This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:27] David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation, the podcast that explores the remarkable history of the Broadway musical, with a special focus on the immigrant Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it. My guest today is Trevor Boffone, whose new book is titled TikTok Broadway, Musical Theater Fandom in the Digital Age. I'm going to jump us right into the episode today, because I think the first few minutes of this conversation provide a perfect introduction to who Trevor is and what his book is all about. Before I do, let me just say one thing. I suspect that many of you out there in the Broadway Nation audience, like me, are not on TikTok, and may not immediately think this book would be of great interest to you. However, I encourage you to give it a listen, because again, like me, I think you will find what Trevor has to say in this discussion and in his book to be a fascinating and important aspect of recent Broadway history. I was quite captivated by it. Here we go.

[1:32] Trevor Boffone: I'm Trevor Boffone. It's so great to have you here today on Broadway Nation to talk about your new book, TikTok Broadway, Musical Theater Fandom in the Digital Age.

[1:42] David Armstrong: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

[1:44] Trevor Boffone: I'm thrilled to have you. This is a show where we talk about Broadway history. In a few weeks, we're going to go way back to talk about George M. Cohan and Helen Morgan, a couple other books that have recently come out. And today, we're going to talk about very recent Broadway history. I love to cover all the bases with this show.

[2:01] Trevor Boffone: No, it's super important. And I think a lot of people focus on theater history being things from the very far past. But really, we're living in the middle of a new wave of theater history. And it's important to sort of look at how that's manifesting and how digital media, social media is really telling part of that story.

[2:16] David Armstrong: And some of the things that you talk about in your book happened more than a decade ago at this point. It's old news. Let's just start there. You are somebody who is immersed in theater. You obviously are a theater fan, a theater nerd. And also, you're immersed in the world of social media, especially TikTok. How did those things come together?

[2:36] Trevor Boffone: Well, that's quite the question. I grew up in a theater family. None of my family members made theater, but we went to theater religiously. We had season tickets to the touring shows in New Orleans at the Sanger Theater. And I remember my first Broadway or my first tour was the Bye Bye Birdie tour with Anne Ranking and Tommy Toon. And so that was my first time going to a big theater and seeing a high value production, a lot of money on stage with two of these amazing performers. And ever since that moment, I had the bug. I never actually studied theater. Oddly enough, I did theater in high school. I did it off and on, but I didn't go to college to study theater. And somehow I ended up being a theater scholar.

I later on in grad school found theater again and realized that people study this. They write books on it. And so I sort of found it in a very not traditional way. And so this book, that's part of the story. It's me being a theater nerd and wanting to talk about these musicals that I love and wanting to really tell this story of something kind of strange and something that I think a lot of folks who love Broadway, who love musicals, might not be aware of how social media is really painting the picture today.

[3:41] Trevor Boffone: And now the other side of the coin, I'm a millennial. I came of age with social media, MySpace, Facebook, all of these different platforms. And so I've always been on social media. But in 2019, I was teaching high school and my students urged me to start making content with them. They were doing these dancing videos on TikTok and other social media apps. And they invited me into their circle. They invited me to dance with them as something we would do during lunch or at the end of class, like on a Friday, whenever it might be. We started making these videos and it went viral. It went viral immediately. And we ended that school year on Good Morning America, Inside Edition, Access Hollywood. Mario Lopez has said my name.

All these great opportunities happened. And as that was happening, I started to really take my PhD, my training and doing research and just, again, being a big nerd and having to really analyze everything happening in my life. And I started to write about TikTok and this pop culture phenomenon happening on social media. I wrote a book about dance culture on TikTok. And then once that was finished, I immediately was like, OK, I got to write the musical theater book because that's what I really love. I love the dance. I love the community building. I love all of those positive things happening on social media. But I felt like no one was talking about the musical theater world and the musical theater that was exploding on TikTok.

And so I started writing that book. Of course, Broadway caught up to me and the theater community has caught up to me in a really great way. It's exciting because now there's other people doing the work as well, looking at theater and TikTok. So this book is really about me sort of coalescing all of these different parts of me, the content creator part, the person who loves theater, the person that makes theater. I do social media for theaters. I have done a lot of new play development in the past. I have acted a few times. And I'm also working on a solo show about sort of this journey as well. There's a lot of things, you know, disparate parts of me that really find a convergence point in this book.

[5:31] David Armstrong: It was clear from the book that you started seeing theater on TikTok early on to an extraordinary extent. Talk a little bit about that. I assume that because you were already interested in theater, that quickly got your attention.

[5:44] Trevor Boffone: Oh, absolutely. So TikTok became available in the United States in August 2018. And as soon as that happened, there were, of course, theater lovers on TikTok that started to sort of adopt things from musical cast albums. And so by 2019, you had viral trends from Heather's The Musical and from Six. You quite literally could not get on the app and not see these trends. They weren't just things that were happening in a niche musical theater fan community. They were very much things happening in the mainstream part of the app. In fact, at one point when I was teaching high school, I played the Six cast recording in between classes and a student walked in, a non-theater student walked in. Six was playing.

And she said, why are you playing TikTok music? And I thought that was just fascinating that this young person, this 15-year-old heard something from Six and immediately thought that's TikTok music, not that's a show tune or that's musical theater. And so TikTok was really a place where these musicals were finding life. And then it really exploded with Beetlejuice, right? Beetlejuice in 2019, Presley Ryan, who was playing Lydia on Broadway, had a TikTok account and she started doing TikToks with Leslie Kritzer and Alex Brightman. And they were just doing TikTok trends, but in costume backstage in their dressing rooms, so on and so forth. And these went viral.

[7:00] Trevor Boffone: Yeah, just having fun, doing something that has probably historically always happened backstage on Broadway, just in a bit of a different way. They were using this new technology that Presley Ryan, being a teenager, was natively familiar with. And they had these fun videos that caught on. And then they started using the cast recording and lip syncing different parts of the musical. And then people started replicating those trends. And so you all of a sudden had the score of Beetlejuice becoming this mainstream part of TikTok. So again, it wasn't something niche. It was something very much out in the open. And so we've seen that since 2019, just the ways that different musicals, and I write about them in my book, Wicked, Mamma Mia, The Lion King, Hamilton, and In the Heights.

I could go on. How these musicals very much live in the popular mainstream space. And I think what's fascinating to me, going back to my upbringing, and I'm sure you can relate to this, David, is being a musical theater fan has historically not been the mainstream, popular, going to get you cool points in high school identity, right?

[8:00] David Armstrong: Absolutely.

[8:01] Trevor Boffone: And I've heard about that a bit too. And so it's just interesting that all of these musicals are very much part of the cool crowd. They're part of the, I'm sitting at the popular kids table at lunch. And that to me is really interesting. So since the beginning of TikTok in the U.S., 2018, 2019, musicals have been part of that mainstream. And then of course, 2020, with the pandemic shutdown of Broadway and with all of the folks working from home and the lockdowns and quarantines and all of these different things in 2020, the app just exploded into the mainstream of U.S. culture, right? So before that, it was very much a Gen Z, a young person place, teenagers, young 20-something year olds. I was there and I was like the old, I was the teacher of the old dude.

And there was like a lawyer and a doctor and a dentist. And that was it. It was mostly kids. That all changed in 2020. And with that, once Broadway reopened in 2021, you had all of these musicals, all of a sudden using TikTok as an integral, important part of the marketing package. It wasn't just a commercial, a billboard in Times Square, mailers, all of these different things. It was, we have to have a TikTok account and we have to meet the fans where they are.

[9:10] David Armstrong: I wrote down something, a quote in your book. You said TikTok makes musical theater popular and mainstream again, much like they were in the 1940s and fifties. Oh yeah. Expand on that a little bit for us. What's your thinking behind that?

[9:23] Trevor Boffone: Well, let me shout out my father. He's part of this story as well, but he passed away in 2018. He played college baseball. He was in a lot of bar fights. He literally did judo. He qualified for the Olympics. Like he was like a man's man. And his favorite movie of all time was West Side Story and thought, Mario, that was the greatest song ever written. There's a lot of people like that, right? That grew up in that generation, the fifties to sixties, that musicals were just popular movies, right? Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, Hello Dolly, We Could Do This Forever, Funny Girl, right? And that sort of fell out of vogue. I mean, when I was coming of age, I was born in '85. And so the musical movies that were sort of during my formative years were not really good.

Like Mirzies, Evita, you know, I'm done, right? It wasn't really until I remember I was in high school when Chicago came out, everyone was obsessed with it and we thought it was like the greatest thing in the world. And that sort of was an entry point for me into, or not an entry point, but like a re-entry, I guess, in the musical theater where I was looking at things that weren't just musicals my parents liked, right? And I grew up watching, you know, the Bye Bye Birdie movie and any Rodgers and Hammerstein movie. Like I have core memories of watching Oklahoma as like a five-year-old, but that was it. It all lived in the past. And so Chicago that sort of got things rocking and rolling. You know, to end up here in this sort of post-2019, post-2018 TikTok world, you have all of these musicals that are very much popular with young people, especially.

And the one that I think is across the board popular is Mamma Mia. Gen Z loves ABBA, period. They love ABBA and they love Mamma Mia. Like unapologetically love ABBA. And you will find even like straight boys, they're like, yes, let's watch Mamma Mia. They love it. And I think part of it is that, you know, you have something like Mamma Mia that doesn't take itself seriously at all. Right. And it does it really well, of course. But, you know, we have musicals like Mamma Mia, Wicked. They love Wicked. The Hamilton pro shot coming out at a formative time in their lives. The pro shot coming out in 2020 at the height of COVID. When they had nothing else to do but watch that. Right. So you've had these sort of musicals that have really been able to enter into the mainstream popularity for young people, for Gen Z especially.

And it's just it's no longer like I quote Mean Girls in the book. I say it's social suicide to like musicals like in high school, but it's no longer the case. There's definitely larger cultural things happening. But I think part of it too is Gen Z in general sort of just doesn't care what people think about them in the way that I think I'm 38. But I think people my age, maybe mid-30s and above, we I think at some point in our life definitely worried about how we were perceived. Right. I feel like young people today don't care as much. It is interesting. I see that in my students who are very different than the millennials and very different than really any of the generations that came before them.

[12:04] David Armstrong: Oh, absolutely. And if you think about it, you can see it in the style of dress. Right. I teach university as well. You can see it the way they come to class. Students, they're all about comfort. Comfort is the most important thing. And it's not about looking the best. It's about feeling the best. You've sort of told us what's so extraordinary about TikTok. Talk about the range of social media, because actually in the book you give us a little mini history of social media and its relationship to Broadway. How does TikTok fit into the world of social media in its relation to Broadway?

[12:32] Trevor Boffone: Absolutely. TikTok didn't fall out of a coconut tree. There is a lineage of social media being an important part of Broadway fandoms and musical theater fandoms. What I'll say before I get into that lineage is that what TikTok does differently is the algorithm. TikTok finds you, it finds the fan, it brings the content to you. So for instance, on Tumblr or other social media sites in the past, you might've had to go find it. I like Wicked. I'm going to go find the Wicked community. On TikTok,

[13:09] Trevor Boffone: The internet became popular, at least, in accessible, like in the mid-90s, depending on who you were, where you were. You had things like message boards, which I'm sure anyone listening to Broadway Nation has been on all that chat or Broadway World, the message boards, for better or for worse. Those message boards were important digital spaces for finding like-minded fans and for being able to actually have an in-depth conversation about Rent or about Family Opera or whatever it might have been. When we get into more, you know, we call it Web 2.0, things like Facebook, Instagram, MySpace even, and eventually into TikTok, these platforms are a little more interactive and it's a little more about a larger conversation beyond sort of like a niche community.

And so we had, you know, Broadway musicals very much being early adopters of these sites. So for instance, the cast of Spring Awakening back in 2006, 2007, they did a music video for The Bitch of Living. They put it on YouTube and it became sort of the crown jewel of their marketing campaign because Spring Awakening knew that this was a show that was going to appeal to young people. And I was like 20, 21 when it came out. I was the core, I was the target audience demographic for that show. I like saw it when it opened, I got the shirt. I still have the shirt. Somehow it still fits. It's one of those miracle shirts that always will fit. But they knew that young people were the target audience and young people were on YouTube, right?

Young people were going to watch video content and so they put stuff out there. And you started to see other productions lean into YouTube as well. We had title of show and they did the title of show show where it was the process of going from off-Broadway to Broadway and developing this show. You had In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda was an early adopter of YouTube and he would do these very silly sort of videos with Karen Olivo and Jonathan Groff in the lead up to In the Heights' Broadway run from off-Broadway to Broadway. And of course, Hamilton started on YouTube essentially with the White House performance. And then Xanadu was another one. Rock of Ages was another one. And they did these web series that became just popular ways to interact with fans, to get fans content that was accessible, to get fans content that was in addition to the cast album.

Because at the end of the day, you're in Washington, right? In Seattle, yeah. I'm in Houston, Texas. We are not close to Broadway. For us to go to Broadway, which we love to do, we love to go to New York, it is expensive, it takes time, all of the things. And so what these shows started to do was to provide content around the show that sort of fills out the fan experience. Twitter was a space where this was popular as well. Things like Next to Normal, that show had a, I'm not sure what we're calling it, but basically they live tweeted the show for several weeks, filling out the sort of world of that show. And they were able to grow a large Twitter following. Of course, Instagram has been important, so on and so forth.

And that brings us up into this sort of 2019 moment where social media goes from, I would say, just part of the toolkit to becoming a very important part of the toolkit for marketing of musical theater, not just Broadway, but really looking at marketing these shows. And if you think about it, it makes sense on TikTok because music does so well on TikTok. And music that has a story, even if it's something by Lady Gaga or the Backstreet Boys, I don't know why those two that came to mind, but things that have a narrative typically do well. And so if you think about show tunes, they by default tell a story, right? And there's something that people can grab onto. They can lip sync and tell a story themselves.

They can do a dance, whatever it might be. And so it just makes sense that it's something that is going to have something for fans to grab onto. So yeah, TikTok is not happening in a vacuum. It's very much part of this cohort of different social media apps and digital spaces. And I'm sure in 10 years, we can reconvene and discuss what's the next big thing. What's come since then, yeah. However, what I got out of the book, and I think that it opened my eyes to a certain extent, is that you call TikTok a performance space.

[17:08] Yes.

[17:09] Trevor Boffone: And I think that's different than the social media elements before it, which were about fans finding the show. I wrote this quote down too. You say TikTok is not simply a place to share fandom. It's a place to perform fandom. So now the audience is the show on TikTok to a great extent. I mean, frankly, I find it a little off-putting. I'm sure that's my age showing. It seems like, well, I'm more interested in the show than I am in the fans of the show.

[17:38] But that's the opposite dynamic of what TikTok is all about. Part of what makes your book so interesting is that you go into the case studies of how this has played itself out in a bunch of different shows in several different ways.

[17:50] Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely true. I do look at TikTok as this performance space, and that is exactly why it's different than these other social media platforms where fans were following, fans were seeking out content about the show. In this case, it's sort of building a community of fans. So, for instance, in the very beginning of the book, the first thing I talk about is a chorus line and how different performers and folks that had been in a chorus line or know the choreography, how they started making videos of, I hope I get it right, the very opening. Every Broadway fan, we all know that choreography. Even if you can't do it, you know what it looks like, right? They started doing their own videos.

And then if you go to those videos and you look at the comments, you see how it engenders a conversation, right? Where people talk about their love for a chorus line or their love for having done that show or what that experience was like. You also had people sharing, this became popular during lockdown, or I don't know if we're calling it lockdown, but whenever it was happening in 2020, we weren't going anywhere. And folks who had done a chorus line, whether it was regionally, on tour, internationally, were sharing videos of themselves doing their signature dances from the show. Like out in the street or in the park or somewhere, anywhere.

[19:01] Anywhere, anywhere you could do a dance. It became a way for these people to really find community and feel seen and feel connected to musicals and feel connected to performing. Because also, I remember, for performers especially, there was a real issue with losing the shape, losing the, I'm doing eight shows a week of it all. I remember there was someone in Chicago I read an article about, and basically they felt like they were in Chicago forever, like 10 years, 15 years.

[19:25] And then when it went back, they had moved back home and they felt like their body had changed.

[19:30] So it happened to so many people, yeah.

[19:32] And so that's one side of the story. But in terms of other musicals, you had things like Legally Blonde, the Legally Blonde dance call that went viral, the Muny Legally Blonde dance call. That became a way for, again, people to do this choreography from the Muny dance call. So explain that just a little bit. This is the Muny Theater in St. Louis was having auditions during the pandemic, and they weren't allowed to have in-person auditions because it wasn't safe and Equity was demanding that all auditions, rightly so, be on video. That was what was happening. They didn't intend it to be a social media phenomenon in any way. It was just getting the job done.

[20:11] What happened?

[20:12] Trevor Boffone: Yeah, this is probably one of the wilder stories in the book. But the Muny was doing Legally Blonde. They put out the dance call and it was a virtual audition. So you submitted a video, a self tape of you doing this dance call to the Legally Blonde remix. So they submitted the videos and then they started to post the videos on social media, on TikTok. All of a sudden, people thought that they were auditioning, like anyone who posted a video of them doing this dance on TikTok was submitting a self tape, right? Who's auditioning for the Muny, which was certainly not the case. And so you had just tons of folks, high school theater kids, professional dancers who actually wanted to be in the show.

People like me who love musicals and like to dance, who were replicating this choreography. Very complicated choreography, mind you, from this dance call. And it sort of blew up. And this was one of the first times where a theater company in the United States woke up. It was like, oh, oh, snap. Social media is going to change the game for us, right? We're getting the followers. We're getting interest in our shows. Again, the Muny, I don't think, needs help selling tickets or filling up their space. They do very well. Every theater needs help. But yes, they're doing quite well. Every theater needs attention because it's not just about seats. It's also like, you know, there's donors and there's grants and there's artists who want to work with you and, you know, so on and so forth.

This dance call, it just sort of became viral. And then you had all of a sudden this sort of explosion of Broadway dancing on TikTok where you had people doing another dance call that was popular is the Moulin Rouge one, which I can 100% do in my brain, in my head. The Bad Romance Toxic, it's the beginning of Act Two. That's the dance. It's wonderful. It was the official audition for Moulin Rouge that then people just started copying because one of the major threads of TikTok is that somebody posts a dance and then everybody else does their own version of it and it becomes a fad, a trend.

[22:01] Absolutely.

[22:02] Trevor Boffone: And so you have these official dances, official self tapes, and then someone posts it and then it's all about mimicking and adding on to the story. So in the case of Legally Blonde, for instance, most of the videos are people giving their best attempt at dancing. But some of them would be funny, like, you know, it would say text on screen, my Legally Blonde self tape, but I'm just a strong mover and they're like struggling through the dance. Or it's a point of view, I'm sitting in the audience at the Muny watching the Legally Blonde dance call or people would play instruments. And so they sort of fill out the world. It's not just the dancer on stage. There's all sorts of funny things that can happen around that. So that's just part of this sort of mimicry culture of TikTok. It's both about familiarity and it's also about adding on to it and giving it a new spin, telling a new story in a different way, which is why these trends do really well.

[22:49] And we're talking hundreds of thousands of videos.

[22:52] Yeah.

[22:53] Trevor Boffone: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Some of these things that happen are sort of micro trends. For instance, a few months ago, there was this trend of Sunday in the Park with George. There are worse things than standing by the river. This really silly dance to the song and basically all of these Broadway companies were doing it like the cast of The Outsiders, the cast of Back to the Future, the cast of Hadestown. They were doing this silly dance, like a hip hop TikTok dance to this serious song from Sunday in the Park with George. And people had this feeling like, oh, my gosh, everyone on TikTok is doing the Sunday in the Park with George dance. It was absolutely not the case. It was just if you were a theater fan, you saw it, but no one else was seeing it.

In the case of Legally Blonde, it was much bigger. In the case of Moulin Rouge, we're seeing it much bigger. And if we especially go with the case of, say, Heather's, Heather's the musical, I'm now singing on the Broadway Nation podcast. If you're a producer, hit me up. But the dang, dang, diggity dang from Big Fun, that lifts choreography from productions of Heather's and people lip sync and they do the hand choreography. And so you have some things that go mega viral and become part of that sort of, I hate to say mainstream for the 80th time today, but again, the mainstream culture on TikTok. And then you have things that are a little more niche. For instance, you've had the Fosse Sweet Charity Rich Man's Frug. And then right now you have the, oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes, they both, oh, yes, they both.

[24:17] Yep.

[24:18] Trevor Boffone: From Chicago. Reach for the gun. It's actually not enough. It's not the actual like Fosse choreography. It's just a Broadway-ish dance to they both reach for the gun. And that one is it's doing quite well as well. And so you have things that are small, things that are in the middle, things that are very big. And at the end of the day, the people that are getting all of that content are your musical theater fans. Because if you're on TikTok looking at musical theater, it sends you other musical theater.

[24:36] It is routing it to you, basically.

[24:45] Exactly.

[24:46] Trevor Boffone: And so what happens is when you watch a TikTok video, the more you interact with it, the longer you watch it, if you like it, if you save it, if you share it, if you comment, if you follow the creator, any of those things, all of those things are teaching the algorithm what you like and what you want to see. So if you, David, download TikTok right now and you get a video that's about the Lion King on Broadway and you comment, oh, I love the Lion King or people's comment, commenting to stay on Lion King TikTok, those sorts of things. When you open up the app tomorrow, it'll give you something from the Lion King and something from Alette, right? And then if it sees you like these Disney musicals, then it starts to give you, you know, keep going. And by saying, commenting on the Lion King to keep, what did you just say those words?

[25:32] Yeah.

[25:33] Trevor Boffone: So commenting to stay on Wicked TikTok, commenting to stay on Hamilton TikTok. And by saying that, is the algorithm noting what you're saying? Is that somehow better than commenting hello?

[25:44] You know what? Maybe the algorithm does know, but I'm convinced it's a joke.

[25:47] Commenting does help you get more content like that.

[25:49] Right.

[25:50] Trevor Boffone: But I assume you could say anything.

[25:51] Yeah.

[25:52] It's sort of people have adopted a language, a style of commenting. And this is one of the sort of recurring jokes that you've seen for the last six years on TikTok. And in a way, teaching other people how to do it, it's sort of instructional in its own way. It can be a serious thing. So it could be like commenting to stay on Wicked TikTok. Like cool. But it can also be like if you have a video you post, I could comment commenting to stay on David Armstrong TikTok or like Trevor Buffani TikTok. It can be like sort of a joke as well.

[26:35] David Armstrong: So I want to delve into these chapters a little bit. The first chapter focuses primarily on Beetlejuice and it's a case study about whether TikTok can actually affect the ticket sales of a show. And did it affect the ticket sales of Beetlejuice? A lot of people will remember that this happened, that Beetlejuice seemed to be revived in its ticket sales at a certain point because of TikTok.

[26:57] Trevor Boffone: Yeah, so when Beetlejuice opened, it very much opened to middle-of-the-road reviews, not a lot of positive press, and it was definitely losing money every week or so. Then has this TikTok viral moment led by Presley Ryan, Alex Brightman doing his thing. Cast members in the show generated this.

[27:18] David Armstrong: Yes, cast members in the Broadway production started making content, right? Once that happened, it started to attract attention and then people started to use the cast recording of Beetlejuice and also engage in a lot of cosplay, right? The world of Beetlejuice has a lot of room for creative costumes and for makeup designs and those sorts of things in a way that, you know, maybe Kimberly Akimbo does that.

[27:40] Trevor Boffone: And so once that happened, all of a sudden you had young people whose parents were taking them to see a Broadway musical. Like, we're going to New York, what do you want to see? I want to see Beetlejuice. And so the audience demographics of that show really started to skew younger, and Beetlejuice turned a profit every single week from that mid-2019 moment until the Broadway shut down in March. The show ultimately did not recoup on Broadway. I can't say that I have insider information on this, but my theory is that it just lost that momentum when it opened up 18 months later. But Beetlejuice has become a popular regional show. It's become a popular high school show, so on and so forth. But, you know, without TikTok, that show likely closes in 2019.

It likely doesn't have that longevity. It probably would tour anyway because of the name value. But really, that show sort of opened the eyes of Broadway marketers who then started to really look at TikTok being a necessity.

[28:30] David Armstrong: To come back to a point you mentioned earlier about the fan being the ones doing the performances, it's a matter of two things. It's a matter of the musical itself, the musical production, engaging with it, engaging with the content, whether it's creating it, but also when other folks are creating it to share their content, to comment on their content, to boost their content. Because at the end of the day, that's free marketing for you. You want to be supportive. And so Beetlejuice was sort of, I don't know if it was the urtext of marketing a show on Broadway with TikTok, but it was definitely the show that got Broadway producers to start paying attention to TikTok. Because Six and Heathers were not, of course, Heathers was not running in New York.

[29:07] Trevor Boffone: Yeah, it has never run on Broadway.

[29:10] David Armstrong: Right. It's never been open on Broadway. And this was before the London production at the other place that ran for a while. And then Six, of course, had not opened in New York either. So you had those other musicals that were doing really well, but they were sort of building momentum before production actually came in. And then Beetlejuice was a production that was open that was relying on that momentum.

[29:27] Trevor Boffone: I definitely think it was the time that the Broadway establishment, that TikTok got their attention. It seemed like something was happening. Unfortunately, it's sort of an imperfect case study because the pandemic happened. It would be fascinating to see what would have happened. Would it have actually turned the show into a hit, a hit that could recoup? Or would that have fizzled out? And we'll never know because then the pandemic happened.

[29:52] David Armstrong: I think you're exactly right. When it reopened after the pandemic, just the momentum was lost and what happened to so many other shows as well.

[29:59] Trevor Boffone: Well, the other thing we're forgetting about Beetlejuice is that they got evicted.

[30:03] David Armstrong: Well, that's true. They were on Winter Garden and they ended up in the Marquis, which is not where you want your show to go if you want to turn a profit. And if you want to recoup. And again, would they have gotten evicted if they had actually turned into a big hit? Of course, the theater owners said they were going to follow through on it. But when a show's a hit, things change quite a bit.

[30:22] Trevor Boffone: Oh, yeah. And I think the Winter Garden owners did quite well with the Music Man.

[30:26] David Armstrong: Totally. I mean, they had commitment there anyway, but who knows? One of the questions that comes up, and I hear this from regional theaters across the country, is they will see a lot of activity around certain shows from TikTok and from young people that don't turn into ticket sales. They turn into a lot of interest, but doesn't move. Now, that's harder to do in a regional situation because you only have a few weeks to get the audience in the door. You don't have an ongoing show.

[30:53] Trevor Boffone: Yeah, this is the challenge. I mean, for every Beetlejuice situation, there's something like In the Heights. When In the Heights film came out, it had many viral trends on TikTok. We're talking millions of videos and you could not escape In the Heights on TikTok. But of course, it didn't translate to the ticket sales for that film. You know, the film, I would say, is one of the best musical films ever made. Personally, I'm an In the Heights fanboy. But you never know. There's some things that we know in marketing that are tried and true methods. But with social media, you just sort of don't know what's going to get that traction. And I think what you said about the regional theaters having a short run is key because with social media, you sort of have to rely on the momentum.

[31:31] David Armstrong: I don't write about, is it The Great Gatsby or Gatsby? The Great Gatsby's on Broadway. Gatsby's in San Francisco. This is going to be our new wild party, isn't it? And so when The Great Gatsby with Jeremy Jordan, Ava Noblezada, when that started rehearsals at Paper Mill, they were doing hardcore, heavy Gatsby TikTok content and were able to get a massive following on TikTok that they were then able to take to New York. So that show, of course, did not have good word of mouth in New Jersey. It did not have good reviews in New Jersey, but they're doing the thing. And of course, Great Gatsby is, everyone reads it in high school. It's some strong IP. For instance, that could be something where we're seeing a lot of that momentum happening before the production even starts, able to really capitalize on it.

[32:13] Trevor Boffone: You make the point in the book that a lot of this is about authenticity and especially for TikTok audience, they will turn away from anything that seems like it's marketing. They've grown up surrounded by marketing. I guess there's the challenges, the sweet spot with Beetlejuice. It wasn't producer driven, these videos that were being made. It wasn't marketing driven. It was cast members, again, sort of fooling around. Did they have an idea that maybe they'd get interest? Of course they probably did. But does it change when it becomes the production that's producing the content as opposed to the fans or the performers?

[32:50] Trevor Boffone: I think it's a little bit of all of those things. And I think the main point here is that, and it's not just young people, but especially young people, I'm going to say under 30 today, don't want to feel like they're being marketed to. They don't want the highly polished stuff that sort of we grew up with. It doesn't really work. And so what is really interesting about these sort of TikTok videos, even ones that are produced with the musical production team, is they are often replicating existing trends, even if they're not musical theater trends. They are showing backstage life and they're a little messier. They're not the highly polished commercials or the billboards in Times Square or even the cast recording.

It's very much a low budget, do it with your phone, throw it up, look into the musical world. And so I think that is able to attract young people in a way that people over a certain age might not be interested in because they'll see it and they'll say, oh, this is not polished. It's a little messy. Like the editing is a little weird, but that's what young people want. Authenticity. It looks real. It looks very casual. We're just like you. I might be Hugh Jackman on Broadway, but I'm just like you. Although I haven't seen any other Broadway production with security guards in front of the stage, but it's cool.

[34:01] Trevor Boffone: You know, it's not a foolproof plan because we've seen, and I'm not going to name names, but there are Broadway productions that have put out bad content, like bad TikTok content, and it doesn't get traction because when you look at it, it is sort of rehashing the YouTube playbook. It's the highly polished, very edited, very cinematic commercial style content that doesn't do well on TikTok, especially. And so the productions on Broadway that have really leaned into the TikTok aesthetics, the messiness, the chaos, the trends that have nothing to do with the show at all are what is attracting attention. And that to me is super interesting. I work in social media for theaters. So every time I do a content shoot with a different show, it's a different director, a different creative team.

And sometimes the director is like, this doesn't have anything to do with my show. Like, why are we doing this trend? And I'm like, it's eyeballs. It's about attention. Yeah, you can have something like Hadestown and the cast can be doing a trending dance to Lady Gaga, and it doesn't need to have anything to do with Hadestown. You have them in costume, they got the dirt on their faces, they're backstage, and that's all you need to get eyeballs.

[35:07] David Armstrong: Which is, you know, counterintuitive, which leads right into your second big chapter, which is about stealth musicals. Because here we're talking about musical theater content that is appearing on TikTok that people don't even know is from a musical necessarily. What exactly is a stealth musical, as you call them?

[35:26] Trevor Boffone: Oh, the stealth musicals. So these are musicals that the casual TikToker, the casual Gen-Z listening to music might know they're from musicals, but they do not know the context of the musical. They don't maybe even know the name of the musical. They don't know anything about the musical, but they do these trends. For instance, Six and Heathers were great examples of this. And so what you have is these musical show tune snippets become memes, and they become totally detached from the dramaturgical world of the musical.

[36:11] David Armstrong: Yeah, that didn't work out. So I decided to have a break from boys, and you'll never guess who I met. Tall, large, Henry VIII, Supreme Head of the Church of England.

[36:17] Trevor Boffone: This is actually where the book began, because I was seeing these things. I'm like, what? Why? No, this makes no sense.

[36:21] David Armstrong: And that's where we'll pick up the conversation when Trevor Boffone returns for part two of our discussion of his new book, TikTok Broadway Musical Theater Fandom in the Digital Age. Now here's the information about how you too can become a patron of Broadway Nation. A donation of just $7 a week will not only keep Broadway Nation up and running, it will also provide you with exclusive access to the complete unedited versions of many of the interviews that you hear on this podcast. And all patrons will receive special shoutouts and acknowledgments of your vital support for Broadway Nation. To join, simply go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. Or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[37:30] ♪ Musical number: "Ex-Wives" — performed by the cast of Six ♪