Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four large nonprofits with theaters on Broadway, has chosen one of its longtime administrators, Nicki Hunter, as its next artistic director.
Hunter, 38, is currently an associate artistic director at the organization, where she started as an intern and worked her way up.
“I’m over the moon,” she said in an interview. “This has been a dream job for me. I’ve aspired to be an artistic director for almost all of my professional career, and to be able to lead a company I care so deeply about and know so intimately is personally exhilarating.”
The nonprofit has produced seven Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and five Tony Award-winning productions, including this year’s Tony winner for best play revival, “Eureka Day.” M.T.C.’s latest Broadway offering, a British play called “Punch,” by James Graham, opens Monday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway. Later this season, it plans to stage “Bug,” by Tracy Letts, and “The Balusters,” by David Lindsay-Abaire, on Broadway.
While Hunter said she doesn’t plan to change the nonprofit’s focus on plays, she added that, “I want to more deeply invest in being able to create new musicals for Manhattan Theater Club.”
“I believe our deep history of making new plays can extend to making new musicals,” she said. “We’ve established our ability to do musicals on and Off Broadway.”
Her appointment, which is effective Dec. 1, caps a period of remarkable turnover atop the four Broadway nonprofits, each of which has chosen a new artistic director in the last 15 months, following decades without change. The nonprofits — which also include Lincoln Center Theater, Roundabout Theater Company, and Second Stage Theater — play an important role on Broadway because they tend to be more open to staging less well-known work that might struggle to find a home in the commercial marketplace.
Hunter is the youngest of the new Broadway nonprofit leaders, and the only one chosen from within the organization she will head. She has been at M.T.C. for 16 years, working closely with the woman she will succeed, Lynne Meadow, who has had a remarkably long tenure atop the organization: Meadow has served as M.T.C.’s artistic director since 1972. Meadow said in June that she would step down from that role; she is planning to remain with the organization as an artistic adviser.
The nonprofit’s chairman, David Hodgson, said the board had been preparing for Meadow’s departure for some time, and had hired a consultant and conducted a full search before settling on Hunter for the job. “We unanimously agreed that we had in Nicki the right person,” he said. In recent years, Hunter has demonstrated an ability to find “unique and interesting” shows, he added, and to attract younger artists to work with the company.
With an annual budget of $28 million and a full-time staff of 75, M.T.C. presents six shows a year on three stages: the Friedman on Broadway, with about 650 seats; and two Off Broadway theaters, both inside New York City Center, one with up to 300 seats, and the other with up to 150.
Like many nonprofit theaters, it has faced postpandemic challenges — the organization has run annual deficits in the years since theaters were closed. But Chris Jennings, the company’s executive director, said that for the fiscal year that just ended, “we were, if not balanced, close” and that “we are in a very strong place financially right now.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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