NEW YORK — Sam Rudy was an 11-year-old farm boy when he first marveled at New York City. He came to the city as a trombonist in a school band representing Pennsylvania in a Lions Club parade, and he knew right then that one day he would make the city his home.
And he did. He moved here in 1979, into an illegal apartment in Midtown West and a low-level job at a theater publicity office.
In the years that followed, he built his own business. He did it old school — he had a small staff, but never had his own office, or even a website. But he represented hundreds of shows, including “Hamilton” and “Avenue Q,” and forged close relationships with two Pulitzer-winning playwrights, Edward Albee and Paula Vogel.
He also saw a production overstay its welcome often enough to know when it was time to lower the curtain. So on Wednesday, he’s retiring after 40 years as a theater publicist and moving back to Pennsylvania, where he has a house in the Delaware Water Gap. He is 66 years old.
“It feels right,” he said. “I know a lot of people think this is a great place to be an old person because there’s a Duane Reade on every corner, but I truly believe in full circle.”
In an interview at the cluttered cubicle in a Midtown workspace he shares with several other publicists, he talked about his decades in the theater business. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: Why now?
A: I’d been talking a lot about retiring on my 65th birthday, but then I had a heart attack, and I didn’t want to go out on a heart attack. When you leave this town, and leave this business, you’re essentially dead anyway, but if you leave after a major health event, they assume you’re actually dead.
Then things were really heating up for “Hamilton” in Puerto Rico, and I wanted to be part of that. But after we got through the opening of the “Hamilton” exhibition in Chicago, I thought this was a good time to go.
Q: You grew up on a farm?
A: My parents had a 100-acre dairy farm in Rebersburg. We’d get up at 5:30 in the morning and milk the cows, go to school, come back home and milk the cows again. On a recent spring day, as I was walking through Times Square, it occurred to me that while I can’t grow crops, what I have learned to do these past 40 years is to help grow art.
Q: How did you discover theater?
A: My junior year in college I got involved with the Penn State Thespians. Some friends of mine were involved, and the next thing you know, you’re painting sets, and then you’re the assistant stage manager, and then you’re the president.
Q: You started in New York as an assistant to publicist Shirley Herz.
A: I was answering phones and doing typing and opening the mail and mimeographing press releases, and I never left. She was one of the most influential people in my life, and until she died [in 2013], we worked in tandem.
Q: What’s the most exciting project you worked on?
A: “Hamilton” is in a class by itself, and class is the operative word. I went to see it again a few weeks ago, and it was a very emotional experience — it’s a masterpiece, and everything about it is so compelling and so beautiful.
Q: And the biggest flop?
A: “Shogun” seemed like a good idea for a musical, but when we got to the point where the ship wrecks on the rocky coast of Japan, and emerging from under the ship was dancing seaweed, we thought, “This is not good.” Not to mention the fact that on a press night the set fell and hit the lead actor — by the time Shirley and I got there, one or two press people had climbed up onstage, and the crew had put the actor in an ambulance. And that was the most positive coverage that show got — poor Philip Casnoff getting beaned by the set.
Q: You worked with Edward Albee for a long time.
A: In 1980, Shirley got hired to do press for “The Lady From Dubuque.” That was during Edward’s bad-boy days, when he was drinking and acting out and being rude. He had two Pulitzers, but he was definitely falling out of favor, and he was going overseas to get his plays done. But then his personal assistant called and said he had a new play, at Vienna’s English Theater, and that was “Three Tall Women” — his third Pulitzer, and a big success. And then “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” became my play.
Q: That must have been a tough one.
A: It was not an easy sell. The first audiences were screaming with laughter — you would have thought it was a farce — and the actors were really freaked out. The critics were ambivalent. At one point the actors came to us and said: “We need help. There’s a lot of hostility coming across the footlights, because people don’t understand the play.” And we knew it was true.
I’d run into colleagues, and people would say, “I really like ‘The Goat,’” and I’d think, “Why are you whispering?” I realized they hadn’t been given the license to say that.
Q: So what did you do?
A: We needed to send people home with something more than the Playbill. So I said, “Why don’t we put together “The Goat Gazette,” a four-page newsletter with reviews and lists of celebrities coming and articles from psychologists. We ended up doing it once a week, and it was flying out of the theater — it was fun and it was thrilling and it was working. And one thing that was remarkable: the number of people who would stay in their seats, talking about what they had seen. It underscored one of Edward’s favorite sayings — it’s the theater’s responsibility to send the audience home in a condition different from the condition in which they arrived. And “The Goat” did that in spades.
Q: Your other great relationship was with Paula Vogel.
A: Paula is, simply put, one of life’s really good people. She’s an exceptional human being with tremendous compassion who knows how to show that.
Q: You spent a long time representing “Avenue Q.”
A: I learned so much from those puppets. People wanted to believe in them — we would go out in public and I would see how people were drawn to the puppets and wanted to talk to them.
Q: Do you still like theater?
A: I still love that moment — if it’s going to happen, it’s usually in the first three minutes — where you think, ‘Oh, wow, this is going to be something magical.” The thrill of that is very intoxicating.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.