A once-dingy basement on West 39th Street has been transformed into a black box theater for aspiring artists creating new works, thanks to “Hamilton” scribe Lin-Manuel Miranda and director Tommy Kail.
The duo are co-owners of the Drama Book Shop, alongside “Hamilton” producer Jeffrey Seller and theater owner James L. Nederlander. In recent years, Miranda used an unfinished space below the bookstore to hash out his upcoming Broadway musical “The Warriors” with co-writer Eisa Davis. Now, it’s been cleaned up, painted, and reimagined as a small performance studio complete with room for 50 audience members and a dressing room.
“There were no cobwebs, but there was definitely some dripping,” Miranda told Page Six, recalling the many hours he spent in the space with Davis. “It was a great place to meet every week to write ‘The Warriors.’ All I need is a deadline and a great collaborator and I’m good.”
The theater is now named the Gilbert Parker Studio in honor of Kail’s mentor, the late theatrical talent agent.
Before 2019, the Drama Book Shop was in a different space on 40th Street, but rent hikes forced it to leave that location. That’s when Miranda and his partners bought the business and moved it south a block.
The original 40th Street location featured a black box space, the Arthur Seelen Theatre, in the basement where Kail and his college theater troupe became resident artists in 2002. That spring, Kail met a young Lin-Manuel Miranda at the theater, and Miranda went on to write much of his hit musical “In the Heights” on the house piano, which is now at the Gilbert Parker.
It’s also where “Hamilton” and “Moana” star Christopher Jackson met his future wife, singer Veronica Vazquez-Jackson.
“We had our first auditions for ‘In the Heights’ down there, and we were so young looking that we actually had our friend Andy Gale sit with us, because he had a beard,” Miranda recalled. “Because we looked like two children in a trench coat trying to put on a show.”
“Billy Eichner used to do the show ‘Creation Nation’ down there, where he debuted this guy chasing people around on the street,” Kail recalled.
“‘Freestyle Love Supreme’s first show was down there,” Miranda added, referring to his hit hip-hop improvisation project that made it to Broadway in 2019. “For 16 people, we rapped about every single person in the audience. It was that bespoke.”
Artists who would like their own chance to create something in the room where all that happened can inquire at the Drama Book Shop.
“Now that Lin doesn’t live here anymore, there’s a chance for more people to come and use this space for whatever suits their purposes,” said Kail.
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