Anyone who cares about musicals should know about Ira Weitzman, the creator and first Director of the Musical Theater Program at Playwrights Horizons and Lincoln Center Theater, later named the Associate Producer of Musical Theater at both institutions. Sunday in the Park with George, Once On This Island, Parade, Contact, and The Light in the Piazza are just a few of the shows he has had a hand in developing, and the American musical theatre is richer for his contributions. Next Sunday, May 3rd, he will receive the Edith Oliver Award for Sustained Excellence at the 2009 Lucille Lortel Awards.

Musicals have always been a big part of his life. “I had a passion inside me that was cultivated by my mother, who played me all the albums she loved,” Weitzman says. “And I grew up in New York, so I had lots of exposure to music and culture of all kinds. And musical theatre seemed to be the thing that just screamed out at me.” So as a precocious teenager, he landed a job at Playwrights Horizons as assistant to Artistic Director Bob Moss, who allowed him to roam free and explore all facets of theatre production. “But after a year or two, I noticed that there was not a lot of musical theatre activity in the community at large. Seeing a void at Playwrights Horizons, I suggested to Andre Bishop, who had recently been named Artistic Director, that we try to find a way to support musical theatre artists.” Bishop connected Weitzman with the young songwriter William Finn, who invited him to a living room reading of the work-in-progress In Trousers. “And it was my fantasy! I thought THAT’S the kind of musical theatre I want to do! It was funny, and it was sophisticated, and it was adult, and it had quirky characters, and it had a distinctive voice behind the writing. This was exactly what we’d like to do at Playwrights.” And over the next few years, Weitzman continued to guide the work, bringing in collaborators including director/librettist James Lapine, and eventually Falsettos was born.

Playwrights Horizons’ charter stated that the organization was dedicated to supporting the new work of American playwrights, and one of Weitzman’s proudest accomplishments was the day it was expanded to include composers and lyricists Supporting the work of playwrights, composers and lyricists includes, in his mind, both success and failure. “Not everything a writer creates will be as acclaimed as their last project, but it might be necessary for them to work on new things to keep moving forward. And ‘success’ can be measured in many different ways: critical success, commercial success, and artistic success." Weitzman learned from Andre Bishop at Playwrights Horizons that opportunities create artists; if one supports those opportunities one stands a better chance of the artists continuing to grow and develop their work as fully as possible.

Over the years, Weitzman has championed the work of many fledgling artists, including such now-established artists as Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, George C. Wolfe, Michael John LaChiusa, Jeanine Tesori and many more, thereby establishing a whole generation of musical theatre people. And the work continues with today's brightest talents shepherded by Weitzman, including Susan Stroman, John Weidman, Michael Korie and Scott Frankel, whose Happiness is currently playing at Lincoln Center Theater and Matt Sax’s and Eric Rosen’s Clay, a hip-hop one-man musical which inaugurated LCT3, a new initiative devoted to the work of emerging artists.

“When I was young,” Weitzman says, “there seemed to be one musical every year that I would get excited about going to see. So when I started to work in theatre, I thought that it should be the one I’m working on! I’ve had one musical every single year for over 30 years that has made me excited. And, oh my goodness, over the past dozen or so years, often we’ve had two or even more musicals a year that have gotten me excited… I’m particularly proud of having sustained excellence over the years. And having held a high standard in the work that we do, and having sustained that through thick and thin, year after year, is a very proud accomplishment for me. The other accomplishment is the personal one of having fulfilled my own fantasy of being part of the musical theatre community. And being part of the future musical theatre community which is new work.”

When asked about what he hopes his legacy will be, he laughs and says “I’m not going down that road, I’m not finished!!!” But he adds that recently he wrote his first bio for himself, and when he listed his productions, he thought “’These are some wonderful shows. You’ve had an amazing experience all these years.’ And so that is the beginning of a legacy. Certainly, all shows close, no matter how successful they are. Then they go into the memory and hearts of everyone who saw them and worked on them. And if you’re lucky there’s a cast album to remember it by. But they do all somehow vanish into the ether. I realized when I made that list, these shows become part of the legacy. And not just my legacy, but the legacy of musical theatre. American musical theatre.”