Will 3 Summers of Lincoln Make It to Broadway?
It’s been in development for five years and has at least a year to go — and the producers still need to raise another $15 million. There really is no business like show business.
3 Summers of Lincoln — the new musical we've been following in our Freakonomics Radio series on theater — made its debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in February of 2025. That meant assembling a big cast and crew in January for rehearsals, costume fittings, choreography, tech rehearsals, and much more. The Playhouse was founded in 1947, by Gregory Peck, Mel Ferrer, and Dorothy McGuire, as “summer stock for Hollywood luminaries,” as one producer puts it. It's a favorite out-of-town destination for ambitious new projects; over the years, it has sent 37 shows to Broadway. Will 3 Summers be number 38?
We flew out to see for ourselves, and checked in with Christopher Ashley, the show’s director and the artistic director at La Jolla. He let us sit in on a tech rehearsal — which gives a perfect illustration of what economists call “cost disease.” Here's how Ashley describes this phase of rehearsal:
We have two weeks in the space to add the technical elements: how the set moves, all the automation, actors moving chairs and tables around the scenery. You add all the lighting. Everything is computerized, so, if you stand on the stage and you look back at the house during a technical rehearsal, you'll see 40 people uplit by their computer screens. There's a lighting desk. There's a sound desk. There's a stage-management desk. There's a separate desk where all the scenery and props folks are. It's full of technicians, all of whom are simultaneously watching the show and building the technical structure. You painstakingly, moment-by-moment, work things out: "Let’s do these three seconds. All right, now we know what those three seconds are. Let’s do the next seven seconds." And then by a week later, hopefully, you can run a number. And by the end of the two weeks, the goal is that you can actually run the show.
These tech rehearsals run for hours, sometimes late into the night. The pace is remarkably slow. The performers are in costume, with full hair and makeup, but they spend most of their time just standing in place while technical decisions are made, and memorialized, and rehearsed. The creative team takes notes, notes, more notes. It’s easy to find yourself asking: what, exactly, does all this add up to? Here’s how longtime Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller answers that question:
Musical theater is a magic trick. When an artist lines up in the perfect way music, dialogue, lyric, movement, character, and story, in a way that makes me go from the back of my seat to the front of my seat, that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and makes me cry, and fills me with joy, and affects me in my, to use a Yiddish word, kishkas, which are my guts — we can get you in your guts. And we’re going to entertain you, and inspire you, and do it with illumination and education, but most important, we’re going to lift you out of your chair and take you to a place you’ve never been.
The producer Alan Shorr told me that the 3 Summers of Lincoln team hopes to bring the show to New York in 2026 — provided they can raise the rest of the roughly $20 million it costs to mount a show this size, and provided there is a suitable theater available, neither of which are guaranteed. Between now and then, there will be more rewrites, more streamlining, more reconsideration of everything. Here’s Christopher Ashley again:
There’s something about the process that is insane, and also that is the most satisfying thing you can possibly do with your life. It’s intensely collaborative, like, Every day you say something, and then someone does something with that thing you’ve said that is better and richer and more exciting than you had in your head. Once you’ve had that experience, you don’t want to give it up.
You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Will 3 Summers of Lincoln Make it to Broadway?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.
Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week
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