was ever a time to commit to real, sweeping, paradigm-shifting change, it’s when you literally have nothing left to lose. I think the spirit is there. I think that some people are better than others at making it really happen, and I think there’s so so much more that can be done.
There was a brief moment during the height of the lockdown when I went to some fellow commercial producers and said, “We should go buy a theatre.” We can do as much as we can to increase representation and diversify decision-makers, and investors, and producers, but at the end of the day if you can’t get space…On Broadway, there are 41 houses that are available. If you want to have control over programming, you need to own a theatre. In New York City, there is no such thing as a commercial house that is owned outside of this structure. I would like to see more theatres, more access to real estate. We need more vehicles for work to come to life.
It’s disappointing to see projects languish because they can’t find a home. So much of this work depends on timing and momentum. Sometimes you have something that has been ready and you can’t find a home, and sometimes you are given a home and you’re not really ready.
We need more access. Period. More access to spaces. More access for women and people of color in decision-making roles. More access for moms to appropriate benefits. Access.
Amy: Access. Love it.
Final Thoughts
Amy: Kate, what are you most proud of in your life?
Kate: Oh, come on! You can’t even ask me that. I’m a mother, so if I don’t say my kid, I’m a horrible person!
Amy: You can say your kid AND…
Kate: I’ve never said this out loud. I’m most proud of my own self-esteem. That’s such a crazy thing to say. Like many awkward, chubby theatre kids, I didn’t have an easy time of it. It didn’t matter that I’m super fucking smart, driven, capable, talented, good at everything I tried. Like so many others, I was bullied, and I didn’t feel like I fit in. Even when I joined corporate America, I was hazed because I was a theatre major from not an Ivy League school and I was a woman, and people didn’t think I deserved to be in the job I was in.
But being a woman is being in the space of questioning your self-worth: “Am I worthy? Am I a person of value? What is my contribution to the world around me?” And of course there’s mom guilt, and job guilt, female guilt…Am I a good daughter? A good wife? A good mom? A good human? A good citizen? A good boss?
But here I am at 40, and you know what, I’m pretty damn proud of who I am. I don’t give a shit how big my fucking ass is. I don’t care whether or not I have a Tony. I’m in a wonderful marriage, my kid is a bright little light and a total pain in my ass. But the fact that I just don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about me, and that given all the shit that the world puts on us, I wake up every day and feel proud of my work, my family and who I am, that is my biggest accomplishment.
Hayley: What a way to end an interview!
Amy: Thank you so much, Kate.
Kate: Thank you guys, it was so nice to be asked and to be included.
