Michael Rosenberg is playing The Phantom of the Opera on his seven-foot Steinway, surrounded by hundreds of Broadway Playbills, making a 60-second video to convince judges he deserves to be named Broadway’s Biggest Fan. Having attended more than 330 Broadway productions over the last 50 years, he’s certainly a contender. But Broadway is only one act in this pianist, entrepreneur, world traveler, and community advocate’s wonderfully unpredictable life.
Growing up in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Rosenberg created a neighborhood newspaper and sold copies door-to-door for two cents apiece. His first civic cause was writing a letter to the local paper criticizing neglected properties. He was 12. A rabbi advised him, as a Jewish boy in the South, to keep a lower profile. “I’ve never laid low and I never will lay low,” Rosenberg remembers thinking.
Music entered his life early with piano lessons at age 7. “I never had to be reminded to practice. Not once,” he recalls. He majored in piano at the University of Kentucky, practicing five hours daily and not attending a single basketball game at the home of the legendary Wildcats. “I was sure I was going to be a concert pianist,” he said.
While earning a master’s degree in music at the University of Miami, the realization hit: “There are a lot of pianists better than me.” So he taught piano instead—until a two-year-old who wouldn’t go to bed changed everything.
When Rosenberg’s toddler Rachel refused to fall asleep, he and a friend composed and sang her personalized lullabies. The songs worked, friends wanted customized recordings too, and he’d stumbled onto a business. Diaper brand Huggies featured the lullabies in a nationwide promotion. Nearly two million songs sold over ten years.
Then a friend showed him how to transfer a photograph onto a coffee mug. What else could you put a picture on, he wondered? That launched Imagine Your Photos in 1991. Rosenberg secured a partnership with Kodak and today, his company produces more than 200 personalized products for major retailers, from mugs and ornaments to blankets and puzzles — another extraordinary outcome.
If Rosenberg’s professional life sounds exciting, his travel calendar is equally ambitious. This year, he will spend more than 200 nights away from the home he shares with his wife Nancy in Miami-Dade’s Calusa neighborhood, journeying to Antarctica, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Canada, and his daughter and son-in-law’s home in Northeast Georgia’s Blue Ridge mountains. In that deeply conservative, gun-toting community, he has formed close friendships with locals who affectionately introduce him as “our liberal Democratic Jew from Miami.”
But Rosenberg has another title: The Man Who Won’t Take No for An Answer. When something needs to change, his persistence, and antics, are legendary. At an AMC theater, he challenged a popcorn-refill policy because the sign promised “refills” (not “a refill”), taking his argument all the way to corporate headquarters, producing signage changes in AMC theatres nationwide. In October 2012, Rosenberg spent 55 hours living inside a cage at Miami-Dade Animal Services to advocate for the Pets’ Trust initiative, generating widespread media attention which propelled the measure to 65 percent voter approval, although the tax was ultimately not implemented. When his water bill soared from $50 to $450, he spent four years challenging billing procedures and changed how Miami-Dade residents dispute unfair charges. For the past 14 years, he has served as president of the Kendall Federation of Homeowner Associations, keeping a desk piled high with newspaper clippings of “things that need fixing.”
Through it all, Broadway remains Rosenberg’s passion, one he passed along to his second daughter Dara, who studied musical theater at NYU and has narrated more than 500 audiobooks. Now, he hopes his latest entry in the Biggest Fan competition will win him a platform to encourage a new generation of theatergoers, whom he says are noticeably absent from today’s audiences.
When the advocacy and occasional disappointments become exhausting, he returns to his Steinway. “That piano saves my life,” he says. “I play and I’m reborn.”
Whether he’s challenging County Hall, trying to preserve American theatre, or advocating for homeless animals, one thing is certain: Michael Rosenberg isn’t taking his final bow anytime soon.
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