From Serving in Iraq to Producing Tony-Award-Winning Broadway Musicals, A Q&A with SIPA Graduate Michael Lamon

While living in New York City after graduating from SIPA in 2015, Michael Lamon began investing in Broadway plays. With his finance background and long-held passion for musical theatre, he has served as an investor and coproducer on shows including The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, the 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll Along, which won four Tony Awards, and this year’s West End revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

But Lamon is not a typical producer of Broadway hit musicals. He is also an Iraq War veteran, and Purple Heart recipient. A graduate of SIPA’s Executive Master of Public Administration program and former Presidential Management Fellow, the Tony Award-winning producer currently works as the director of enterprise risk management at a commercial bank in New York.

His two most recent shows, Operation Mincemeat and Dead Outlaw, opened on Broadway earlier this year. In May, both shows were nominated for Tony Awards and the former won a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. In addition to his work on Broadway, Lamon is the lead producer of Figaro: An Original Musical, which premiered in London’s West End in February. In this Q&A, Lamon discusses his trajectory from infantry squad leader to Broadway producer, his current productions, and the skills he gained at SIPA.

So you were just nominated for two Tony Awards as a coproducer on Operation Mincemeat and Dead Outlaw – and congratulations for Operation Mincemeat winning a Tony! Can you tell me a bit about those two shows and how you got involved with the projects?
Absolutely. They both might be interesting for history buffs, especially for SIPA alumni, they’re both based on true stories. Operation Mincemeat is essentially a comedy musical about the true story of a World War II deception operation in which the British tried to mislead the German army about the location of a planned Allied invasion of Sicily. The ploy involved a dead body, which the British planted false information on to trick the Germans.

This show is written by an incredibly talented comedy troupe – SpitLip – started out of the UK. It did very well in the UK, and I was following it over the last few years from abroad, then went over and saw it in London in November. I knew it was transferring to Broadway, and I became involved as a coproducer. And essentially, how Broadway works is you have lead producers and coproducers, and by and large, coproducers are, you know, can be there for artistic input or other input depending on how early on a show is, but, typically, by the time a show is reaching its Broadway phase, it’s more about capital raising [as opposed to artistic input].

The second show, Dead Outlaw, is the true story of Elmer McCurdy, an outlaw from Oklahoma whose body is preserved after he’s killed and he becomes a sideshow attraction. So he’s almost more of a celebrity and more successful in death than in his life. And this show has got a really cool rockabilly, gritty vibe – and it’s also about a dead body. I swear it’s just a coincidence, but my brother is a mortician [laughs].

Typically, I try to see a show or hear a lot more about it before I join a co-producing team or agree to co-produce it, but Dead Outlaw was a little different. It came late in the season, and I was approached about it by a friend. They were kind and willing to share the script with me, and I read it and thought it was fantastic. I had heard some of the vibe and sentiment of the music and read the reviews, and it was just an absolute hit when it was off-Broadway. The show beat out The Outsiders for some awards last year, and so I thought, ‘Yeah, let's go for this.’

When you’re scouting for shows to invest in, what criteria are most important to you? What are you looking for?
When I'm thinking about producing a show, a number of factors that weigh into my decision making. First and foremost I would say is the music in the show – if the music's not good, or if it's repetitive, or if I don’t have a strong gut feeling about it, then I kind of just don't look any further. And I'm at the point where I have a look at probably close to 90 percent of the things that are going to make their way to Broadway, so I get a pretty good sense of the market. So that’s number one – is it good content, is it something that resonates with me and that I think could be commercially viable?

Number two, which is also important, is [the production] has to have a good business plan. And if it's at the Broadway stage, that usually means you've got to have a good budget in terms of capitalization and weekly operating expenses. Typically, I find shows are less sensitive to capitalization, or the upfront cost, than they are sensitive to weekly operating costs … because there's only so much that you can generate in ticket sales on a weekly basis, and if your weekly costs, just like any business, are exceeding your ability to generate income, then you might have the best show in the world, but it's not going to play that long because it can't actually sustain itself.

And then three – and maybe it’s not as important as it once was, but it's certainly an X factor – is, unfortunately, if you're thinking about commercial theater like Broadway or West End, then an A-list name of some sort or a big marquee name is an important selling point from a marketing and branding perspective. It definitely helps.

You’ve had a very interesting career path – going from music school to the military, then into the financial sector and Broadway. How did your interest in music begin?
I started playing bass and getting into music at an early age. I started taking lessons when I was around 12 years old, and kind of just accelerated to music theory and almost every music class that I could take in high school and after. When I finished high school, I felt like there were really only two potential paths that I was going to take – one was in the sciences, like chemistry or something like that, and the other was music. And at the time, the only thing I could really imagine myself going to college for was music. So I enrolled at the University of Minnesota.

After my first year, I went home for the summer, and I was in a local production of the musical Oklahoma, singing a featured role. And I was also working two other jobs at the time. That was a moment of realization for me – of realizing that that’s hard work, I didn’t have family that was paying for school, it was all on me if I was going to pay for college. And so I had to make some tough decisions about how I was going to do that.

What led you to enlist in the military?
One of the couple jobs I had that first summer home from college was working as a pizza delivery driver, and I delivered a pizza to the local Armory one day. The recruiter asked me if I'd ever thought about joining the military and I said that I had. My grandfather had been in the Air Force, my uncles were in the Army. I went back later that day and signed up to join the military. And, you know, that helped fulfill my intrinsic motivation to be in the military, but also helped to pay for school. It paid for my undergraduate [education], and paid for two graduate degrees. So I would definitely not have been able to do all that without the military service.

I did my second year at the University of Minnesota, and then deployed to Iraq. I was gone for about two years, from 2005 to 2007. I was in an infantry unit in Camp Taqaddum in Iraq, which was a Marine Corps logistics base almost halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi. We were spread out to provide support for the Marines in the area – we were like the ground operators for the Marines on the base. On the roads around the base there was a very high chance that you'd find an IED or drive over one. There were large bomb craters all over the sides of the roads when we first arrived there.

Our job was kind of threefold. One, we would do base security, we’d run and operate the entry control points of this logistics base. Two, we would do some route type clearance missions. And three, we would do area operations, ‘building hearts and minds,’ and intelligence-collecting type of work. We saw a lot of change, I think, for the positive, at least while I was there. We did a lot of good work for the local communities that we were asked to serve.

I came home from Iraq around July 2007 and immediately went back to school. I ended up transferring to Concordia College, which was a better music school. I was only two years through undergrad at the time, and I remember coming home and thinking, “Man, what a crazy life.” I didn't know what I wanted to do when I got back from Iraq, you know. The only thing I did know was that maybe the path of least resistance was finishing up undergrad, and if that's in music that's fine. I can kind of figure it out afterwards if there's something else that I need to do. And so that’s what I did – I finished up my degree in music education.

What led you to apply to SIPA? And how did you end up in your current role in the financial sector?
After I finished undergrad, I decided I didn't want to teach K-thru-12 music. It was 2009, and there were no jobs, it was a pretty difficult time. I worked a bit and basically got a direct appointment at the Social Security Administration for being a disabled veteran. I did four years at the Social Security Administration and got a master's degree while I was working there, and then I tried out and applied for the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program.

I got into the PMF program, and then started attending SIPA. And then around when my PMF tenure expired to accept an appointment, I accepted one down in DC after a year at SIPA. And so for my second year of SIPA, I was commuting back and forth between DC and New York to finish up that degree – that was a crazy year. Because I also had two kids under three at that time. So my wife definitely reminds me of that all the time that I was traveling for a couple of years. But again, I don't think that, you know, I'd probably be here today if I didn't do the PMF program. I did two stints – one was at the US Agency for International Media, and then I also did a rotation at the Treasury as an International Economist, with West Africa as my portfolio coverage area.

After working in DC, I knew I needed to come back to New York where my family was. So I made some plans to pivot back. And I was like, ‘How am I going to do that?’ Well, I had always sort of wanted to pivot into the financial world, and then there was a posting at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that opened up as an examiner. I was selected for that and got to come back home and did that for about two years. I had done a lot of government service and military service up to that point in my life, and I wanted to try the private sector out. So then I pivoted over to Ernst and Young, and was a consultant there for a couple of years. I went into industry with the banks after that, and haven't really looked back. I got into a position where, you know, work is going well, and finances are at a place where I can look into alternative investments and things that I'm passionate about. And that's kind of where Broadway investing creeped back up into my mind – to fulfill that artistic need through helping develop or providing expertise in these different Broadway or West End endeavors.

How did SIPA’s EMPA program prepare you for a career as a producer of Broadway musicals?
So at SIPA, my concentration was international economic policy. Surprisingly, I am somewhat using the macroeconomic – I guess it'd be kind of micro- in a way – thoughts when it comes to Broadway producing, as we speak. Primarily, I've done a lot of Broadway stuff, but I'm actually pivoting some of my efforts to the West End in the UK, just because things are relatively cheaper, as my economics professors would say, thus creating a potential disjointed market where it's better for investors.

When I'm thinking about where these macro shifts are going to happen is definitely number one. Number two is some of the financial modeling that is done as a part of these – like how you're actually analyzing the deal. It takes some strong Excel and assumption-type skills to build out, one, if you're building or challenging a model, or two, reviewing and validating these, so to speak, assumptions that different producers put out there. I think those are the key ways that SIPA’s EMPA program prepared me for a career on Broadway.