Listen to Sam Sweet
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Sam Sweet
Executive Director
Signature Theatre
Audio Transcripts
On Signature and Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer
We try to have a personal relationship with our audience—knowing people by name, responding personally, being around. Eric is here a lot and I think the audience loves that they can walk up to him in the lobby and talk with him about the show they just saw. And the surveys that we've done confirm that people feel a closer connection, a more personal connection, to Signature than they do to any other theatre.
On Arts, Business, and the Community
I've made the case to the business community and I've particularly made the case to my peers; if you want to be at the table, understand that the business community is talking about quality of life, economic development, and education and the arts have a major role to play in each of those areas. Because these are things that everybody has in common.
As a field it's important for us also to talk about the value that the arts play in and of themselves—what the arts mean to sustain people's ability to imagine, and to dream, and to feel, and to thing differently—that the arts have an innate value. And that's another thing that we have to communicate.
On His Role as Managing Director
Eric has artistic vision and I know pretty well what his artistic vision is. I am trying to tie my vision to his, saying "this is where he wants to go artistically therefore this is the organization I have to build." And that is the creative end of my job, which makes me feel artistically fulfilled.
If you're connected to an organization that is doing work that you enjoy, that you feel is high quality, that you're proud to be associated with and be a part of, if you're playing a role in the community that makes you feel good about bettering the community—those things are motivating.
On Growth and Progress
Now we have the right place, we have a lot of the elements of the right organization to really progress towards being the nation's foremost musical theatre—producing, sustaining, and developing new work. The last five or six years that we've built the progress that we've made should give everybody confidence that we can do even greater stuff in the next five years.