Berklee Alums Bring GIANT to Broadway

Brian and Dayna Lee's love story starts in the most unlikely of places: Ear Training 2. 

“I really wanted to be in Paul Stiller's class,” Dayna says over Zoom. “I went to the department head to fight to get into that section. Only time I ever did that at Berklee.” 

Brian recalls that first day: “I remember you walked into class, and you were like, who's excited for Ear Training 2? And it was dead silent because all of us were so nervous at the beginning of a new semester. I was like, who is this person? I think I'm in love.”

Soon after, they discovered they were both from the suburbs of Toronto and became fast friends. Two years later, they were a couple. After graduation in 2013, they had a choice: Go back to Toronto, or try to make it in Nashville, LA, or New York. They chose New York.

Dayna was interning at Warner Music in their sync licensing department before getting a full-time gig at a smaller publishing house. Brian worked as an assistant director on Broadway for musicals, plays, readings, and workshops. It wasn’t until after they got married in 2017 that Dayna floated the idea of working together. 

A GIANT Leap

“Brian was more cautious than me about it,” Dayna says. 

“The only fight we’ve ever gotten into was when we tried to write a song together,” Brian says. “We’d been dating for six months and it almost broke us up. It's amazing how many times you can be wrong when writing a song with your partner.”

But they figured they’d try again. “We ended up deciding on our honeymoon: We're going to take a leap of faith, quit our jobs, start a production company,” Dayna says.

Their company, AF Creative Media, began as social media marketing for hospitality groups, then grew into influencer marketing and eventually producing through Brian’s theater contacts. The team has been coproducers on some of Broadway’s biggest shows of the past few years, including Moulin Rouge!, Funny Girl, Angels in America, The Who’s Tommy, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, and Company, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival in 2022. They have also been lead producers on shows in London’s West End, off Broadway, and with touring companies. 

“It morphed into finding shows that we loved, but it’s the same thing. It’s storytelling—telling stories that we believe in, putting it out into the world, and hoping that it makes an impact in some way,” Dayna says.

GIANT, which is their first play as lead producers on Broadway and stars John Lithgow as Roald Dahl, came to them through an agent who they had initially worked with on a project that fell through. While grabbing a drink, the agent told them about this script from a first-time playwright. They asked to read it and the rest is history. GIANT won an Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2025, and opened on Broadway this week at the Music Box Theatre. 

When putting together the trailer for GIANT, none of the sync music available seemed to fit, so the Lees turned to Berklee for help. Rodney Alejandro, dean of the Professional Writing and Music Technology Division, put together a contest for film scoring students to compete for the project. The brief was based on Nicholas Britell’s main title theme for Succession, which contest winner Samantha Williams BM ’25 says “is a little hard to mimic, as it’s really easy to end up harmonically copying exactly what he wrote. I knew I wanted to honor the need for a dramatic piece like Britell’s while also showcasing my own voice. I started with a simple piano motif and the rest kind of wrote itself after that.”

Williams—who is currently freelancing for directors and media companies while working on her first album, out later this year—says that working with the Lees and the GIANT team “has been incredible. [They] all were extremely enthusiastic about our collaboration and gave me lots of leeway and inspiration to create music for this campaign. I have since written more beyond the original competition music for them, and each time I come back to the project I write something I love.”

“The chasm between graduation and actually getting to where you want to go can feel so insurmountable,” says Dayna. “We're lucky that we're now in this place to be able to extend the opportunity to join the [professional] world.”

“I feel like I'm here because I had someone look at me and say, I'm gonna give you the keys to the kingdom, and you can figure it out, but you have to be let in,” Dayna adds, noting that when she interned at Warner Music, the head of the sync licensing department was a Berklee grad.

Advice for Current Students

If you want to be a producer, Dayna has some news: You’re already doing it. 

“If I look back, especially while I was at Berklee, I was always producing. If you wanted a project to be done, you were putting all the pieces together. You were getting the rehearsal space, you were getting the band, you were getting the engineer, you were getting the arranger. You were printing the lead sheets, you had to pay for it. You had to get a sound mixer, you had to deal with personalities and manage a team of people. And you had to cheerlead and find supporters to help you generate content. You had to brand yourself and actually get the music out there and make it palpable and accessible to other people to then hopefully sell your music..." she says. "We're now just selling tickets.”

Williams says to “take advantage of the time you have during school to deepen your relationships with classmates, because they’ll soon be your fellow coworkers out in the real world.” 

And if you’re like the Lees, they could be your spouse, best friend, and business partner, too.

GIANT runs now through June 28, 2026 at the Music Box Theatre.