NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Want to drink beer for a good cause? You can help the struggling Broadway community by hoisting a brew.
As WCBS 880's Mike Sugerman reports in this week's Difference Makers, two Broadway actors and longtime pals, Jimmy Ludwig and Mark Aldrich, found themselves, like the rest of Broadway and all live performing arts, out of work this past year due to the pandemic.
"It's just completely flattened an entire industry that normally in this country makes more money than agriculture," said Ludwig.
They were distraught, so they turned to beer.
“What we’ve done is create a collaborative group of breweries, anywhere, who are making this beer to raise money to help arts workers,” said Aldrich.
Ludwig and Aldrich were beer guys to begin with, sharing their love of brew on their podcast "The Happy Hour Guys."
They were having breweries brew for charity even before the pandemic, but then they really poured it on, with the help of brew masters like Brad Nagle at Gun Hill Brewery in the Bronx.
“My stepfather is still a high school music teacher and I grew up going to Broadway musicals and I thought it was a cool way to try give back to them and to our entertainment community," Nagle said.
Sixty breweries in 12 states are making and selling Curtain Up, with a chunk of the proceeds going to help the Broadway community … almost 100,000 jobs that will not be coming back anytime soon.
“We’re going to be one of the last industries to come back and that means the workers in that industry, in our industry, are going to be some of the last to be able to restore what they’ve lost," Aldrich said.
Want to help out? Drink up and start spreading the brews for Broadway.
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