A Life in the Theatre: Nancy Coyne

By Mervyn Rothstein
October 27, 2004

Stage professionals look back at decades of devotion to their craft.

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She's played a crucial role in nearly every smash hit on Broadway for the last 26 years, but unless you went to school with her you’ve probably never seen her onstage. She’s Nancy Coyne, the chief executive of Serino Coyne, the largest full service advertising and marketing agency in live entertainment. What this one-time Mouseketeer and former theatre hopeful does, in her own words, is what every Broadway show needs: She sells tickets—25 million of them a year.

The shows for which she has helped fill the seats include some of the longest-running successes in Broadway history—Cats, A Chorus Line, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables and Miss Saigon. Not bad for someone whose first New York theatre job was leading guided tours at Lincoln Center.

“I was born in Washington, grew up in Silver Spring, MD, and I saw my first Broadway show, Gypsy, when I was ten,” Coyne says, sitting in her corner office above Times Square with its wrap-around windows looking down on the theatre district, the Paramount Building clock, The New York Times Building and the Hudson River beyond. “My parents were stage parents. I had been singing and dancing since I was three. And when I saw Gypsy, I got lost in the show to the point that at intermission, I was truly startled that something was over and I had to get up and go out and come back. Those 15 minutes were torture.”

That was the moment, she says, “when I thought that when I die and go to heaven, it’s going to look like a Broadway theatre. But then I realized I didn’t have to die. There were careers in the theatre. And even though singing and dancing onstage didn’t seem what I was destined for — I didn’t have the temperament to follow through on that — I quickly found that a career selling tickets, which is what I really do, was absolutely fabulous.”

When she was ten, Coyne won a Walt Disney contest, “and I was a Mouseketeer for a minute-and-a-half. That was when I decided that a career in show business was what I wanted.” She attended Catholic University in Washington, “and when I met my now ex-husband there, he said he was going to New York, and I said, ‘I’m going, too.’” She graduated from N.Y.U., “and we thought we’d have careers on the stage. But I got one rejection, and I thought, ‘I can’t stand this.’” So she got the job giving tours at Lincoln Center.

“I saw an ad in the paper about writing copy for a radio station, and I took a job writing all the advertising for a little jazz station called WRVR. One of the things that happened frequently was I would get fact sheets from a Broadway show that was to be live copy a deejay would read — except none of our deejays was particularly skilled at reading live copy. So I’d go down after hours and produce these radio spots with music, with my friends who were actors doing the voiceovers.”

The ad agency that had provided the fact sheets, Blaine Thompson, called and asked if it could use the spots on other stations. “I said, ‘No—but you can hire me.’ And they did. I went to work for them, and about three years later, in 1978, Matthew Serino of Blaine Thompson and I opened our own agency.”

She and Serino learned one very important thing from Blaine Thompson, Coyne says. “They had a monopoly on Broadway shows. They had them all. Which meant they had all the hits and all the flops. And flops were notorious for leaving town without paying their bills. So Blaine Thompson went under shortly after Matty and I left. We vowed that we would be as fiscally responsible as you can be in the theatre business. And that, combined with a passion for the theatre, has contributed to our success.”

She has no favorite ad campaign, she says, “but there are landmarks. I think one of the things we discovered early on was what our thrust was going to be — keeping shows running longer. Our first show was A Chorus Line” — which ran for 15 years and 6,137 performances — “and that’s how we developed a strategy that would take a show into a very long run. A Chorus Line was near and dear to my heart, not just as my first big megahit but because it hit every chord in my show-business background.”

The ad campaign for Evita was also very special, she says. “We made a commercial, and it was put on before the show was opened. That hadn’t been done before. While the show got mixed reviews, the commercial was very successful, and it steamrolled. The show opened in the fall, and the following spring it won the Tony as Best Musical. I always felt that was something I had contributed to.”

The big British imports were all landmarks, too.

“Cats, Les Miz, Phantom, Miss Saigon — those all furthered my strategy of how to keep a show running for ten years, 12 years — nearly 18 years (and 7,485 performances) in the case of Cats. Now The Lion King has been an incredible experience. Each time one of my shows tops another I feel a landmark change. It was a little sad when Cats beat A Chorus Line, and it will be a little sad if Phantom should beat Cats, as it looks like it might.”

How does she do what she does? “I am like the consumer,” she says. “Before I worked in this business, I bought a lot of theatre tickets. I took my daughter to the theatre. I understood the power of the theatre, from that moment when I first saw Gypsy, and what I do is communicate that when you see a show, it will be a different experience than you can have watching a movie, watching television at home, with your DVD or your video game — it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s live, it’s in real time, and it has the capacity to change your emotions, to alter you. I look for that thing in a show that communicates to me.”

Her agency doesn’t handle every show that asks, she says. “I try not to handle shows that I don’t know how to sell,” she says, “where I can’t find the thing about the show to tell myself to go see this. Sometimes what we do is very unconventional. Sometimes we turn down a big piece of business because we don’t know how to handle a certain show. And sometimes we take something very little because we think perhaps it has a huge future somewhere.”

Current shows that have communicated to her include Beauty and the Beast, Billy Crystal 700 Sundays, Dame Edna Back With a Vengeance, Dracula, Fiddler on the Roof, Hairspray, Mamma Mia!, Movin’ Out, The Lion King, Phantom, The Producers and Wicked. She has worked for years with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and she has taught entertainment marketing at the Yale Drama School.

And she plans to continue doing just what she has been doing. “Just when I think the big landmarks are behind me,” she says, “along comes a Producers, or a Hairspray, or a Mamma Mia! Now Wicked is our latest hit. And in many ways Wicked has been as much fun to work on as A Chorus Line was in the beginning, because it’s one of those shows where selling tickets is very gratifying, because the people coming out of the theatre have had a magical time.”

She smiles. “Every year,” she says, “holds the potential for a huge breakthrough hit.”