Barrington Stage's Julianne Boyd Has Transferred Two Shows to Broadway and Helped Pull Cars Out of Ditches

Off in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts—a crowded artistic hub that's home to the Williamstown Theater Festival, Berkshire Theatre Group, Shakespeare and Company, Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow—Julianne Boyd has spent 26 years making quality, community-serving theater. Boyd founded Barrington Stage Company in 1995, and she still serves as its artistic director today. The theater had two productions transfer to Broadway: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and On the Town. Boyd began doing theater “probably around 4th grade,” she said in a recent #LiveAtFive interview with Broadway.com's Beth Stevens (who coincidentally got her first job in theater at Barrington).

Boyd immediately wanted to be a director but, “there were no female directors then, and I didn’t have any role models,” she said. A pivotal piece of advice she received from her college professor gave her a much-needed push: “Do you know how you become a director? You say, I am a director, and then you go out and find a project that only you can do, that you own,” said Boyd.

And that's what she did. Less than 10 years after founding Barrington Stage, Boyd developed a musical that put the company on the map as a venue for developing Broadway-worthy work: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Two-time Tony winning composer William Finn came to Boyd in 2003 with two-and-a-half songs and a pitch. “It was funny. It was exciting, and I said, ‘We’ll do it,” Boyd recalled. “He said, ‘Okay, can we do it January?’ This was November!”

Despite the time crunch, Barrington mounted Spelling Bee in January and February of 2004. “We did it in the middle of the winter with this fabulous cast, most of whom are still around—Jesse Tyler Ferguson, many of them—and the cast said, ‘It’s like being here in The Shining.' In the middle of the winter, it’s like icy roads and black covered ice. And we were constantly pulling cars out of ditches.”

All their efforts, and car pulling, paid off. In 2005, Spelling Bee transferred to New York and won two Tonys. And it put Barrington on the map as a must-visit destination. Since then, Barrington has worked to revitalize the local economy in Pittsfield, MA. “We do a lot with the community,” explained Boyd. “Pittsfield doesn’t have a firm foundation, because GE was there up to the late 1980s, and they left and took 13,000 jobs with them. The community collapsed, so we came in and said ‘How can we build it up again?’ And now we bring 60,000 people into town.”

This season, Barrington Stage Company is mounting much-loved musicals like South Pacific and Ain’t Misbehavin', and new plays like The Great Leap, about an American basketball team traveling to China in the 1980s, and Chester Bailey, about a young injured soldier in the Second World War. "I’ve done a lot of plays that have social issues—plays that deal with race, diversity, and immigration—and this season, I just want to have a season of joy,” said Boyd.

Watch the rest of Julianne Boyd’s #LiveAtFive interview below.