In May 2025, Joshua D. Saltman pulled up to the Hutton Brickyards in Kingston, New York, a former brick manufacturing site on the banks of the Hudson River. It was his fourth venue visit that day. “I got here and walked around and said, ‘This is an amazing, special place,’” Saltman told Broadway News. He chose it as the place for his brainchild, “The Festival,” a three-day, outdoor Broadway music festival that took place from Aug. 14 through Aug. 16.
Saltman is an entertainment lawyer and self-described Broadway fan and music festival devotee, a frequent Coachella-goer. He recruited his former colleague David B. Schwartz, an entertainment lawyer who also happens to be a producer of stage and screen. When they cooked up initial plans for the Festival, the first step was to determine if there was a place that could house their vision in the right location. “We both felt that the venue had to be within a two-hour drive of New York [City] from both a talent and a guest perspective,” Saltman shared. The duo expected there would be high attendance from those in New York City and surrounding areas. (They were right. The two reported that a slight majority of attendees were from the tri-state area, though folks traveled from 45 U.S. states and as far as Japan.)
With Hutton Brickyards on hold for August 2026, the pair needed to ensure they could get supreme Broadway talent to perform. They began courting folks in the fall of 2025. By December, Saltman said, they had confirmed some key talent, but the majority of names fell into place at the start of 2026. “By January 1, I don’t know if we had it,” Saltman confided. “But somehow by January 10 or 12, a few others had fallen in [place], and Kelli O’Hara said, ‘Oh, that really does sound good,’ and that’s when we said, ‘This is happening.’”
The timing couldn’t have been more necessary. “We knew that we had a bit of a drop-dead date in terms of putting tickets on [sale], in terms of announcing sometime in January,” Saltman said. “By the beginning of 2026, we needed to know whether this was a go.” And it was.
