Jordan Roth, the scion of a New York real estate fortune, a convention-challenging fashionista and a social media habitué, spent 15 years as a Broadway macher, running one of the big three theater landlords. He programmed hits like “The Book of Mormon” and “Hadestown,” nurtured plays and musicals in development, and joined the theater industry’s inner circle at its cloistered confabs, all the while showing up at openings in increasingly fabulous couture.
But it’s fairly obvious to anyone watching Roth’s evolving public persona that he’s been looking for a new adventure.
He has sold most of his stake in Jujamcyn, the company through which he owned five Broadway theaters, and he has dialed back his theater producing.
Now he is moving on to a different stage, combining his love of fashion, his hunger to perform, and his taste for storytelling. He is pursuing “narrative fashion performance,” and he plans a debut on July 10 at the Louvre in Paris.
“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my own,” Roth, 49, told me during a rehearsal break at a black box studio in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.
“In retrospect, I think I can see that is why I dove so deeply into fashion, because it was a daily opportunity to express personal creativity, to explore a more unbounded self,” he added. “It started to feel like I was feeling my way towards an artistic practice.”
His Louvre performance is part of a fashion night (“la nuit de la mode”) that coincides with a couture exhibition at the museum. And like everything Roth does, it is visually ambitious. In an indoor sculpture garden called the Cour Marly, he plans to perform three times over one evening a piece that he has created called “Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty.”
The performance will unfold in three sections, each connected in some way to the Louvre.
At first, he will slip into a white ball gown in the heart of the atrium. Then he will be attached to a pair of billowing 40-foot-wide wings. And then he will ascend through a 22-foot-high pyramid, a nod to the I.M. Pei glass structure that serves as the museum’s entrance.
In each segment, images will be projected onto his costumes: a regal John Galliano ball gown; wings from paintings, sculptures and other objects throughout the museum; the sky as seen in paintings, along with time-lapse video showing how light plays across the buildings that surround the Pei structure.
“It’s this exquisite confluence of these three things he has been passionate about — art, fashion and theater — and he’s created this space for himself to pursue these passions,” said Nicole Kastrinos, who for years worked as Roth’s top lieutenant at Jujamcyn and is now a producer at Lincoln Center Theater. “When I met him he had a buzz-cut and was wearing black Prada suits every day, and when you look at today, you realize how extraordinary the transformation has been.”
Roth commissioned Thomas Roussel to write music for the piece; the two have been sending music, video and notes back and forth across the Atlantic, and plan to record the final score in Paris.
“I think a lot about transformation in circles and cycles,” Roth said, “and very much that is a metaphor for my own process of transformation.”
He spoke as he worked with his movement director, Julia Crockett, and a six-person ensemble, experimenting with how different movements affected the wings. He said he has been developing the show for two years, visiting the Louvre frequently to refine his thinking and connect it to the museum’s collection.
Olivier Gabet, who leads the Louvre’s decorative arts department, called Roth “a very special character,” and told me he was struck by the discipline with which Roth approached the project.
“I knew about his life as a theater person and a producer in New York, and he said, ‘Now I would like to try to go through the mirror and propose a performance,’” Gabet said. “It was quite impressive — this mixture of a Broadway professionalism that for French people is quite mesmerizing, but also that in such a short time Jordan was able to understand the spirit of the museum.”
Roth is the son of the real estate investor Steven Roth and the Tony-winning producer Daryl Roth, and he had grown up wanting to be an actor. But he started producing soon after college — first with a downtown, disco-themed riff on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” called “The Donkey Show,” and then with the 2000 Broadway revival of the sci-fi sex spoof “The Rocky Horror Show.”
He has both resources and taste, and that combination made him a success: He acquired Jujamcyn, the smallest of the big three theater owners, and presented or produced a string of lucrative hits (“Springsteen on Broadway”) and prestigious Tony winners (“Angels in America”). Like everyone on Broadway, he had plenty of flops, too.
Then in 2023 he sold control of the theaters to a British company now called ATG Entertainment, which absorbed Jujamcyn. He has a minority stake in ATG, the title of creative director, an office in Times Square, and a position on the committee that oversees the Tony Awards.
His only remaining commercial theater project is “Galileo,” a musical in development about the Italian astronomer whose work landed him in trouble with the Roman Catholic Church, which Roth is helping to produce. But much of his energy is now elsewhere.
“He is giving voice to a ton of impulses and modes of being that he has long been nurturing,” said Rachel Chavkin, the director of “Hadestown.” “Jordan is finding new channels for expression, and growing more into himself.”
I had written a profile of Roth back in 2018, and even then he was talking about finding his way in the world. Since then, he said, the pace of his transformation has quickened, hastened by his immersion in the fashion world, often showing up at events or appearing in media wearing gowns, capes, long nails and hair, and high heels.
“I am aware that a radical act can be any one of us getting dressed in the clothes of our imagination and walking outside,” he told me. “The clothes became a portal to this practice of discovery.”
And what, if anything, is he discovering about gender?
“I don’t think I’m dancing around the question of gender — I think I’m dancing on the question of gender,” he said when I asked about the subject. “Gender is, for all of us, one of the strongest confinements that can become one of the most freeing liberations, just by shifting our perspective on what it is, and that’s what I have been working on.”
He said he has found himself pondering why people are so interested in what his clothing might signal about gender identity. “These are obviously questions I have asked myself, and what I found more interesting than the question was, Why the question?”
He had a ready answer.
“What I understand about it is this: We have assigned each other the responsibility of making ourselves legible to each other, and when we become illegible to each other, we project failure,” he said. “So why don’t I love the pronoun question? Because for me that takes me right back to childhood playgrounds — places of no good happening — and, ‘What are you, a boy or a girl?’”
“Every child knows that simply being asked the question means that you have failed at making yourself legible,” he added. “What I am coming to resist is the notion that my illegibility to you is my failure, when in fact I take it to be my superpower.”
So where is all this leading? Roth says the Louvre is just the beginning of his next chapter, and that he expects more performances as well as related projects.
“I am accessing all of my experience in theater to create this work, which is the first public piece of an ongoing practice,” he said.
This new chapter, he said, is an amalgam of his passions. “In many ways, the word performance can connote artifice,” he said, “but I take it to be the exact opposite — I take performance to be revelation.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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