Macy Schmidt on Creative Risks, Audience-Centered Experiences, and Barbie

Monica Holt: Welcome back to CI to Eye. I’m Monica Holt. One of the reasons I was so excited to host CI to Eye this season was the opportunity not just to speak to some of today’s most influential executives in the arts, but also to introduce some of the inspiring innovators and disruptors on the rise in our field. Macy Schmidt is exactly that. She’s an orchestrator and live entertainment producer and is the CEO of Overture Global Entertainment at just 28. Macy is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, a Tony Award-winning producer, and the first woman of color orchestrator in Broadway history. She’s transforming how we think about live orchestral experiences through her all woman majority women of color orchestra, the Sinfonietta. The result is what I like to call the Macy Method: an approach to live entertainment that breaks every convention about how orchestral music should be presented.

She’s not just succeeding as an individual artist, she’s demonstrating a replicable methodology that any arts organization can apply to create more inclusive, more engaging, and yes, more commercially successful programming. This conversation is particularly timely as our field grapples with questions of relevance, accessibility, and sustainability. Macy represents a new generation of leaders who refuse to accept the false choice between artistic excellence and broad appeal. She’s showing us that the future of classical music could look very different from its past, and that’s something to celebrate, not fear. Every time I talk to Macy, I leave with a hundred new ideas and the energy and inspiration to go try something new. Let’s dive in. Macy Schmidt, welcome to CI to Eye.

Macy Schmidt: Monica Holt, thank you for having me.

Monica Holt: Thank you so much for being here. I first wanted to just talk a little bit about how the two of us really met. I know that we had circled in orbit via socials and Instagram, friends of friends, but I think when we met for the first time was at the Kennedy Center backstage at the concert hall.

Macy Schmidt: It was.

Monica Holt: During the, can we say notorious?

Macy Schmidt: I was going to say infamous. Yeah.

Monica Holt: Infamous. The one night only Barlow and Bear Bridgerton and Concert Moment. And there was Macy Schmidt having worked with these two phenomenal women, and I think I have a photo of you backstage conducting the backstage vocals for one of the songs and the two of us chatted and the rest is history. And that was a crazy night, but how fun.

Macy Schmidt: It was, and I feel really lucky to have been there and gotten to see it, not knowing at the time that it was going to be a one night only moment.

Monica Holt: Totally.

Macy Schmidt: Frozen in history.

Monica Holt: It was such a moment in time and it’s fun that I think about that night and how special it was on stage, but also it’s a special night for me because we finally met in person and I have just been a diehard fan and supporter of yours. I think the way you approach the work is incredible. So let’s start at the beginning. True or false, watching the Disney Wishes fireworks sparked your interest in orchestration?

Macy Schmidt: Holistically true. I don’t think little child me at five or seven years old or whatever, watching the Disney Fireworks show at that age, I don’t think that child at that time was saying, this is the beginning of a music career as an adult. In retrospect, I have pinned that as the moment looking backwards, but really it’s because I’ve never wanted to compose. I’ve never had an appetite for it and I’ve never really wanted to perform. I’ve wanted to manipulate music and have it be played by an orchestra, like exploiting it to present it in a different way and make someone feel something different than they felt the first time. The Disney origin story really came from, I think I was asked about explaining arranging and orchestrating and the difference between that and composing and hearing myself describe it. I was like, oh, I do remember a formative memory.

I was something between five and seven years old and I was at the Magic Kingdom. It was the Wishes era. And I distinctly remember hearing clips of songs in that Once Upon a Dream from Sleeping Beauty and Go the Distance in different songs and poking my mom being like, that’s not the movie version. It doesn’t sound like the movie version. And I had no vocabulary to articulate why it didn’t sound like the movie version. So then someone says, what’s your favorite song? And I’m like, the Wishes fireworks version of Part of Your World. And they’re like, what?

Monica Holt: Discerning taste from a young age. And we love it.

Macy Schmidt: But the thing is, I really love when the orchestra is leading with the story. I don’t think I could have explained that for 10 more years. And the sound of the orchestra — I’ve never really been particularly classical. I’ve never really been particularly jazz. I’ve never really been particularly pop-produced-on-a-laptop. It’s like this contemporary Disney orchestra sound that Disney made what it is. That the Danny Troob orchestration era made what it is.

Monica Holt: I am curious just for listeners who might not have as much experience or knowledge about the orchestrating world, if you can just talk a little bit about what happens in your mind when you’re taking a melody or what’s given to you from a composer and translating it into an orchestral experience.

Macy Schmidt: I’ll use the most straightforward version of the role, which I guess is the Broadway orchestration process, which is an orchestrator will be delivered a file. That file may have started in audio form, a team of music assistants or music prep people would’ve taken it down into written transcription form, that would pass through a music supervisor, arranger, who’s probably in the room with the composer. By the time they’re like, this is locked, it gets sent to the orchestrator. And if I’m looking at a template in scroll view, it’ll have vertically all these different staves and in the middle there will be the piano one. And my job is to basically take that and expand it out to all of the different staves. So I think of it very much as a vertical expansion, but that’s basically the process. It’s looking at each staff and being like, okay, well, to communicate what it feels like the composer intended in the piano sketch, what do the drums need to be playing? What do the woodwinds need to be doing? What kinds of sounds does the synth and the keyboard need to be doing? And it’s just assigning parts to all of those instruments to bring the piano bit of it.

Monica Holt: And having an ear for how all of it comes together. And I think this is a critical thing when I think about you to understand, because oftentimes you’re given a resource. This is the instrumentation that this Broadway show has. You’re given an overall kind of vision, roadmap, and then you are both responsible for the individual experiences of every musician on that piece as well as the overall reception. Obviously that is a team effort, but just in terms of the way your brain works, I think about that a lot when I think about you, because as we talk about some of the experiences you’ve created and building the Sinfonietta, that same kind of tool set, it’s, I understand the singular through line, the singular idea, now I’m going to expand it in every way. I’m going to be very specific about what each part of that is, and also I know what the whole picture adds up to. And that’s very much — when I think about this Macy Method of live experience that we are going to dive into — your brain makes sense to me how these two things work so beautifully in parallel.

Macy Schmidt: Yeah, something I really love to do is if a song is written on piano, I really like to present it without the piano at all. If a song is written on guitar, I really like to present it without the guitar at all. One of the programs that I’m working on that you know about, which is The Music of Taylor Swift: A Symphonic Tribute, will have no guitar in the instrumentation anywhere because it feels like that’s what they originally leaned on. And so if you take that crutch away, you have to put so much more orchestral color in the thing to carry it to make up for that. So usually what’s going through my mind is if I take away whatever rhythmic crutch this was written on, how do you use a wall of sound to move the song forward using every other instrument but that? Sometimes you have a composer who’s like, no, I actually would really — the piano is the point. Orchestrate around that. And that is common and totally a thing. But when I’m set free to do whatever I want, usually I’m seeing what happens if I get rid of the rhythm section but still want to have a rhythmic piece of work.

Monica Holt: It’s so fascinating to hear how your mind works and the way that you approach different problem sets, if you will, with the orchestrating work. So as you kind of learn and develop the orchestrating skills, talk to me a little bit about what doing that on Broadway was like, but then how COVID ultimately evolved you into the space of creating the Sinfonietta.

Macy Schmidt: So the early days, all I ever wanted in the whole universe was to work on Broadway. I just loved the big sound because also in terms of actively working, sure you can go try to maybe get a job in the Disney Music Department and be one of those music preparation people. That was not the I’m-20-years-old entry point. Broadway was the industry where that sound, that not classical, not hyper pop, like big grand orchestral sound was being heard. And I thought I had my dream job and I was just going show to show, workshops, pre-Broadway labs, being in the music department for all these different shows in different roles. And when the pandemic hit, I felt like I was at the peak of my career and it had all been taken away, which looking back is so silly, but for the first bit of the pandemic, I was clinging to everything the Broadway League said being like, okay, they’re saying it’s going to be Memorial Day.

They’re saying it’s going to be Labor Day — in the summer, early summer, when it was Labor Day. But then they said, it’ll be January. That was when it hit me. That was like, oh, that’s so far away. And so I think that was the first mindset shift of, okay, what do I do? Other influences: George Floyd’s murder had just happened and everybody with time on their hands in the Broadway community decided to call a racial equity town hall via Zoom with everyone that they knew because that was everyone’s full-time job for a three or four week stretch in the summer of 2020.

Monica Holt: Oh yeah.

Macy Schmidt: And a lot of the conversations in those led to what the Sinfonietta became. It was a lot of really well-resourced white male music supervisors being like — either the age-old, oh, we would love for the music side of Broadway to be more diverse, but there aren’t people, we just don’t have them. Or there’s the, how could we possibly bring more people in? And I’m like, I don’t know, create jobs, pay them, any list of things. And it felt like the community as a collective was scratching their heads about it to have something to do.

Monica Holt: When it’s pretty straightforward that —

Macy Schmidt: Pretty straightforward.

Monica Holt: — you could pay people living wage and create opportunity across the board.

Macy Schmidt: And then you have people who are getting residuals and royalties off of shows who are so financially set, bringing every black and brown person that they can in the community onto these panels to talk about their experience. And it was the intersection of that. It was the intersection of, I found myself being staffed as an orchestrator almost exclusively up to that point on shows that one would type as ethnic shows that were not the genre that I was skilled in. I would be pulled into shows that were Motown music centric, or I was on Tina or I was on Aida or The Color Purple, and I was brought into all these shows being like, I guess I fill a quota here. And I was thrilled to be there, don’t get me wrong, loved everything. But when I said to my agents at the time something like, Hello Dolly’s coming to Broadway, I want to work on the revival orchestrations.

Any reasonable producer would be like, you’ve never done that before. You don’t have a body of work in big white Broadway music. So in my spare time, I like to do a lot of charts and arrangements of what I called big white Broadway music. And so the intersection of all of these things came to a head in June of 2020, and I was so just frustrated and fed up thinking about how I wanted to be perceived in genres of work versus how I actually was perceived in genres of work. And thinking about the fact that artists who financed loans of a quarter million dollars to go to school and study their instrument or sitting at home not being paid to do their work, and I’m a very ADHD person, I had to be doing something. So that was how the Sinfonietta was born. And I decided to just reach out to female producers and say, hi, I want to do this project. I need this much money. It’s not a not-for-profit, so you won’t get a tax cut. It’s not a for-profit where you’re ever going to see a return on your investment, but would you contribute to this? And I was absolutely stunned when the first two women that I reached out to, Daryl Roth and Jana Shea, were like, absolutely. What’s your wire info?

Monica Holt: In your pitch emails, how did you describe the Sinfonietta? How did you describe the project?

Macy Schmidt: So the Broadway Sinfonietta, I described it as an all women and majority women of color orchestra. And the official definition has evolved since then. But I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the years about why majority women of color, and that was just so important to me. And we’ve maintained that for five years. Anytime the Sinfonietta has played — which now that we’re international, that phrase means something different. But within the white world, I felt at the time that within the Broadway music community, when women were brought into a space, it was usually white women. And when diverse bodies were brought into the space, it was usually men. And women of color were in this subsect that was left out. And if you were a woman of color on a first-class project, zero percent chance you were the majority in the room.

Monica Holt: Yeah.

Macy Schmidt: You were constantly aware that you were not. And one of my favorite things about the Sinfonietta is I wanted the women of color in the room who are used to always being the one or two others, to just feel the comfort of what it feels like to be the majority in a room because we probably had never felt that. So it was an all-women and majority women of color orchestra. And I had a piece of music, You’re Going to Hear From Me made famous by Barbara Streisand, that I had in my big white Broadway music fun arrangements vault. And the thing that was most important to me at the time that was crucial to the Sinfonietta actually being successful was, this was June of 2020. I wanted it to be filmed in person, high res quality, gorgeous. And everyone’s like, you should do a Zoom video for this piece you want to record. And I was like —

Monica Holt: Enough.

Macy Schmidt: Enough. Enough. And that required financing enough money to pay people for quarantine time. That required all kinds of other COVID safety things and bringing people into small instrument sections and then cutting it together later. But having an onsite camera crew of quality, I was like, if I’m going to put this thing out there and say this is the kind of sound and the kind of quality of work that women of color who are already in this industry can do, it has to be impeccably excellent in quality with absolutely no room for criticism.

Monica Holt: And that went a little viral. It certainly caught industry attention. And I think for you, it probably caught some of the corporate partnerships that got the Sinfonietta off the ground in those early days.

Macy Schmidt: It did. And what’s interesting is the reporting on it was, yes, it was about the orchestra itself, but the reporting on it really was not only is this orchestra, these all women and yay the song, yay the project, but oh, they did this in person and it’s really high quality. We’re not seeing that. So the decision to not make it a Zoom video, I think has led to everything. And yeah, one of the next calls that we got was about being part of a project that was being sponsored by Mac Cosmetics for Black History Month. It was a recording and it was a brand partnership. It was called the Broadway Sinfonietta at the time. And then I started one in LA called the Hollywood Sinfonietta years later. And then when I started getting asked to put symphonies together for tours throughout middle America, I was like, what do I call this one? And so now everything is just the Sinfonietta.

Monica Holt: Simplicity at its finest. And so you evolved and now you go from an idea into a real business. And as you were just starting to talk about, you’re building international orchestras across the globe. How did the way that you originally built the Sinfonietta inform the way that you’re scaling now?

Macy Schmidt: When it first started, I didn’t even understand that I should have had a separate bank account for all of this. My now COO of the Sinfonietta’s parent company, Overture, Colleen McCormack. Colleen had been at Disney for almost 15 years and I got to know her there. And when Colleen came on board, that was when it really started to feel like a business. I would say for the first two or three years, people were constantly asking me if it was a nonprofit, if they would get a tax cut and it felt like it should, it would qualify as one. But also then why is it that you put women of color on a thing and it has to be raised GoFundMe dollars? Nonprofit instead of, we participate in the profit economy?

Monica Holt: Speak on that.

Macy Schmidt: And that’s something that I really cared about, but I very much did not want the Sinfonietta to be like my profit machine. Not that it would — not that it could have been, but something we started doing really early that we’ve really evolved into doing at a larger scale now is if there was any leftover money from a project, we had a contingency line. And if we didn’t use it or something like that, we funneled it all into a childcare fund for working mothers. And since 2021, we’ve had a no questions asked policy that if you are a mom and you get asked to do a gig and you would have to hire childcare in order to do that gig, you don’t have a partner staying at home watching, you tell us you need it and no questions are asked.

Monica Holt: That’s incredible, Macy,

Macy Schmidt: It’s something I’m really, really proud of.

Monica Holt: What does a global network of women-led orchestras accomplish that traditional orchestras can’t?

Macy Schmidt: I think it accomplishes two things. One is that it’s adding a layer of representation for young girls. That’s very important to me. That’s always been very important to me. But also a lot of the general live music going population that doesn’t identify as an orchestra person maybe isn’t going to the symphony orchestra on their Friday night and an all women orchestra doing commercial music in orchestral form has the ability to bring people into that in a way that even if there’s tons of programming at that symphony orchestra that person A might enjoy, they might not even get there to find out because they’ve typed themselves out of the word symphony orchestra so hard.

Monica Holt: Very well said in my opinion. And actually a great transition because you’ve developed what I’d call the Macy Method for live experiences. So I think in its simplest terms from an outsider, I describe it as just an audience-first approach that breaks traditional conventions of what a symphony experience can be. So before we dive into specific projects, of which there are many, can you maybe try and distill that Macy Method into what your core philosophy for designing a live experience is?

Macy Schmidt: I can. So we’re going to go back to Disney. The thing about Disney that I realized as an adult that I didn’t realize as a kid is, it is immersive adult musical theater.

Monica Holt: Wait, that’s so well said.

Macy Schmidt: You’re walking through musical and there’s hidden magical orchestral sounds coming out of bushes and hidden speakers that you can’t see that just are the underscoring to your musical. And then there are like characters singing songs up on little stages. You’re walking through a musical that’s designed to hide all of the technical things that make it a musical. The reason Disney World is up here and all other theme parks are here, sorry, all other theme parks, for now, is that Disney is giving you an experience that is leaving reality at the door and entering another place. And truly you’re in another world and we’ve crafted that world so that you can really get into it and it’s like awe and wonder. And that is my favorite feeling. And so my personal creative mission in all work that I have done and will do is when my orchestra is on stage, make it such that audiences are looking at that with the awe and wonder of me watching the fireworks show.

That is what I want. And so cut to one of the first film concerts that we were brought in to do. Kids who have never been into a symphony hall coming in to see this live orchestra. The Sinfonietta is playing and people come dressed up and everyone’s very into it and on stage there is an orchestra of women dressed in black. That is it. And the movie playing above it, which I realize is enough, that is enough. You seeing the movie with the score played live totally is enough. But I’m watching people come dressed up in costume and I’m like, oh, what about this missed opportunity? What about a photo? What about an audience activation? What about design? The world is limited to the proscenium of the stage, but they’re coming in character, they’re coming like they’re going to a theme park. Or when we did Cowboy Bebop, the anime on its 25th anniversary, people are showing up in costume.

I think merch for that show sold out before the show even started. And I was seeing these fans and I’m like, wow, when fans come see the IP, yes, the movie’s there, the screen is there. The hard part of licensing these concerts is there, but that’s almost not completely what they’re there for. They’re there for the world of the fandom. I love a fandom. One of my favorite things is the quote Taylor Swift has that I’m going to butcher, you probably know it, that’s about how the most uncool thing in the world is to make fun of somebody for being excited.

Monica Holt: Yes, I believe so strongly in this. It’s the worst kind of person is someone who makes someone feel bad, dumb or stupid for being excited about something.

Macy Schmidt: I love that. When I see people coming dressed up as these really specific characters, I love it. I love that they’re so into it.

Monica Holt: It’s funny though because even as you’re describing, not to go too hard on my analogy here, but you’re essentially, you’re building the score for the experience when you talk about all of these other things.

Macy Schmidt: I love it.

Monica Holt: So you take that philosophy — last summer, Barbie the Movie in Concert at the Hollywood Bowl with Barbieland Sinfonietta. Trademark Barbieland. My favorite part of this title. Will you do me the honor of walking me through how we got there. Indulge me by telling me my favorite Macy story, your pitch to Mattel.

Macy Schmidt: Okay, so the Sinfonietta was performing, we were performing as a vendor. We were being brought in by producers to put something on stage to perform, which was a huge thing for the Sinfonietta, but also for me, because I’d never worked in this medium, I’d never come into the medium of the score live orchestra. It was so formative because I was like this medium of storytelling, you get to use the films that already have these fans that love being in this world and build a world around it for them using my favorite thing, which is an all women orchestra, which is niche. So I’m like, I can take my niche thing and put it in this commercial existing fandom thing. And the Barbie movie was in theaters at the time, and I sent many a cold email. This was probably cold email number 2,999 of 3000. But I wrote an email describing our experience playing that film concert and inquiring as to whether the licensing rights to Barbie the Movie were available for live experiential worldwide. And I sent it directly to Mattel’s C-Suite.

Monica Holt: Come on. That’s like audacity in the best sense of the word.

Macy Schmidt: It doesn’t feel that way to me because the worst case scenario here is I just had a little creative deep work session writing this email and no one responds to me. And I truly believe that the 2,998 cold emails that I wrote that didn’t get responded to all contribute to the one that gets responded to.

Monica Holt: Yes, but say that again, because I feel like more people need to take this approach of, for situations like this, the worst case scenario is no response.

Macy Schmidt: The worst case scenario is you’re right where you are.

Monica Holt: Right? The worst case scenario is you’re exactly where you are. Getting a response, even if that response is no, is still a door open that wasn’t before. So for anyone who has a draft sitting in their Gmail right now that they’re worried to hit send on or they’re fearful, listen to what you just said. Worst thing you’ve wasted is just the time that you put in to create a thought, which is going to only buoy you forward somewhere else.

Macy Schmidt: Totally. And that thought might evolve into a different project for a different place. There are two movie studios that I went in pitching a film to get the film license for, both of which said no. And then I said, oh, I’m going to be in town. Why don’t we sit down and I would love to hear about where the department’s at and if there are other films you might like to do this with. And both of those studios we’re going to work on a completely different film with. So yeah, being told no instead of being told nothing is great. It’s — conversation’s open.

Monica Holt: Exactly. Okay, but so sorry. You send your email to C-Suite and the pitch is…

Macy Schmidt: The pitch is if you lived in Barbieland and it was Friday night and you were going out for a night at the symphony, you wouldn’t be going to the whatever city philharmonic to see Mahler. You would be going to the Barbieland Sinfonietta and hearing Lizzo songs and Dua Lipa songs. And so the idea was diegetically, we’re at the Barbieland Sinfonietta. And the next day I got a response from Mattel’s location-based entertainment team saying, let’s have a conversation about this. And I think two days after that, we got on a Zoom call and all of the people in this department were these amazing creative imaginative women. And I will say truly, I’ve never worked with a company that embodies its mission and message so meta internally as this company. I adore this company.

Every conversation I’ve had from the moment of licensing to now, I’m constantly just stunned. And one of the reasons I think everything was very kismet for me with Barbie the Movie is, they’re an IP company with brands and fans and building up universes that put out its first movie. And so something that we’ve dealt with over the entire lifespan of Barbie the Movie in Concert, especially when selling it to symphonies and explaining how it works to symphonies, is they’re used to: I license a title, throw the title on the screen, throw my orchestra on the stage in black, the end. And we have to explain to them Barbie is a brand that is treated differently at a higher level. For Mattel, when I pitched this, they weren’t hearing ‘film concerts.’ They’d never done that before. They have one film. They were hearing ‘brand event built out to be a super high quality experience for fans.’

Monica Holt: The audience experience, all the touches… Will you just talk about a couple of your favorite touches?

Macy Schmidt: Something that I’m very proud of is that when I’ve looked back at my original drafts of pitch decks, the overwhelming majority of the weird little tiny things that I put in have made it into the show and remain in the show. I mean, we had the low hanging fruit. The orchestra’s all in pink. We had matching hot pink heels for them all at the Hollywood Bowl. We decorated the stage top to bottom pink. So basically the goal was, you don’t see any black on this stage anywhere. Giant 30-foot turquoise custom made palm trees. I’ll get to the Bowl experience in a second, but in terms of the actual show, it was things like during the beach scene, only the rhythm section’s playing. It’s not a big orchestral scene. I want all those players who aren’t playing bouncing around giant pink beach balls to each other and having a party and just pretending they’re not musicians in that moment.

So I want it to be fun. One of the things that I put in the original pitch deck to try to help them envision it was, there’s a deprogramming sequence where all the Barbies have been brainwashed. When Barbieland becomes Ken, all the girls on stage gradually become Ken, like the little black headbands, the sunglasses, and they unzipped the jumpsuits and they’re wearing black t-shirts like the I’m Just Ken sequence underneath it. And some of the Barbies who were brainwashed, they’re in the pink jumpsuits and America Ferrera’s in the back of the ambulance and she’s saying all these things that are wrong with the patriarchy. And then there’s like a ding, a little bell tree sparkle, and the Barbie comes back. She’s like, oh, I am a doctor. And so when every time a little ding like that and a Barbie’s deprogrammed, I would pick a player to be spotlighted to hop up and zip up her jumpsuit and become Barbie again.

And you see that kind of pinging around the orchestra and it’s just like we’re not crossing into stage theater, acting territory. We’re just being diegetic about the fact that in the world of this IP, there could be an orchestra and you could be at the orchestra and we’re just bringing them into the world. So that’s the onstage part. The offstage part — I want from the moment you park your car in lot D of the Bowl parking lot, I want you to feel like you are entering Disney World level universe. So I sent Helen Mirren these selections of narration being like, I know you’re filming a movie in London. Could you please record yourself in your iconic Helen Mirren voice saying all these sentences to an imaginary audience so that when someone pulls up their car and parks the Hollywood Bowl and they get out, the first things they’re hearing are Helen Mirren orienting them into Barbieland? And they pass through a giant billboard that we had fabricated to replicate it that says, Barbieland: This Way on one side when you’re going into the Hollywood Bowl and Real World: This Way when you come out.

So all the little things like that, it’s like, by the time you’re inside the Hollywood Bowl, I don’t want you to be thinking you’re in the Hollywood Bowl. I want you to be thinking you’re in what the Hollywood Bowl would look like if it was in Barbieland.

Monica Holt: And that — it takes so much labor. I know for you as you’re thinking about this, but also the physical labor of doing this. And yet as you were first telling me all this as it was coming together, just how many performing arts cultural centers, theaters, can even as you said, take the low hanging fruit of this and just apply it for any event that they’re doing.

Macy Schmidt: I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it takes resources to do that. But something special happened that we now do with every single show that costs zero or negligible dollars. I did something at the Hollywood Bowl that I didn’t intend to continue, which is our principal violist has a daughter named Amelia. She was seven at the time, she’s Indian, beautiful, looks just like me, and I wanted to do this thing during what was I made for that in the girlhood flashback scene. I walked off the podium when kind of Barbie walks away and then she comes out and takes the baton from me and conducts as my mini self. And I worked with her on conducting the four pattern and she conducts the orchestra into what was I made for. And that was not the thing I was thinking most about. I was thinking about how many dollars went into the pink firework show, and that was one of the most special moments of my entire life.

And then it just so happened that at Royal Albert Hall, her mom was like, we have so much family there, maybe we can come to London and do it again. And I was like, yes. So we did it there. So then we get to China for a tour in China, and I think because all the footage and materials of the first two shows had her in it, they actually just assumed they had to source little girls. So I roll up to conduct in China, and there’s two little six year olds that they’ve sourced for this who don’t speak any English, who are in pink holding a baton. And everyone in China was like the little girl conductor is the thing. And then we start moving into the symphonies in America and I’m trying to push them on, can you decorate the stage? Can you do this, can you do that?

And resources, orchestras being defunded, we know the drill. And I was like, okay, but can we at least do this one thing because it’s been hitting and it’s easy to execute. Ask the women in your orchestra if anyone has a daughter. And that has now been done at every show. A few days ago at San Diego Symphony, a 9-year-old girl named Evelyn whose parents both work for the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, her mom is the music librarian and her dad is the principal percussionist, conducted her parents for Barbie during What Was I Made For at San Diego Symphony. And now there are press, there’s articles about this. It’s become the heart and soul of the show. And what I have learned is I was assigning the source of the awe to expensive spectacle when actually the heart and the narrative and the storytelling is people cry when this girl takes the podium and you’re in this emotional moment of the girlhood flashback scene and you see the little girlhood self take over leading. I get goosebumps when I think or talk about it. That’s it. And that’s the moment, and that is not a hundred thousand dollars pink firework show.

Monica Holt: No, it’s storytelling at its core in a way that — we could wax poetic on the layers of why it is so moving and emotional at any time, particularly now, but a few that I’ll name are not just that it is enhancing what essentially was let’s say on the page, but really on the screen, right? It is enhancing a moment that was created. It is something tangible that you’re watching, which is to say a young person, particularly a young woman, have a platform literally in every sense of the word. And also on top of that, on top of the nostalgia, the wistfulness, the care, it’s also having a platform and having power. I think it is an understated thing. You’re not going to think that in the moment as you’re watching this scene. You’re thinking about your own experience, your own girlhood, but you’re giving a young woman power in front of an orchestra, in front of an audience, and that is powerful, even if it wasn’t tied to a movie and theme. It is so beautiful. Folks, if you haven’t seen Barbie in Concert, all you need to do is type it into TikTok and you will see a clip of this exact scene from one of the outdoor venues that Barbie’s been at. It’s gorgeous.

Macy Schmidt: All the viral TikTok videos — I noticed this after the Bowl and after Royal Albert Hall. It wasn’t the big pyro show. It was always the zoom in of the girl conducting.

Monica Holt: And they all do think that she’s your daughter, which I love.

Macy Schmidt: I’m like, no, I can’t take credit. It’s Rhea’s daughter. But it’s also the way that the scene is set up. What Was I Made For is it’s all piano for a while and then a few lines into the Billie Eilish vocals, the whole orchestra comes in at once, and so we switched during this piano part, and so it’s not just her standing with power in front of the orchestra, it’s that she brings them all in and she is leading 85 of the most accomplished musicians in the country.

Monica Holt: Gives me goosebumps all over.

Macy Schmidt: Yeah, and I will tell you, every young girl who has done this, which we’ve had a lot now, has nailed it, and no one has ever had anything less than a perfect performance.

Monica Holt: It’s so special. Okay, Barbie concerts now happening all over the world. Live to film concerts we’ve talked about, we know they’re not new, but this approach is different. How do you go about identifying what IP you want to commit that brain real estate to?

Macy Schmidt: I have found in the film concert industry, the movies that just sell out in live concerts and make money hand over fist with very little marketing are the Boys R Us movies, the superhero, John Williams scores. The big — that just sells out immediately and there hasn’t really been a producer in the market that’s been like, I want to do all the Girls R Us movies. Not that — A lot of boys and men come to Barbie. We have a lot of Kens, but I reach for the type of work that I imagine Greta Gerwig would want to direct. And I’ll use two examples that are actually not live score shows we’re doing, but were inspired by the concept. We’re doing a tribute show by the Sinfonietta that’s The Music of Taylor Swift: A Symphonic Tribute.

Monica Holt: I’m very excited about this.

Macy Schmidt: I’m like, okay, first of all, the instruments need to be glittered like the glitter guitar. There may be friendship bracelet making stations absolutely everywhere. There’s going to be bead cleanup, it’s in the rider, there’s going to be bead cleanup. The concept for me for that one is you probably got an outfit for the Eras tour that you wore once and you have amazing pictures and it sits in your closet. Wear it again. Make some friendship bracelets, come meet other fans because that is part of what made the Eras tour so special. And create a world or experience that’s just a new — there are a million ways you can experience Taylor Swift’s music, but come experience a tribute to that music with other fans in that kind of way. Another one is on December 16th of this year. It is what would’ve been Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. She’s older than America. I’ve learned.

Monica Holt: We love that.

Macy Schmidt: And I was looking at, okay, what film should we put here? Do we license one of the big Jane Austen films and do film score with the orchestra? What it’s actually evolved into is a new program that we’re premiering and then taking out called The Music of Jane Austen in film, and it has selected readings from a notable reader in between all these different selections of music following the scenes that the music has scored to. The through line is you’re bringing people into a world. You’re bringing people into purple glitter and friendship bracelets, or you’re bringing people into Jane Austen books and the feather pens and that era, and I’m going to do absolutely everything I can to make sure that the indoor theater feels like that world. So I think that I’m reaching for work and IP that is empowering and elevating women and girls, and then secondarily, that is creating a world of awe and wonder for whoever’s seeing it.

Monica Holt: As we’ve been talking and just thinking about how you take concert experience and merge it with fan experience and just create, as you said, an evening, a moment in time of awe and wonder and being together, which feels like just the theme for the moment is how do we bring people together in joyful ways, right? In a moment where there needs to be resistance and other things happening, there also needs to be dancing in the streets together. We’ve talked a lot about this merging of concert experience and fan experience. I just think your story and what you’ve been doing is so important, and frankly, I think a lot of venues are going to see this increasingly so hopefully working with you, but I’m also hoping that some of them take these lessons upon themselves.

Macy Schmidt: Yes.

Monica Holt: You are still very early in your career, I should say. Macy is not even near the peak of her career, but she’s done a lot already. So you’re the first woman of color orchestrator on Broadway.

Macy Schmidt: Yes. Which is a depressing statistic, but yes.

Monica Holt: Which is a depressing statistic and yet still an accomplishment. You are a Tony winner. You’re a Forbes 30 under 30. This is a lot to have done early, and you are transforming what live concert experiences mean to a lot of people. As you think about not what you want to do in your next 10 years, because I want that to be just a freedom of space that you are going to have so many adventures in, and I will be there cheering you on every step of the way. But as you think just about your legacy and the themes that have brought you through to this moment, what do you hope the through line of your career represents?

Macy Schmidt: I love that question, and I think there are two things. One is inspiring and elevating, empowering women and girls and making sure that in doing that, women of color are not the minority in the space and creating magical experiences that inspire wonder and awe and creativity for people.

Monica Holt: Yeah, inspiring creativity is a noble cause and one of great import, so I’m really glad that you said that and I see it already. Okay. We have our last few questions, which are our quickfire culture questions. What is one piece of culture that you’re currently obsessing over?

Macy Schmidt: My current show is Madame Secretary. I’m finally watching it. I’m loving it. My current book is everything by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Monica Holt: Ooh, okay. Good one.

Macy Schmidt: But with the real answer is the upcoming Life of a Showgirl.

Monica Holt: I should have known better than to even ask.

Macy Schmidt: I felt like I needed to put two other things first to couch it a little bit, but it’s the only answer.

Monica Holt: October 3rd can’t come soon enough. We love this. We love — Swifty is another fan subculture that we love and support here.

Macy Schmidt: We do.

Monica Holt: If you could go back in time, what is one performance or concert that you would want to be present at?

Macy Schmidt: The 2015 Actors Fund Benefit Performance of Bombshell.

Monica Holt: Wait, I just need a moment to yes-and you, and just say, would that this time machine would be built sooner so that we can both go together. The way I lived for those YouTube videos.

Macy Schmidt: Lived. I rewatched that during COVID so many times. It was a pure moment in time.

Monica Holt: It was a pure moment in time. Okay, so last question. Your CI to Eye moment. If you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would it be?

Macy Schmidt: Enhancing the magic does not have to be expensive, and that is something that I learned from trying to put fireworks everywhere. The ability to find small ways to elevate and enhance the creative so that what you’re creating for your audience is not just the music they’re hearing, but they’re walking away with something memorable. Thousands and thousands of people at our shows who have never seen an orchestra play live before ever want to see it again, and something that’s crucial about that is that they were brought into the door in a show where the audience knows there are no etiquette rules and I want them to cheer and be unhinged. I’m telling the audience, I’m like, if you’re here, it’s your first time seeing an orchestra. This is how it works. We’re not going to be sitting here, not clapping between movements. We’re supposed to have fun. Someone’s going to pass you a beach ball. Get into it. Inviting new audiences in and making sure they actively know that they aren’t going to be held to some mysterious etiquette rules that they don’t really understand, that no one will explain to them, ’cause that’s what’s keeping them out.

Monica Holt: Their enthusiasm is welcomed and appreciated and treasured, and as you said, it’s the experience. It’s also the feeling of belonging. It’s the feeling of come as you are, enjoy as you want. We are all here to be together. Macy, thank you for your time. Thank you for all you are doing to continue to push creativity and access forward for the field, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Macy Schmidt: Likewise to you. You pushed that forward a lot, and something that I’m going to say on this podcast that I hope you leave in is that Monica Holt was definitely the first leader executive at an elite symphony organization who engaged thoughtfully with programs that I had and made me feel like my programs might have a home in an elite hall. I used to think, okay, I’ll go into the PACs and performing arts centers and finance something on the side. I don’t even think I’d be selling Barbie into symphonies if we hadn’t been talking about maybe doing Taylor Swift with the NSO or whatever it is and being like, oh, these organizations are open to doing that kind of programming because it’s part of new audience development. You did that for me, and I think people should know that.

Monica Holt: Thanks, Macy. Adore you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to CI to Eye with Monica Holt. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show and hear from leaders in the arts and beyond. If you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some pretty incredible episodes coming your way, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Monica Holt. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are our incredible designers and video editors. Our music is by whoisuzo. Don’t forget to follow CI on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for CI’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com and you’ll never miss an update, and you can always reach out to let us know who you’d like to hear next from on CI to Eye.