Lia Vollack has always had a good ear. As a youngster, she was a musician, playing piano and woodwinds. And though her dreams imagined life as a professional musician, Vollack is also a realist. “I wasn’t special as a musician,” she told Broadway News, “but sound came really easily to me and made sense to me.”
She hit the road as a sound engineer for rock bands when she was 16, but moved to New York City at 19 to pursue a degree in technical theater. But after beginning classroom studies, the pragmatist in her head chimed in again. Why not learn on the job? Vollack answered an ad from Ensemble Studio Theatre and was hired to be the assistant to the production stage manager. But when she arrived, the sound department needed help; with her sound background, she pitched in. And so, Vollack launched the early part of her career as a theatrical sound designer. Her first Off-Broadway sound designer credit was 1983’s “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker. Vollack made her living designing Off-Broadway shows, assisting sound designers on Broadway shows, setting up sound for fashion shows and providing sound effects for ABC Television. Eventually, she made her Broadway debut as the sound designer for the 1989 revival of “Born Yesterday.” But then Hollywood scooped her up.
“I worked with [director] Norman René and [writer] Craig Lucas on a lot of the plays that they did,” Vollack recounted. “So when they got this movie, ‘Longtime Companion,’ Norman called me and said, ‘Do you want to be our music supervisor?’ And I said, ‘I don't know what that is, but yes.’” Vollack moved to Los Angeles, where — after “Longtime Companion” — she freelanced as a music supervisor and music editor for about five years, earning credits on movies like “Prelude to a Kiss” (another René-Lucas collab) and “The Usual Suspects.”
Then, “through a series of coincidences,” as Vollack put it, she was hired as a senior vice president at Sony and eventually took over as president of Worldwide Music for Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group. “I oversaw all of the creative business licensing for music for all of the movies made and all of the Sony labels: Columbia Pictures, Screen Gems, Sony Animation, TriStar,” Vollack explained. “That meant putting together soundtrack albums, licensing the music, working with the filmmakers to choose a composer, working with the composers on film scores, working with the editors. I music-supervised a number of [projects myself, while also] putting together singles, putting together award campaigns for the music videos, because I was doing music videos…” She worked on the Oscar-winning song “Skyfall,” the Oscar-winning score of “The Social Network” and soundtracks for the “Spider-Man” films, to name a few.
For approximately 25 films per year, Vollack touched anything that had to do with the movies’ music. But because she was part of senior management, she also had the inside track on the studio’s greenlighting process, marketing strategy for individual movies and “understanding what about storytelling works and doesn’t work.” About 12 years into her time at Sony, Vollack wanted more. At the same time, she had begun seeing theatrical scenic designer Derek McLane, her now-husband, and returned to the art form that had been her foundation.
“I thought, ‘Disney as a division, Universal as a division, Warner Brothers as a division. I don’t really understand why we’re not doing that with our library,’” Vollack recalled. She pitched the idea of Columbia Live Stage, a new arm of Columbia that would develop works for the stage based on its catalog, to then-CEO Michael Lynton. Columbia leadership agreed to create a theatrical division with Vollack in charge. “They did say, ‘You have to keep running music,’ and I was like, ‘I understand this will be my side hustle,’” Vollack said. Some side hustle!
By 2016, Vollack transitioned to Columbia Live Stage full time. The division lead-produced “Groundhog Day” and “Tootsie” with some Broadway co-producing as well. A few years later, when leadership and priorities at Columbia changed and Vollack’s producing gained traction, the two struck a deal so that Vollack could take the projects she’d been working on — like “MJ” — to her new independent operation; Columbia maintained its investment in the title without the liability of a lead producer.
Today, Vollack is the independent lead producer of not only “MJ” on Broadway but three more productions around the world — and counting. She produced the Broadway musical adaptation of “Almost Famous” and the original musical “Dead Outlaw.” This season, in addition to developing “Eurovision Song Contest” and “Revolutions,” the seven-time Tony Award-nominated producer is one of the general partners on the 2027 revival of “Damn Yankees.” Here, Vollack explains how she approaches producing, how she uses marketing research and what she thinks is Broadway’s untapped opportunity.
