By Kenneth Jones
18 Nov 2009

The Shubert Organization, Broadway's major landlord, has entered into a development agreement with Tony Award-winning theatre producers Frederick M. Zollo and Robert Cole, the New York Times reported.

Philip J. Smith and Robert E. Wankel, the Chairman and President, respectively, of the Shubert Organization, have signed a three-year development deal with the Angels in America producers that would allow the Shubert Org to invest in shows being eyed by Zollo and Cole, or would allow the theatre owners to serve as "advisers" without investing, the Times reported.

Any shows that come out of the partnership would be housed at a Shubert venue, of which there are 17 on Broadway.

This is reportedly the first time the powerful organization has had such an arrangement: housing independent producers in the Shubert offices with the organization potentially developing and bankrolling the producers' emerging projects.

Smith and Wankel told the Times that with this new venture they would be helping to fund and produce their own productions in a time of economic uncertainty.

Smith told the Times, "We've been less hands-on over the last many years because there was no need to help producers by investing in their shows. It would have been cruel to take over, say, our two best playhouses and fill them with our own plays. That would not have gone over well with producers."

Cole was executive producer of the Tony Award-winning productions of Elaine Stritch At Liberty and both parts Broadway's Tony-winning Angels in America. Zollo was a producer of the Tony Award-winning 2002 production of Private Lives and both parts of Angels in America, among other Tony-nominated productions.