The Muny is gearing up for its return to live performances next month, preparing to welcome thousands of theatre fans back to its legendary auditorium under the stars in Forest Park.
The 103-year-old St. Louis institution opens its 2021 season on July 26 with “Smokey Joe’s Café,” one year after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Muny stage to go dark last summer.
On this edition of The Stir Podcast, host Trish Muyco-Tobin welcomes Denny Reagan, who is marking his 30th year as The Muny’s president and CEO. Reagan announced he will be retiring in December after serving the organization for 53 years.
Click here to view The Stir Podcast episode featuring Denny Reagan.
For many St. Louisans, Reagan is a familiar face all season long. He has not missed a show night since 1976, save for one time to attend his brother’s wedding, and is usually found greeting theatergoers with a handshake and a smile right inside Gate #1 as they enter the auditorium.
“You get to meet so many people, you see the joy in their faces when they come through the gate,” he said.
Over the years, Reagan has served in several capacities, including as a member of the stage crew, wardrobe dresser, office gofer, assistant manager and director of theatre operations, among other roles. But his Muny adventure began in 1968 at age 16.
“It was a summer job. I wasn’t necessarily a huge musical theatre fan or a theatre fan even, but a friend of mine said there was an opportunity at The Muny – they were looking for a picker,” he recalled. “A picker is someone who literally picks up the trash the morning after the performance. We’d start at 6 a.m. because it got really hot, as we all know, in St. Louis in the summer.”
In the mid-1970s, Reagan left to pursue work as a purchasing agent at a downtown St. Louis firm. For one-and-a-half years, he worked at the firm during the day, while continuing to work evening performances at The Muny as a dresser for extra money.
In June 1976, Reagan received a call from then-president Bill Culver, who offered him a full-time job at The Muny.
“I had really missed it – the excitement, the problem-solving that you had deal with or not have to deal with on a daily basis – I missed it a lot,” Reagan said. “When (Bill) offered me the opportunity to come back to The Muny, I said, ‘Absolutely, I would love to!’ At that point, I felt like this was one place where I wanted to spend a lot of time.”
One of Reagan’s earliest celebrity encounters was seeing television stars Ozzie and Harriet Nelson backstage.
It was a very vivid memory,” he said. “I walked backstage during that first season and I remember seeing Ozzie and Harriet Nelson sitting backstage. Now, there’s a certain number of your viewers who probably won’t remember who Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were, but they had a show on television at the time. And I thought, ‘Wow!’ That was my first experience as a starstruck teenager, to see them sitting there.”
Reagan also remembers crossing paths with marquee stars like Gene Kelly, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Carol Channing, Yul Brynner and Robert Goulet, as well as celebrity athletes Ozzie Smith and Joe Namath.
“Those two, I was completely starstruck,” said Reagan of Smith and Namath, who both had cameos in Muny productions. “It was wonderful to get to know them and realize just what nice, nice people they were. They were wonderful.”
During his time at the helm, Reagan has also overseen some dramatic behind-the-scenes milestones that would position The Muny among the nation’s top outdoor musical theatre venues.
Shortly after he became president and CEO in 1991, The Muny began to transition back to its roots by once again producing its own shows. He also focused on building the theater’s season-ticket subscriptions, making it one of the largest subscription bases in the country.
More recently, Reagan shepherded The Muny’s Second Century Capital Campaign, launched during its 100th-year milestone, which aimed to raise $100 million to ensure the theater’s financial security into the next century. In addition to supporting The Muny’s “rainy day” fund and endowment, the campaign made it possible to invest in the theater’s complete renovation – from the state-of-the-art stage to the backstage facilities such as the wardrobe department, scenic arts and set design spaces, and rehearsal areas – throughout its 11-acre campus.
“To see the complete overhaul of the campus over these last few years is something we’re all extremely proud of,” he said. “It took a lot of people to make that happen.”
As he prepares to step down at the end of the year, Reagan looks forward to serving as an adviser to incoming president and CEO Kwofe Coleman, The Muny’s current managing director, who himself has been with the organization for more than 20 years.
With Coleman and the rest of the Muny team, Reagan is anticipating a joyous return to welcoming theatre fans next month.
“One thing I’m truly looking forward to is getting people back in the theater,” he said. “It does two things. It allows the community to connect with The Muny and each other again. And the other thing it does, you have to remember everybody in the entertainment industry has been out of work for 14, 16 months, and what this is going to do is give them an opportunity to earn a paycheck like they did before.
“Come on out, let’s enjoy ourselves as we have in the past. Let’s see a big, bold musical on the Muny stage. Let’s come out and engage again… and let’s just enjoy a show under the stars in Forest Park!”
View Denny Reagan’s full interview on The Stir Podcast
New subscriptions for The Muny’s 103rd season are available now. Single show tickets go on sale beginning Monday, July 12. For more information, visit The Muny website or call (314) 361-1900.
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