How do movies get from screen to stage? Or books? TV shows? Toys? That would be Michael Barra, the president of media and entertainment at the Araca Group and an officer on The Players’ board of directors, who takes iconic entertainment properties and adapts them for the theater. He also has a hand in keeping the historic private social club for theater professionals and patrons going.
How did you get to the Araca Group?
It’s such a random path. I was an MBA, a consultant. Then I started a not-for-profit theater group. I was living Off-Broadway for 50 hours a week and corporate America for 50 hours a week. My wife made me choose between the two, so I went through the studio system. I went to the Walt Disney Company. I learned how to exploit film properties, and every facet of how a film is exploited. I went to the Disney Theatrical Group, and saw how these films got adapted to the stage. That’s the lane I wanted to swim in.
MBA and theater is quite the dichotomy. I always went to the theater as a kid and I acted in high school. A creative career was not something I had even thought about. After I graduated from grad school, I looked around and all my friends were in business, medicine, or education, but when I got transferred from Boston to New York, I had this creative explosion. My friends were actors and producers and directors. I started getting involved as a young patron, and then I started producing short films and getting into commercial theater, but I didn’t like how long it took—that’s the theme through my career.
How do you start the process of getting a property to the stage?
We have relationships with every studio, most networks, and book publishers. We run titles by them and they let us know what’s available. They really trust us to put them in the right context. We’ve developed a sense of which properties resonate where, and the expectations of the audience. A Broadway audience needs something that justifies a $180 ticket. A touring audience wants nostalgia that’s not reconceiving, it’s about straight adaptation. High schools want large casts that are three-to-one casts of girls to boys. Our job is to know what the right market is and deliver the properties to those markets.
Do you ever look at something and think, ‘This would be great onstage’?
I don’t look at current releases. Nostalgia is a much stronger emotion to glom onto; it’s stood the test of time. I use myself as a test case—what did I grow up loving? I’m a 41-year-old man and those are ticket buyers. Beyond that, we do a lot of surveys. People tell us what they like. It surprises me when a lot of people say, “We love this one movie.” It makes us look at it differently.
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