Exclusive Interview With ‘And That’s Showbiz’ CEO and Founder, Katharine Quinn
Image Source: Broadway World
CultureSlate had the chance to talk to several amazing artists and storytellers who have worked on Broadway, film, music, and TV in various different ways. All of them shared their stories, how they came into their roles, and what their jobs entail in the industry.
This interview is with Katharine Quinn, who is the founder and CEO of And That’s Showbiz.
CultureSlate: What has been the hardest thing with including representation in your work? What roadblocks have you run across?
Katharine: Tons. The first thing that comes to mind is Broadway theaters are 100 years old. They're so beautiful, they're nationally designated historic landmarks, and also they weren't built for today's bodies - the wide array of wonderful humans that we have on this planet. Anyone should be able to go experience theater, and it's challenging to do that even as an audience member, and as a performer, or a technician or any of that. If you are physically disabled in any way, sometimes that's challenging, because backstage on Broadway is not necessarily built for that. We're making strides, slowly but surely.
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Image Source: YouTube
I have a very wonderfully diverse team that I work with in my marketing and media company. Access needs are important, and it's not challenging to accommodate. The awareness and effort just have to be there. Is it more challenging when you're dealing with a 100-year-old building? Yes, but I still think that there does need to be more of a push towards accommodating all humans in entertainment in general.
CultureSlate: How did you get your start in this business?
Katharine: I'm a fan girl. I grew up being obsessed with musical theater. I performed for a little while, turned into a director, choreographer, and then Broadway shut down during the pandemic, and I started making TikTok’s about how obsessed I was with theater and what it might look like when it came back, thinking it might evolve in some magical way. And in some ways that happened, and in other ways it didn't. I accidentally started a marketing agency because my TikTok’s took off. I started working with some Broadway shows on their marketing and now I have an agency and a web series.
CultureSlate: What is one of your favorite things that you’ve worked on?
Katharine: I run a company called And That’s Showbiz. We've got two sides of the business. One is a traditional marketing agency and on the other side, we produce web series of game shows with Broadway actors and interview series. We've got a behind-the-scenes docuseries of bringing a show to Broadway and what that looks like. It's my baby, and it makes me so happy, because it's the kind of content that I wish I had had growing up. Broadway feels like a very glossy sort of gate-kept thing. My biggest passion in the universe is, along the lines of access, just enabling more people to fall in love with it and experience it from wherever they are, whether they can get to New York or not.
CultureSlate: Can you elaborate more on what the web series you work on entails?
Katharine: We've only done one season. But currently we have 40 episodes of Broadway media up on our YouTube channel, And That’s Show Biz. It's free, Anyone can watch it. Season two is starting to roll out now. We have an actors on actors style show called “It Takes Two”. We've got the making of documentary series, which is, “Keep Up: The Making Of The Heart”. We have a show called “Game Changers”, where we talk to people who are properly shaking things up in a very legacy industry. We got a show called “Subway To Stage”, where we walk actors from the subway to their stage door and have off-the-cuff conversations with them. And then a show called “Swing Nation”. [Swings are another term of an understudy, but for more than one character]. We want to highlight the fact that they hold eight people's jobs in their brains, and at any moment, can just go on for anybody. We hype the swings of Broadway.
CultureSlate: Do you have anything on the marketing side of things you had been working on that never made it to the stage?
Katharine: I'm working on a lot of shows in development right now. People are bringing us on in a creative director kind of role, and not of the piece, but of the brand, early on. The odds of some of these not making it to Broadway are very high. It's totally possible that I'll work on a project [that will never get made]. It happens all the time. There's only 41 theaters on Broadway, so there's limited real estate. And some of them are occupied by The Lion King, Wicked and Chicago, and the shows that will hopefully never close. There's such a limited number of new shows every year, and the economics are impossible right now, so the likelihood that I'm working on a few things right now that will never, ever make it to the public are really high, which is a bummer, but also part of the gamble of showbiz.
Image Source: YouTube
CultureSlate: Do you have something that is coming up soon that you can share?
Katharine: There's a show called The Heart that just had its out of town run at La Jolla Playhouse in California. We're doing a docuseries of the making of that show. It's an EDM musical. The score is so good. The music is absolutely incredible, and the cast is insane. It's a medical drama of sorts, which you never would think would make a good musical, and yet, it does. Those producers [and creatives] have been so game to let us into the process to show the vulnerability of trying to get a show to New York.
CultureSlate: Did you have a favorite musical as a kid that inspired you?
Katharine: I saw a production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever as a small child, and my mother says that I sobbed at intermission, looked at her, and I said, “is it over?” I also grew up with Hello, Dolly! and My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music and every VHS tape under the sun. My first Broadway show was with Bernadette Peters. It was Annie Get Your Gun in 1999, and it was fabulous!
Be on the lookout for more interviews in this artist, film, and musician series!
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