Award-winning Broadway Producer Visits Mercer Island

"If you think that your joy in show business is going to be because you're going to become famous, or you're going to write the next great novel...you're going to be very unhappy."

These words were part of the wisdom shared by Mitchell Maxwell with the audience of adults and youth at on Sunday, October 2.

Mitchell Maxwell, a 35 year veteran of the entertainment industry, has produced several critically acclaimed Broadway shows including the revival of Damn Yankees, and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Dinner with Friends as well as Stomp! His productions have won and been nominated numerous times for almost every theatrical award including the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Obie and Ovation awards.

The free event at Youth Theatre Northwest which included an interview conducted by executive director Manny Cawaling, a reading of several excerpts, and a Q&A session with audience members, was one of only two other book tour stops in Seattle by Maxwell, a mostly self-made producer and director (he helped found Tufts University's Musical Theatre Department, but dropped out before graduating) who has just published his first novel, Little Did I Know (Prospecta Press, 2011).

Little Did I Know, written as Roman á clef, is a novel based on Maxwell's first 100 days in showbiz after his theatre troupe at Tufts has graduated in 1976, and they set off to fulfill their dreams in the "real world", which in Maxwell's case was Plymouth, Massachusetts in a "dilapidated, decaying, mess of a building" old barn theatre with 450 seats, two hundred yards from the beach.

The novel, which is suitable for young adults and adults, relects on the hardships and sacrifices of following your dreams, staying true to your vision and growing up. In the author's words:

"It's a book about big dreams, it's about believing in yourself, it's about doing rather than talking, it's about flying without a net, making things happen, it's about dancing with pink elephants or lazy afternoons, it's about being fearless, it's about losing your innocence and realizing that you can't hold on to everything if you're going to be a man. It's about falling in love, it's about falling out of love, it's about disappointment and overcoming it, it's about triumph, it's about soaring, it's about keeping perspective. It's about everything you experience from being a boy to a man."

Among Maxwell's bits of wisdom, he cautioned the audience to not put so much pressure on a successful, final product, because in the end, "Life is about doing. Life is about trying."