Dear Evan Hansen is a TONY-award winning Broadway musical that focuses around the life of a high school senior with social anxiety. We met with a co-producer of Dear Evan Hansen – Michael Kriak – and had a discussion-centered class session to explore his background and how it matched with some of our interests. Michael Kriak was funny and relatable, establishing his initial background as a CPA, which I found interesting since he managed to merge his interests in art and production with business. I have to admit whenever I think about business, I think about financial statements and stocks and cubicles in a looming corporate building, not necessarily about how business is usually applied in a multitude of other fields such as art and news and sports. So hearing about Kriak’s experiences first hand and seeing how he was able to incorporate a field traditionally not thought of as business-related into his career was extremely interesting. His background as a CPA led to his position as a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Mashable and then to ConsenSys, where he is helping to develop processes within the Ethereum blockchain. He then delved into what blockchain technology was and how Ethereum would impact the media industry, which was a popular topic, unsurprisingly, amongst students in our class.
As a Broadway producer on Dear Evan Hansen, Kriak talked us through his role and what it entailed on a day-to-day basis. This included creating revenue and distributing it, generating media attention, finding audience demographics and appealing to them, etc. Kriak also emphasized that the production methods they used tried to tailor social media platforms in the show so that they mimicked real social media – since it plays a big role particularly in the beginning of the show – so that the accurately represented platforms would appeal to the younger generations who are growing up in a technologically advanced age.
He also spoke about how he aims to produce shows that have real-life social issues incorporated into them. For instance, Dear Evan Hansen is about a socially anxious teen who has suicidal thoughts, which brings attention to issues people face in real life, such as mental health and depression. The next show he is producing is called The Prom, which focuses on bullying and the exploration of sexual identity.
I enjoyed every minute of our discussion with Michael Kriak, who I found the most relatable out of the speakers who came to our class, and I look forward to seeing the results of his future endeavors.
