Q&A with Jerome McEntee of Broadway Strategic Return Fund
Co-Founder
Principal Series:
Broadway Strategic Return Fund’s strategy applies an institutional, quantitative methodology to the inefficient live theater industry which consists of Broadway, West End London, and tours in major cities around the world. Attraction to investing in live theater:
– Venture capital like returns
– Worldwide homogenization of taste is expanding the market opportunity for productions.
– New theaters coming online line around the world including Middle East and South America
– Not economically sensitive, Broadway revenues were up in 08-09 for example.
– Highly inefficient industry
– Barrier to access hot productions
– No depository for detailed financial information on productions
The Broadway industry requires approximately two billion in new capital each year, ex Disney productions. The vast majority, over 95%, is raised from individuals seeking to pick a winning production with the average check of 75-100k. Given the disparity in topics of successful productions, no one has demonstrated the ability to consistently determine which productions will be successful.
Taking over three years to develop, Curt and Hunter created a proprietary database of every Broadway production’s detailed financials over the last 10+ years. Employing a quantitative analysis, Curt and Hunter found there are common traits for unsuccessful productions. Using this process combined with industry knowledge and access, the Broadway Strategy attempts to eliminate the bottom 50% of failing productions and invest in the remaining productions via an evergreen portfolio which now consist of over 200 productions including over 54 Tony and Oliver’ winners. Where only 20% of productions succeed, over 11 years the strategy averages a 47% success rate.
Join us for a private Family Office Insights Webinar featuring Curt Cronin and Hunter Arnold, Founders of the eleven-year-old Broadway Strategic Return Fund and Strategy, on a mission to support and touch people through live theater and provide non-correlated returns to investors. With over forty years’ experience in raising capital, producing productions including 6 Tony winners, Hunter and Curt have brought an institutional strategy to a highly inefficient and hard-to-access industry. Prior to launching the Broadway Strategy, Curt retired as Head of Operations for Seal Team 6, Consulted for McCrystal group and Co-Founded Aiki Partners, Hunter Arnold Founded recruiting site Hunter Executives which he sold to Career Builder as well as led Career Builders MA in the Far East. Since then, Hunter has been a long time Producer on Broadway, winning six Tonys including his first for ‘Kinky Boots’ and recently for the 2025 Tony winner ‘Maybe Happy Ending’.
May 07, 2026 at 2:30pm-3:30pm EST
RSVP & Confirmation Required
Investors Only Please!
Family Office Insights is a voluntary, “opt-in” collaborative peer-to-peer community of single family offices, qualified investors and institutional investors. Join the community here www.familyofficeinsights.com
How did you meet Hunter?
Hunter and I met in our MBA program in London, and honestly, it started in a way that still makes me laugh.
He was sitting behind me in class, and every time I turned around to introduce myself, he had disappeared. This went on for four or five days. Finally, on the last day of the week, I cornered him at the snack table and just asked directly, “Do you have a problem with me?”
He looked completely confused and said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “You’ve talked to everyone in this class except me.” And he said, “No, not at all.” I said, “Great, I’ll see you at dinner tonight, seven at seven.”
What I didn’t know at the time was that on the flight over, he had looked at everyone’s profiles and basically decided, “The decorated Navy SEAL is not going to hang out with the gay Broadway producer.” So he had completely written me off.
That dinner ended up being one of those rare, immediate, deep connections. And that was the beginning of a 15-year partnership that ultimately led to everything we’re building today.
Why did you come up with the idea for the fund?
Coming out of the Navy, my entire career had been built around risk mitigation and asymmetric outcomes. I knew that if I was going into business, I needed to find an environment where the upside was significantly mispriced relative to the risk.
When Hunter started walking me through how Broadway actually works, it immediately stood out as one of the most arbitrage-rich markets I had ever seen.
You had an industry where a large percentage of capital was coming in emotionally, people investing for access, for passion, for proximity to the art. At the same time, most producers were thinking very short term, how do we get this show open?
We saw an opportunity to approach it completely differently. What if we treated this like a disciplined investment platform, built a diversified portfolio, and focused on the full lifecycle value of the intellectual property instead of just opening night?
At a deeper level, we believe the arts are one of the primary drivers of culture. If artists, entrepreneurs, and storytellers are the ones shaping the future of how people think and feel, then the system funding them has to be sustainable.
So the real question was, can we make the arts investable in a way that is both financially viable and culturally impactful? The fund was our answer to that.
Why are you the only ones, and what obstacles are there?
The simple answer is that this is a very hard model to build, and it runs directly against how the industry has operated for decades.
Broadway has traditionally been relationship-driven, fragmented, and emotionally financed. Most capital comes in on a show-by-show basis, and most investors want liquidity, control, or personal attachment to specific projects.
What we did was introduce institutional discipline into that system, a diversified fund, long-term capital, data-driven decision making, and a structure that removes the ability to make emotional, short-term decisions.
That’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. It requires patience, trust, and a completely different mindset around how value is created.
The other obstacle is access. This is a closed ecosystem built on relationships and reputation. It takes years to earn the trust required to consistently see the best opportunities and negotiate favorable terms.
And then finally, there’s the fundamental risk of the industry itself. Individual productions are volatile, many fail. So you have to build a system that can absorb that volatility and still generate consistent returns.
That combination, industry access, financial discipline, data, and a long-term vision, is very difficult to replicate. Which is why, so far, we’ve been able to operate in a category of one.
