Inside the ‘deliciously weird’ musical ‘Small Ball’ produced by the Sixers’ Daryl Morey

Daryl Morey recently sat inside Philadelphia Theatre Company’s rehearsal space and openly laughed. Even though he had seen the material being presented numerous times during the last decade-plus.

He was watching the musical Small Ball, a passion project the 76ers’ president of basketball operations has helped shepherd through a lengthy development process. Now, he is commissioning and co-producing a full production at PTC, anchored by a cast and creative team with Broadway and off-Broadway credits alongside standouts from Philly’s theater scene.

The show began performances at Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Friday, before opening night on Wednesday and continuing through June 29.

“It’s pretty magical,” Morey told The Inquirer on a recent Saturday morning, before heading to the Sixers’ practice facility for draft and free-agency meetings. “I was just lucky that my first time — and, really, only time — [doing this], we hit on a draft pick. … I laugh off my [behind] every time I come.

“The cast, when I came once, was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re the one laughing. You’ve seen it the most.’”

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Small Ball is billed as an absurdist comedy that co-director Taibi Magar calls “deliciously weird.” The premise: The island of Lilliput, from the classic novel Gulliver’s Travels, has a basketball team of players who stand six inches tall and signed a human-size man named Michael Jordan — but not that Michael Jordan.

“After reading the script,” said actor Jordan Dobson, who plays the Michael Jordan role, “I was like, ‘Whoa, what is this? How are we going to do it?’”

Perhaps the offbeat concept fits Morey, who, in addition to helping pioneer basketball’s analytics movement, has an eclectic array of interests including table tennis and chess.

This project originated while he was in the front office of the Houston Rockets, when he linked with playwright (and fellow basketball fan) Mickle Maher. Maher reached out to Morey when he noticed that Morey shared in a Q&A on X with fans that, if he had not pursued a career as a basketball executive, he would have been a theater director.

Maher wanted to pen a script exploring the theme of an outsider in a foreign land, inspired by former NBA star Stephon Marbury’s time playing in China. Morey invited Maher to Rockets games and practices, including the postgame news conferences that would become the framing device of Small Ball.

Morey also contributed his own ideas, even applying a dash of his basketball strategy while choosing Merel van Dijk and Anthony Barilla to compose the show’s music. They asked five contenders to write the score for a critical scene between Jordan and his love interest, Lilli. The members of Morey and Maher’s team then independently ranked their choices on paper before converging to discuss, in an effort to limit groupthink.

 That is how Morey’s front office executives do their initial evaluation of draft prospects, an interesting parallel for his current work life after the Sixers landed this year’s No. 3 pick following an unexpectedly dreadful 2024-25 season.

Small Ball had productions in Houston in 2013 and Denver in 2022, with revisions along the way. When the husband-and-wife team of Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky became Philadelphia Theatre Company’s co-artistic directors in 2022, Morey’s name on the organization’s board immediately caught their eye because they “deeply love basketball,” Magar said.

Dobrowsky grew up outside Boston and was born into Celtics fandom. Magar is from college basketball-crazed Durham, N.C., and owns the ultimate fun fact that that Michael Jordan, who attended the university down the road in Chapel Hill, once babysat her (long story).

Eventually, Morey brought Small Ball to Magar and Dobrowsky, suggesting that they see the Denver production.

“That’s a huge reason why we were so attracted to this show,” said Magar, whose resumé includes several off-Broadway credits. “… We like merging these two audiences together.”

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Magar and Dobrowsky began regular Zoom sessions to collaborate with the writers. In December 2023, PTC held a two-week workshop and staged reading, primarily to work on the music that is described as a departure from traditional musical theater. After that, PTC added a full-scale production to the 2024-25 season, making opening night the theater’s 50th anniversary gala performance.

And though the directing team was already familiar with Morey, the name recognition with actors was more mixed.

Sarah Gliko is local but does not follow sports, yet received visceral responses from friends who learned she is playing the Lilliputian team’s director of basketball analytics that is loosely based on Morey.

The Broadway veteran Dobson is from Philly, and his family previously had Sixers season tickets. (His question to Morey: Could he meet Jared McCain?)

 Adam Chanler-Berat, another accomplished New York-based actor who plays the “psychotic, unhinged, deranged, tortured, evil villain” assistant coach named Pippin — spelled like the musical, not the basketball Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen — had to drop Morey’s name into an internet search.

“He’s just, like, my friend Daryl,” Chanler-Berat said. “ … and he doesn’t make me feel like, ‘You should know who I am.’ He leads with the kind of respect for this craft that I feel like you’re lucky, as an actor, to have any producer who’s as invested and creative as Daryl is. He really cares, and he loves this art form. …

“[That] there’s this whole other life that he has that he’s obviously incredibly skilled and accomplished at is an amazing thing, because he does not bring that into the room with us.”

Gliko received an immediate sign of the show’s wackiness when met by a “comically huge basketball” on the first day of rehearsals. Magar and Dobrowsky said they have the resources for more ambitious design elements — such as puppetry and shadow play to create drastic scale between characters — than previous iterations.

There also are several homages to the worlds of sports, theater, and classic literature. Additional character names — Phil Jackson, Magic, and Bird — are synonymous with basketball. Players in the show are struck with poison arrows when they do not perform up to standard, a direct callback to  Gulliver’s Travels.

And Morey believes that all sports fans — especially the passionate Philly base — will relate to a song about “the extreme pain of losing, and how the only way we know we exist is through the pain that we feel through the losses.”

And though the comedic elements have left Magar “rolling on the floor [in] laughter” throughout rehearsals, heavier universal themes such as connection, grief, and mental paralysis are breached. Jordan, for instance, cannot bring himself to pass the basketball, then faces questions about those failures in press conferences.

“There’s this mask or a veil that [players put on, like], ‘Oh, now I have to talk about what I just hated,’” Dobson said. “There’s something so fascinating about that — having to discuss with a room full of people what could be an embarrassing moment in your life, or just a moment that you’re still working through and learning from.”

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While detailing the show’s journey, Morey subtly hinted that “each time, we get closer to New York.” The years-long process to reach that desired destination is typical for new, original work not adapted from existing intellectual property. Morey said it took 13 years for 2019 Tony Award winner Hadestown, which was composed by folk artist Anaïs Mitchell, to go from its first staging to a concept album to opening on Broadway.

  When this East Coast premiere production was initially placed on PTC’s calendar last summer, Morey may have envisioned it conflicting with a deep Sixers playoff run. Instead, it arrives during the crucial run-up to the June 24-25 draft and the opening of free agency about a week later.

That means Morey has not been as hands-on with this version of the show. But on one recent rehearsal visit, he gave an actor a note that Magar called “brilliant.”

Mostly, though, Morey is still laughing at Small Ball more than a decade later — and hopes that reaction will soon translate to audiences.

“I frankly think Philly was built for seeing this show,” Morey said.

“Small Ball,” presented by Philadelphia Theatre Company, continues through June 29 at Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St., Philadelphia. Information and tickets: philadelphiatheatrecompany.org, 215-985-0420.