May he show you to your seat?

Jay Gutterman can easily recall one of his low points as a producer. That was right after Sept. 11, 2001, the first night his play "Love, Janis," reopened after being closed by order of the mayor.

Only seven people were in the audience, several of whom were friends of cast members. Before then, it had been playing to big crowds. But now, all flights into New York were canceled.

"There was no one out," he recalls. "The streets were bare. The tourist buses were naked.... But the show went on as though there was a standing-room-only house.

"It was like watching a stock that fell off the chart," he says. "It took months to finally get back up to snuff."

Such is the life of a theatrical producer in New York City.

This spring, Mr. Gutterman has been hearing from hotel concierges that tourism in New York may be good this summer. He'll take good news like that wherever he can find it. He figures his current show, "Hank Williams: Lost Highway," should have strong appeal to those out-of-towners. Though it's the story of perhaps the greatest country-and-western singer of all time, he worries how it's playing with Gotham residents. Manhattan doesn't even have a country-and-western radio station.

So instead, he's been advertising on a classic rock station (advertising is 15 to 25 percent of his costs) and emphasizing the show's other aspects. It has memorable music, including tunes familiar even to people who prefer grand opera to the Grand Old Opry: "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Hey, Good Lookin'," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)." The reviews have been good, and the show, and especially its star, have been nominated for a bushel of awards. Now all he needs is to keep the seats filled.

New York theater has had a troubled winter. Bad weather, a Broadway strike, the war in Iraq, and an uncertain economy have made for dicey times for an industry still trying to figure out what the new normal is since 9/11 knocked it for a loop.

Producers like Gutterman and his partners - who include his wife, Cindy - must be particularly adroit at coping with the vagaries of their profession. Their battle to keep "Lost Highway" from spinning out on the road to success tells a lot about what it's like to try to create theater in New York right now.

Real producing, Gutterman points out, doesn't involve shenanigans like those in Mel Brooks's "The Producers." "It's a great satire," he says, noting that his mentor, the late Alexander Cohen, was just one of several Broadway producers who was convinced Brooks fashioned Max Bialystock after him. The show depicts producers as devious, out for a quick financial killing, and contemptuous of the show itself. In reality, Gutterman says, it's vital that a producer "play it square" and "mount a show that everyone is proud of."

Sure, he's a bit of a salesman, he says. "But you want these people to work with you again in the future."

Gutterman and his wife have helped produce several off-Broadway and Broadway shows. Though neither had been a big country music fan, they saw "Lost Highway" last year at the tiny 140-seat Manhattan Ensemble Theater (MET) in SoHo and loved it. Like many New York shows, "Lost Highway" had made a long journey to New York. It opened in Denver, later moved to Los Angeles and then to Nashville for two years, and finally to Cleveland.

Its director and co-writer, Randal Myler, seems to specialize in musical biographies: His other credits include "Love, Janis," based on the life of Janis Joplin, which the Guttermans helped produce off-Broadway.

Gutterman has a background in investments and banking. One of his clients asked him to invest money in shows. That led the Guttermans to get their own feet wet as "silent investors" in some productions. Family ties to theater kept growing. Their daughter is an up-and-coming actress, something the parents have given grudging blessing to, even though they've warned her "this is a very, very rough [business]."

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