“Exhausting usually comes before the adrenaline rush,” concedes producer Barry Weissler, who is readying Waitress for its April 24 Broadway opening at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Weissler and his wife and production partner, Fran, have chalked up seven Tony and four Drama Desk awards since they brought Othello to Broadway some 35 years ago.
The Weisslers’ production credits are attached to some of the Great White Way’s most memorable musicals, including Chicago, Finding Neverland, Pippin, La Cage aux Folles, Falsettos and Annie Get Your Gun. How have they picked so many winners? “We know,” says Barry, “that what turns us on will fill the audience’s minds and hearts.”
That’s what led the Weisslers to Waitress. Based on the 2007 film, the musical tells the story of Jenna, a small-town waitress and expert pie maker stuck in a loveless marriage. Faced with an unexpected pregnancy, Jenna fears she may have to abandon her dream of opening a pie shop. A baking competition and the town’s handsome new doctor become the keys to her happiness.
As producers, the Weisslers are hands-on with “every aspect” of the show—“from raising money to casting, booking the theater, advertising, publicity,” says Barry.
The 77-year-old New Jersey native was bred to take over his family’s home-goods business, Home Fair, which had locations in Union City, West New York, Hackensack and Perth Amboy. But while attending Upsala College in East Orange, he was smitten with the stage. He eventually enrolled in acting school at the famed Stella Adler Conservatory. “My family refused to talk to me for two years,” he jokes. Thanks to the generosity of a former classmate, Robert De Niro, Weissler could rely on at least one free meal a day.
Forming his own acting troupe, Weissler played metropolitan-area schools, eventually graduating to fine-art and suburban venues. One night in 1962 at a small theater in West Orange, he met Fran, a slightly older divorced mother of two, who was filling in for a friend in the box office. “We fell on each other,” Weissler recalls.
“We had nothing, scraping by hand to mouth,” he says. In between traveling and booking dates throughout the northeast, Barry supplemented the couple’s income loading trucks.
Their theater company grew to the point where they signed James Earl Jones for the revival of Othello, which opened in 1982 at Broadway’s Winter Garden. It was the start of a long run of hits for the Weisslers.