UWSer Jenny Gersten Rolls the Dice as New Artistic Director at City Center

UWSer Jenny Gersten, City Center’s new artistic director of musical theater. Photo by Emilio Madrid 

By Bonnie Eissner

For the past week and a half, audiences have packed into New York City Center’s mainstage theater to watch a lively revival of the 2001 musical Urinetown, the latest in a string of hits in the Encores! series, which brings retired Broadway musicals back to the stage with star-studded casts. 

Sustaining the streak of City Center’s revival successes is now in the hands of Upper West Sider Jenny Gersten, who late last month was named the center’s vice president and artistic director of musical theater. Since 2020, Gersten has produced the three annual Encores! revivals and the Annual Gala Presentations. Now, in addition to helping to create the Encores! shows, she will choose which musicals to revive.

“The first goal,” she said recently over a morning coffee at Brunch on Broadway, “is really the Hippocratic oath, which is: do no harm.” 

Started in the early 1990s to shore up sagging revenues at City Center, Encores! has become a New York City institution and the source of several Broadway transfers. Chicago, originally staged in 1975, was revived at City Center in 1996, where it proved so much of a hit again that it moved back to Broadway and hasn’t left.

“It’s really good the way it’s designed,” Gersten said of Encores! But as the series ages, the problem “of having a program that’s about unearthing classic treasures for 31 years is that we’ve done a lot.” 

She plans to work with her creative team to identify obscure shows from the 1940s to the 1960s — the golden age of musicals — that can stand the test of time and balance those with more recent hits that people are ready to see again. 

“I think the hardest thing coming up for me is managing expectations,” she said. “We’re going to produce some shows that may not be as nostalgic for you. We’ll do our best, but they’re not all going to Broadway.” 

A seasoned theater executive and the daughter of New York theater heavyweights, Gersten knows that high stakes are part of her business. She has produced Broadway shows, including Just for Us, Beetlejuice, and Once Upon a Mattress, and served as artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival and associate producer at The Public Theater. 

“Theater producing is, fundamentally, a form of gambling,” she said. “It’s like, I’m going to spend millions of dollars to put on this thing that I think people might like, and maybe they’ll buy tickets, and we’ll cover our costs, or we’ll do a little better. Maybe we won’t.” She has to lead the board, the staff, the artists, the audience, she added, “in the belief that this is worth our time.”

To Gersten, producing theater is not just worthwhile, it’s essential, especially in this digital age. 

“I think that creating opportunities for people to be together is a vital calling,” she said, “and to find stories that draw people in. I think there’s something neurological that happens in theater, and specifically with musicals, where you get caught up in the emotional life of the story, it can break you open.”

Gersten’s belief in the power of theater stretches back to her childhood in the 1970s, when her father, Bernard Gersten, the longtime associate producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival and right hand to its well-known founder, Joseph Papp, brought her and her sister to see his shows.  

She noticed how her father delighted in watching audience members react to the performances he produced. Afterward, he’d take his daughters backstage where he hugged the crew members and actors. “They loved to see him,” she said. “It made him so happy that the imprint was on me. I wanted to know what it feels like to love your work so much and be loved.”

Her mother, Cora Cahan, a dancer who later led the revitalization of 42nd Street theaters, was on a first-name basis with Mikhail Baryshnikov, or Misha. Other family friends and dinner guests at the family’s Greenwich Village apartment included actors Kevin Kline and Raul Julia and the playwright John Guare.  

“I didn’t need to study theater,” Gersten said. “I did that at the dining room table.” So, as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, she skipped over theater and majored in classical archaeology. 

After college, she returned to New York, where she found an apartment in the same 14th Street building where she grew up and took a job at the 52nd Street Project, the theater mentoring organization that brings kids and professionals together to create new works. 

There, she met and started dating the organization’s founder, Willie Reale. When they moved in together and needed a larger apartment, her landlord offered her one on Riverside Drive in the West 80s. She took it reluctantly.

“I came here kicking and screaming,” she said. “I was a total Greenwich Village snob.” But a year later, she and Reale married (they are no longer together), and two years later, they had their first child. Now, she has a dog, Penny, a black Lab who rested at her feet as she sipped coffee at Brunch. “I just completely fell for the lifestyle of the Upper West Side,” she said.  

These days, she and Penny walk in Riverside Park every day. Gersten has her favorite take-out place — Flor de Mayo. She frequented the Chinese restaurant RedFarm when founder Ed Schoenfeld was alive, and she enjoys dining at Celeste on Amsterdam Avenue, which reminds her of Rome.

“It’s such a better lifestyle than what I had on 14th Street,” she said. “I’m a total proselytizer.” 

But she also professes a love for all of New York. 

“There’s no other place like it,” she said as she put her hand on her chest reflexively. “You sit on the subway, and you see this incredible array of humans, and you interact with them every day. I always feel for people who live in Los Angeles, because they never are with people. They’re never with their community. We are always with community. We’re always interacting with different people. There’s nothing better for our humanity.”

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