Brian and Dayna Lee started producing, individually, before they even knew what the term meant.
Growing up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Toronto, Brian Lee started producing theater when he was just 16. Richmond Hill had just built a state-of-the-art, 700-seat performance venue. “I skipped school, and went for a meeting and was like, ‘I want to produce shows at your theater.’ But I didn’t know what that meant. They said yes. And so I would get the rights from MTI and we would have this large community theater with 80 people in the shows, I would direct it and then I’d also design the sets. And then my parents would drive me to get sponsorship from TD Bank.” That’s how Brian produced shows like “Oliver!” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“It was the most wild thing, but that’s what I did,” Brian told Broadway News.
Dayna Lee (née Bloom) began a different way. “I always wanted to be a singer-songwriter, so I was always putting together all the components of what it was to make a song. I had to find my arranger, the engineer, a sound studio. I had to hire my band, I had to pay for it, figure out a videographer, a photographer. I was still putting together pieces of the pie, but not realizing at all that that was producing.”
The two, who are now married, met during their respective undergraduate studies at Berklee College of Music. In 2014, the Canadians moved to New York City and decided to start a production company together, “not 100 percent understanding what that really meant,” said Dayna, “but knowing that we wanted to work together, we wanted to build things from scratch and we wanted to tell stories.”
While establishing their operation, known as AF Creative Media, they survived by creating social media content for hospitality brands like Schmackary’s and 5 Napkin Burger. Simultaneously, Dayna worked in sync licensing for music while Brian would often take gigs as an assistant director.
“I was the assistant director on ‘Sunset Boulevard’ with Glenn Close in London [in 2016]. I worked for Lonny Price, and we went to see ‘People, Places & Things,” Brian said. Dayna chimed in, “I looked at Brian and said, ‘I want to do that.’ Period. That’s what I want to do.”
The two called the National Theatre, the original presenting house, to ask how they could help bring the play to New York. (They had heard it was coming to Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse.) “They were like, ‘Okay, well we need an enhancement,’ and we’re Googling enhancement,” Brian recounted. “We raised that enhancement. It was $100,000, and we took the three-day intensive at CTI [Commercial Theater Institute] and through there we started building this network.”
From there, the pair served as co-producers on the Tony Award-winning revival of “Angels in America.” That’s when they realized they could become full-time producers and make the dream of their production company a reality.
“I feel like there are three different avenues as a producer: you can work for a legacy producer, you can go in-house for a nonprofit or you do it yourself and you figure it out,” Dayna explained. “Because we wanted to work together and our creative visions and tastes aligned so specifically, we wanted to do it ourselves.”
Recently, the pair served as co-producers on the 2024 revival of “Cabaret.” Now, Brian and Dayna are about to make their Broadway lead-producing debuts with “Giant,” which begins performances on March 11 at the Music Box Theatre. The play, by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner, will star John Lithgow as children’s author Roald Dahl during a controversial moment in his career — when his publishers and fiancée are attempting to get Dahl to apologize for anti-Semitic comments he made. “Giant” won the 2025 Olivier Award for Best New Play. And, just announced, Brian and Dayna (as lead producers alongside Stephanie and Nicole Kramer) have enlisted Grammy Award winners Norah Jones and Gregg Wattenberg to score the musical adaptation of “Practical Magic,” with a book by original author Alice Hoffman alongside Peter Duchan.
Here, Brian and Dayna dig into their approach as millennial producers, their strategy to sell Broadway shows and the importance of an out-of-town tryout. As Dayna said, “We spent the last eight years building to this moment and we are ready to meet it.”
What makes a project a Brian and Dayna project?
Dayna: Brian and I always say, “We love a story that’s familiar, but teaches you something new.”
Brian: That is consistent across all of our work.
Dayna: I will also say, going back to our values, [we want] stories that speak to who we are and the subject matters that we really care about. I think a lot about the legacy I want to leave for my children and the types of stories I’m telling that they would find interesting or be proud of. As younger producers, we’re always saying, “TV is so good. What is going to make somebody feel so compelled to go out and have this experience that can only live in the theater?” We have to reach those people who think “Euphoria” is incredibly cool — and it is. But [to say]: That’s happening on Broadway, Off-Broadway, the West End—
Brian: And you get to live it. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need the special effects you have on TV onstage. What it means is the theater itself is enough of a container to hold stories being told in a uniquely theatrical way. What are we giving [audiences] that can only be experienced there?
Dayna: My litmus test is always my sister, who’s eight years younger than me. I’ve taken her to see a few Broadway shows. She looked at me once and said, “Are all shows this amazing?”
Brian: Theater’s also a tricky thing because it is intergenerational. Someone has to take you to the theater.
How are you thinking about ways to create the culture of theater and that culture of intergenerationality?
