As president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization, Ted Chapin is a powerful player on the Great White Way.

The son of arts patrons Schuyler and Elizabeth Chapin, Chapin grew up in the theater world. By the time he graduated from Connecticut College in the early '70s, he already had five years of behind-the-scenes experience as a production/directorial assistant on the New York productions of Follies, The Rothchilds, and The Unknown Soldier and His Wife. Following a stint as the musical director for the National Theater of the Deaf's production of Four Saints in Three Acts and as associate director of the National Theater Institute, Chapin joined Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1981. He's spent over three decades at the theater behemoth, where he's now the president and executive director.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein company owns the copyright on the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, as well as select shows by Broadway icons like Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, Andrew Lloyd Weber and Adam Guettel, whose The Light in the Piazza took home six Tonys in 2005. So if your theater wants to stage South Pacific, Oklahoma or Jesus Christ Superstar, you better be prepared to pony up hefty licensing fees to Rodgers and Hammerstein.

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