Episode 110: Scrolling TikTok on Broadway w/ Dr. Trevor Boffone

Introduction

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Leaguer. TikTok might not seem like a natural fit with Broadway, or for that matter, with the subject of theatre history. As our guest today writes, an entire generation's attention span became roughly 15 seconds once the short video app caught on, and it's been at the center of numerous controversies, political and otherwise. But there's another side to TikTok and its

0:30relationship with Broadway, one that has changed how people from all over the world engage with and share their enthusiasm for their favorite musicals. That's the subject of Dr. Trevor Buffoni's TikTok Broadway, Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age, which explores how the worlds of social media and musical theatre collided between 2018 and 2022 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trevor is a lecturer in the Women's Gender and Sexuality Program at the University

1:03of Houston, as well as the author of Social Media in Musical Theatre and Renegades, Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok. Trevor, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Your book mainly covers the first four years in which TikTok established itself as this central part of American cultural life. The internet, of course, existed prior to that, and there were also many social media platforms where people could share and talk about their love

Musical Theater Fandom

1:33of musicals. Could you give us a sense of how those changed musical theatre fandom in the decades prior to the emergence of TikTok? Absolutely. And it's important to remember that TikTok is the platform du jour. It's the one that is the most downloaded, the most popular today in 2024, but it is not the invention of social media. It's not the invention of musical theatre intersecting with social media. And to really look at that conversation, we have to go back to really the early

2:04days of the internet, or at least when the internet became a little more accessible in the mid to late 90s. And so in my book, I do offer, I would say, I would say a quick and dirty overview of this sort of legacy, but it really goes back to discussion boards. There were things like all that chat or the Broadway world discussion boards, or the ways that people were engaging with Broadway.com and looking at videos, right? The trailers for Broadway musicals. And so we were using the internet to express our

2:35fandoms. We were using the internet to engage with our favourite musicals. Of course, this really

Social Media History

2:41exploded in the 21st century, once we had things like MySpace or Facebook, and especially YouTube, where YouTube became the de facto platform where musicals were marketing their wares. And so for instance, Spring Awakening, when Spring Awakening opened on Broadway, which don't quote me here, I want to say 2007, 2007 or so, 2006, 2007, that winter, when Spring Awakening opened on Broadway,

3:11they used a Vimeo, they used a video of the Bitch of Living, they recorded a music video style video on stage of the cast singing the Bitch of Living. And they intentionally went to YouTube and different video platforms to market this, because they knew that young people were on YouTube, watching videos, and young people were the target audience for Spring Awakening. And seeing this success, you started to see other musicals on Broadway, like Rock of Ages, In the Heights,

3:42Xanadu, Title of Show, and a few others that did web series, where they would create a fictional reality show or a show where they were documenting the process of moving the show to Broadway. And it really just became a way for people to engage with their musicals in a relatively free, for the most part, accessible way, where you just need access to the internet to watch your favorite musical theater performers, to hear music, to go backstage, to really engage with the world of these musicals.

Twitter Experiment

4:15And then of course, Twitter became an important space for musical theater fandom as well. Next to Normal, when Next to Normal opened on Broadway in 2009. I'm really testing my dates here. But when Next to Normal opened, they actually did a Twitter experiment where over the course of several weeks, they live tweeted during the show of things that were happening from different characters' perspectives in real time. And they were able to amass about 140,000 Twitter followers in just a few weeks or about a month or so. And so this really sort of created a lot of energy.

4:53We had the YouTube experiments, we had the Twitter experiments, and this created a lot of energy where Broadway marketing started to realize or really understand that social media was going to be an important part of the marketing machine. And on the flip side, and something I really write about in my book is that we started to see fan expression. So it wasn't just things that the official production of Phantom of the Opera or, you know, Shrek the Musical or Billy Elliot was putting out. It was

5:24actually things that fans were putting out, and fans were promoting that was helping these shows become popular and become part of sort of mainstream conversations about musical theater. And so TikTok really just falls into that lineage and sort of takes those conversations and those aesthetics and the different ways that fans were engaging and sort of makes it explode in 2018, 2019 when TikTok becomes popular in the US. Yeah. What's different maybe about TikTok? And how does

TikTok Fandom

5:56that work? How does, for those of us who might not be on TikTok, how does that sort of fandom operate? How do those communities form? That's an excellent question. And I think that's something that a lot of people who are not on TikTok don't always understand, and rightfully so. And what really separates TikTok from these other platforms, and of course, today, YouTube Shorts is wildly popular, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, there are other platforms to engage with short-form video content. But what TikTok does differently is TikTok has the notoriously incredibly powerful algorithm.

6:33TikTok finds the fans. TikTok finds you. So whatever your interests are, you will be met with a stream of content when you enter TikTok that is tailor-made to what you're interested in. And it learns that by how you interact with the app. So for instance, if you looked at my TikTok, you might see cat content, content about Houston, where I live. And you will see content about tennis. I'm a tennis fan. So you'll see different things I'm interested in. And the more I interact with that stuff, the more it

7:05teaches the algorithm to send me those things. And so that is quite different than other social media platforms we've seen in the past, where you have to really go to the fan space. So for instance, it's on Tumblr. Tumblr was a largely very popular platform. It still is in a lot of ways. But it was a very important space for fan cultures. But you had to know where to go. You know, you had to go to Tumblr and know how to find the accounts, the pages that you were, that had to do with the content you

7:39wanted to see. Say it was Heather's the Musical, you had to know where to find it. YouTube is similar in a lot of ways. And of course, Facebook, you have to find those groups, so on and so forth. On TikTok, it finds you. And so it's able to sort of do a little bit more meaningful work. And then what also TikTok is able to do is because it isn't in these sort of niche corners of the app, it's living a very mainstream life on TikTok. So, you know, of course, of course, there are a lot of Broadway and

8:11musical theater fan cultures and phenomenons that are happening on TikTok that are very much isolated to fan communities. But for every one of those, there are also many examples of things that have lived on the mainstream culture of the app. And so if you talk to, and I write about this in my book, but if you go, if you talk to anyone on TikTok, or many people on TikTok, you will inevitably find people that see musical theater content, whether it is explicitly musical theater content in the sense of Patti LuPone backstage and costume doing something, which I don't know if you're going

8:48to find that on TikTok. But you can find other performers. Mandy Patinkin, he's very into TikTok. But you will see that on the mainstream part of the app. And you'll see trends where folks are using cast albums and songs from musicals, they go viral. Choreography from Broadway musicals and musical films go viral. And so it's able to sort of live in a very public way compared to, say,

9:19the niche communities that YouTube formed in 2007 to 2010 or so when we had these web series going viral in the same way that Next to Normal on Twitter sort of stayed within a theater community.

Beetlejuice Case Study

9:33Yeah, you talked about how kind of, in a way, the content, the algorithm finds you. And it also sounds like many Broadway productions have started to try to exploit that, to use TikTok to promote their shows, maybe especially if they're concerned about reviews or ticket sales. One case that you mention and you explore in your book is Beetlejuice back in 2019. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah. I mean, Beetlejuice is sort of the OG of TikTok, you know, musical theater on TikTok

10:07case studies. Beetlejuice opened in 2019 to very mixed to negative reviews, not well-reviewed at all. It had very little buzz aside from having an incredibly powerful IP in Beetlejuice. But it was not a show that was making money. If you go look at the Broadway grosses, which as a theater nerd, I obsessively look at my Broadway grosses every week. So if anyone wants to talk about Broadway grosses, you know where to find me. But Beetlejuice was not making money. It did not have much of an

10:40advance. It had very little to work with in terms of pull quotes, of word of mouth. And then in 2019, Beetlejuice started making, or cast members of Beetlejuice started making TikTok videos. And this was led by Presley Ryan, who originated the role of Lydia. And so what she would do was she would, she was already on TikTok being a teenager, and she would make backstage content with Leslie Kritzer, with Alex Brightman, with different members of the cast. And they would just

11:10wear their costumes and they would do TikTok trends. These started to get a lot of traction, because if you're thinking about on social media, and you're scrolling these videos, you see, you know, people dress normal, people dress normal, people in a house, people in a mall, like in a very normal places, and in a park, whatever. And then you get to this content where you have David Koren's is like wildly imaginative set, right? Very colorful, you have the props of a Broadway musical, you have the costumes, you have a man dressed as Beetlejuice in technically cosplay at

11:45the end of the day. Very effective. And they also would have videos of if you've seen Beetlejuice, you know, the man with the like coconut head, he has like the little coconut head. And so you see this on social media, and it stops the scroll, it makes you stay on that content, because it just doesn't fit in. And it gives you a lot to look at. And so this content started to go viral. And what happens on TikTok is if you can get people to stop the scroll, if you can get people to engage with your content, it then pushes the content out more to other people who are, you know, like similar

12:17things, so on and so forth. So these videos by Presley Ryan, stop the scroll, they went viral. And then a few weeks later, seeing this sort of energy, they started making content where they were using the cast recording of Beetlejuice. So you had literally Beetlejuice and Lydia doing a lip sync to say my name, the song say my name. And this went mega viral, and people started to replicate it. So on TikTok, something very important is the replication. It is a platform that relies on

12:49mimicry and replicating trends. And so the Beetlejuice cast effectively started these trends that went viral. And then you had hundreds of 1000s, in some cases, millions of people creating their own versions of these videos, all using the Beetlejuice cast recording, all engaging in some form of Beetlejuice cosplay in a lot of ways. And so this just, you know, became an organic social media marketing strategy that I don't think I'm based on my research. I really think was shocking to to Broadway.

13:23And it was shocking to the Beetlejuice marketing team, because of course, in 2019, TikTok was not part of the marketing strategy. And none of this that happened was part of the marketing strategy either. Eventually, the musical did get on TikTok. And what happened was, all of a sudden, you know, we know this, or even if you don't know anything about TikTok, you inevitably think of it as a young space of Gen Z of people in their teens, 20s. And so the people engaging with Beetlejuice

13:54were very much young people. And so all of a sudden, Beetlejuice, the musical starts turning a profit. And all of a sudden, the audience demographics are looking very young, it was skewing extremely young, like in the same way that like Lion King or Aladdin might because it was parents bringing their kids. So you're bringing your teenager to New York in 2019. What musical do they want to see? They want to see Beetlejuice. And so this sort of established a template for other Broadway musicals to realize that a, or one, they needed to have a TikTok account. And two,

14:30they needed to engage with this sort of TikTok culture of fans sort of creating content with their cast albums, with their shows, like your cast album needs to be on TikTok. If you want to sort of engage in this viral culture. And in 2019, when I was first on TikTok, I remember I was looking for musical theater stuff. I write about this in the book. I was looking for show tunes, and there was very little, you know, it was Beetlejuice, it was Six, it was Heathers, and a few songs here and there.

15:00And now you can find sort of any show tune you want is going to be on TikTok. And so the culture started to shift. Of course, 2020, when the Broadway shutdown happened in March 2020, 2020, everything sort of halted. But by the time Broadway reopened, and what was it, September 2021? Basically, every musical on Broadway was on TikTok. And now they all have TikTok. And many plays engage with TikTok as well. So we've seen in just five years, a dramatic shift in the ways that a Broadway

15:33marketing team views social media. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating to sort of see this, this show that I'm sure many listeners are aware of.

Canonization

15:41But, you know, certainly before reading the book, I wasn't aware of how Beetlejuice sort of had affected the way that TikTok and Broadway marketing campaigns interacted. Also, how many times could we get through that sequence saying the word Beetlejuice? Nothing's happened yet. Let's see. So I wanted to ask you, because you sort of talking about this with Beetlejuice there, and you mentioned a few other shows. There's this process that you refer to as kind of canonization, where you go on to write each musical within the larger TikTok Broadway archive has its own unique afterlife. How are you using

16:17that term canonization? What does that afterlife look like for a musical like Six or Wicked? The theater historians are coming after me for my use of canon and canonization. No, I joke. So what I mean here is that, you know, we can debate the canon all day. And I feel I have a little PTSD from from college, from my different college experiences. But what essentially happens is TikTok is creating a canon of popular musicals with young people. And these aren't all sometimes these are very obvious

16:50musicals like Wicked, of course, doesn't need TikTok to be popular. And Hamilton doesn't need TikTok to be popular. But there are other musicals like Beetlejuice, Six or Heathers that have been made popular because of TikTok. And there are also musicals that, you know, have a very niche Gen Z following because of TikTok, such as Be More Chill, in many ways is accredited to social media and later TikTok. The Lightning Thief was popular with young people. This is not always translated into ticket sales,

17:24of course. Ride the Cyclone is one that was resurrected from obscurity because of young people on TikTok. And so what I mean here is that it's sort of creating a social media digital canon of musical theater that doesn't always match what shows are the most, say, innovative. It doesn't match what shows are the ones that make the most money that have the longest runs on Broadway. It's the shows that people, young people want to engage with, that young people are interested in seeing. And we could

17:59debate sort of the canon all day long. But what happens on TikTok is when these shows go viral, so Six and Wicked are great examples. Mamma Mia is an excellent example as well. Hamilton too. Are these musicals continue to go viral? So for instance, with something like Six, you've had at least four moments in this, what, five-year span where Six has gone viral for different trends. And every time that happens, it draws new attention to the musical, and it keeps Six in the forefront of

18:34this sort of US pop culture at large in a lot of ways. And if we look at Six, Six is also another great example because Six was viral. Six was mega popular on TikTok in 2019, which is well before, or maybe not well before, but before the show even played in the United States, right? Before it made it to Broadway. And that is really something interesting to think about American teenagers being obsessed with this musical that had never played in the United States. Of course,

19:07we know the story of Six. It made it to Broadway. It became a massive hit. It is tour. It is a, you know, I saw Six in London and I said, I wish I could produce this on Broadway. I want to make money. But I remember one time I was teaching high school. I used to teach high school full-time and I was teaching high school and I would play music when the students came in and I was playing the Six cast recording. And a student walked in, a student who was not into musicals, was not a theater student, walked in and said, ah, Dr. Bufoni, why are you playing TikTok music?

19:40And it was this aha moment where I thought, wow, we have a teenager who is calling a musical theater cast album TikTok music because that's how well-known TikTok, or I'm sorry, how well-known Six was on TikTok. And so there are people that they're, you know, in some ways this canon, there are people that only know these musicals because of TikTok. Of course, something like Wicked, Hamilton, they have largely popular, they're popular in so many different ways, but things like Six, like Heathers,

20:12like Beetlejuice, and then later, of course, like Ratatouille, the TikTok musical, which I'm sure we'll talk about. Those are musicals that have been made popular on TikTok. Yeah, you just mentioned Ratatouille, the musical, the TikTok musical, I should say. And that happens in really sort of the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. The period that you focus on in your book is very strongly sort of

COVID-19 Pandemic

20:39marked by the emergence of the pandemic. How did COVID, you know, affect, obviously it closed down musical theater, but how did TikTok sort of interact with that, providing a space for people to perform and perhaps turbocharge some of the developments that we already see emerging with Beetlejuice with Six even before the pandemic began? Excellent point here. And if we, I think the thing that most people forget from this conversation or don't realize, and it's something

21:10I've already mentioned before, is that musicals were already popular on TikTok when Ratatouille started to gain steam in the fall of 2020, really October of 2020. But musicals were already popular. So the idea of creating a musical on TikTok might have seemed wild at the time. But if you really look at the deep roots of the culture on TikTok, it wasn't surprising that eventually something like this would happen. And so what happened was you had a very small creator who made a song, an ode. It was called

21:44Ode to Remy. And it was a little song, Remy the Ratatouille, the rat of all my dreams. And she continues, but she posted this because she was upset because she couldn't ride the new Remy's Ratatouille adventure at Epcot, at Disney World. And it kept getting pushed back, the opening. And so she makes this little jingle. And then a very popular TikToker, Brittany Broski, who's very funny, she takes the jingle and just makes a little video that has nothing to, the musical is still not existing at this moment. And then a young composer, Daniel Mertzloft, finds this. Well, not finds it.

22:21I mean, Brittany Broski, she got mega views. So he sees this video, and then he gives it the Disney treatment. He orchestrates the song, he records all the vocals, and then he posts a video where he is lip syncing this song. And he also includes all of the sort of, I guess, directing choices that he would make if this was a production that was on stage that he was directing. And this goes viral. It becomes this sort of wild thing. And it sort of hits on a lot of different ways. We have a lot of

22:54things. We have Ratatouille, incredible IP, the Disney Pixar IP. We have Camp. It is over the top. It's kind of ridiculous. It's a little kitschy. And it also sounds kind of good. Like, wait, this is a good song. This sounds like it's from a Disney movie. Like, this is an actual, this is actually good music. And also, it doesn't make sense. Remy, the Ratatouille, the rat of all our dreams. Ratatouille is a food. It's not, Remy is not a Ratatouille. And so what this does is, it spawns other creators, other composers who start to, and again, remember, everyone's stuck at home,

23:30right? And so you have these young composers who start writing songs for their entry into the Ratatouille musical. And so we have sort of a crowdsourced creation of a new musical where people, where the cream is rising to the top, to use a food metaphor there. But essentially, the songs that were, I don't want to say higher quality, but the songs that the fans wanted in the, in that show rose to the top. They were the ones that were engaged with, the ones that got the comments, the shares, the likes, and eventually went viral. And it sort of created this cohort of

24:07people co-writing a musical. You also had accounts that were building out the world of the musical. So for instance, if I were directing Ratatouille, here's what I, here's my vision. If I were designing the set, here's my set design. Here's my set renderings. If I were the costume designer, here's what I would do. Or here's how I would tackle, again, Ratatouille, we have humans and we have rats. Here's how I would do the costumes or the puppetry. And you also had people playing instruments, the trumpet in the pit. Here's the trumpet in the pit for this song. Here's the piano

24:40in the pit for this song. And it's, it just became a very much a part of the mainstream culture of TikTok, which is also, we can talk about it later if you want. It's called straight TikTok. That's what people jokingly call mainstream TikTok is straight TikTok. Anything else is queer. And so it became part of this mainstream TikTok where it was attracting attention far beyond, you know, a group of theater nerds making a musical. It got the endorsement of Disney. It got the endorsement of Pixar.

25:10And then it became a news story. It was on basically every, if you Google this, you can find any sort of media outlet in the United States cover this in some capacity. And with this energy, they did a benefit concert, Ratatouille, the TikTok musical, which debuted on January 1st, 2021. And I don't have the numbers with me or memorized, but it's in the book. And they made millions of dollars and they sold enough tickets. And when I say tickets, of course, you know, you could watch it on your

25:45screen, but have 10 people with you or two people with you. But it could have run in like an off Broadway theater for over a year with the amount of people that watched it in one night. And I think a lot of people watched Ratatouille, the TikTok musical, expecting it to be stupid and over the top. And it was over the top, but stupid and not of high quality. And people tuned in. And if you follow that conversation on Twitter, and we could also, you know, Twitter, let's not forget Twitter is an important space for when TV musicals happened. And for any sort of these live streams,

26:19we're following a conversation in real time on Twitter, people were ready to hate watch this thing. And then once it started, they sort of realized, wait, this is kind of good. It's funny. It's campy. It fully leans into the TikTok aesthetics without being gratuitous about it. And the music is good. It was well orchestrated. The songs, even though they were written by, you know, 10 or 12 different composers, they sort of, it had a cohesive sound. It sounded like the cast recording of a musical. And if you haven't listened to Ratatouille,

26:51the TikTok musical, if you go to YouTube, you can easily find it. I believe you can watch it as well. It's about 50 minutes, 55 minutes. But it was good. And I think this sort of really changed a lot of people who were not on TikTok, their perception of, of what TikTok could do for musical theater development. Because of course, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, I'm sure you are aware of how theater is made and developed. It takes a very long time. Musicals take especially a long time, and they're especially expensive to develop for the different, you know,

27:24of course, we have the music, the orchestra, all of these different things. And there's so few places where you can develop musical theater in the U.S. And so what we have here is an organic, fan-led, composer-led thing that happened in real time without the need for a grant, without the need to get into the Eugene O'Neill, without the need for a producer, without the need for money, okay? And it sort of changed a lot of people's perceptions. And so, of course, coming out of Ratatouille,

27:55we have had a large cohort, or a sizable enough cohort, of composers who have used TikTok as, I call it like an out-of-town tryout, or who have looked at it as a sort of place to engage with a sort of TikTok concept album, where they're putting out their, their compositions, their music, their songs, and getting real-time feedback from fans. And also not just getting feedback, but developing a following that they can then take into a full production. So a show is not, the goal here,

28:29ideal situation, is that you are not opening a show out of town or on Broadway with no fan support. You have brought your fans with you. And of course, the sexy, the story everyone knows about this is Bridgerton the Musical, which, by Barlow and Bear, which won the musical, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Show Album, or Cast Album, a few years back. And of course, they had the cease and desist, and that show will never get done on stage. But we have a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater

29:02Album that came from a TikTok musical, a musical that never has been done on stage. And if you were to tell someone, you know, 10 years ago, they wouldn't believe you, right? Like, no, you have to have a Broadway production, you have to have a London production, whatever it might be. And it's sort of changing the way that composers can approach creating a new musical. It's really interesting to hear you say that, because I found myself wondering, was this, you

Ratatouille Musical

29:29know, was Bridgerton, was Ratatouille, were these the product of the specific time and place, the pandemic and all that? But it sounds like they're actually maybe harbingers of a larger trend. Absolutely. I mean, they're the most well-known examples. And if you Google this, those are the examples you're going to find in articles on Playbill.com or Broadway World or wherever it might be. And they've also been reviewed. If you go look at studies in musical theater, oh, actually, I said they've been reviewed. I reviewed, I reviewed Ratatouille, the TikTok

30:01musical and studies in musical theater. Yeah, and there's a lot written about these two musicals in different ways. Sarah Bae Chung has written some great stuff about Bridgerton, for example. But yeah, they sort of set a precedence. And for instance, there is Jorge Herranz, who is a composer, Latino composer, and he is writing an adaptation of the Odyssey called EPIC, all caps EPIC. And he has built a following of over 500,000 folks on TikTok. And he basically

30:34uses it as his sort of playground where he will sit at his piano, he'll work on new songs, he gets massive amounts of support. And when these albums have come out, it's been several albums. This is a musical, I don't know that the goal is for it to happen on stage. But he's had several of these albums, like part one, part two, that have had massive amounts of streams on Spotify and iTunes when they're released. And so it also opens up the conversation

31:05about what is a musical or, you know, does a musical need to be on stage to be, you know, part of this conversation? Or not even a stage, because this musical, there's no TV version of it. There's no movie version of it. It's literally just a concept album, a very long, very high quality cast album, sorry, concept album. And so, you know, there are other composers, and I will say, I can't name names, but I do work with, I do social media coaching and consulting and

31:36different things about TikTok and theater. And I have a few composers I work with and writing teams where I'm working with them to put their work on TikTok and to talk about the process and to talk about, you know, to build the fans, right? And so you have people that are doing this in a very large way, like Jorge Herranz, and Barlow and Bear. And then you have folks that are, you know, just doing it. Steven Sater, he is very much on TikTok, doing all the things, doing the trends,

32:08showing his new work, so on and so forth. Joe Iconos is another one that is very much active on TikTok. Now, you mentioned a moment ago, straight TikTok. There's this, I think by this point, it's almost cliche. You sometimes hear this complaint, I guess, that there are no more crossover hits from Broadway. You know, whatever happened to the days when you'd hear a Cole Porter tune on the radio, and then, you know, you'd also be able to see it on stage. But it sounds like from what you're talking about with canonization, with, you know, certainly the coverage of a musical

32:43like Ratatouille, that maybe that's thinking about it the wrong way, that there is something interesting going on with the interaction between musical theater culture, and I guess what you might call, you know, sort of straight TikTok culture. There's maybe more crossover than people are realizing. Absolutely. And, you know, if we look back, musicals were popular, were part of pop culture. We're not part of pop culture, but we're part of sort of the zeitgeist, right? The mainstream pop culture for a very long time. And for whatever reason, which I think is probably beyond the subject

33:18of this episode, musicals sort of fell out of vogue. And we're sort of seeing a new period where they're coming back into popularity. Of course, we have all these musical movies that are happening, and we have sort of musical theater crossover stars, people like Ariana Grande, you know, and other folks like Audra McDonald, of course, has success in multiple different sort of genres or venues. And TikTok is doing it, doing it as well in a different way. So, you know, you have musicals,

33:50like I mentioned the story about Six and my student who associated Six with TikTok music. And another example, I was teaching high school Spanish. And my students had never seen In the Heights, the movie, which I think is wonderful. And so I said, okay, we're gonna, I'm gonna get the auditorium, we're gonna get all the theater classes, we're gonna get my classes, and we're gonna watch In the Heights. And, you know, we did some like academic stuff related to it as well. But when it got to the part of fireworks, or is it Blackout? Blackout or fireworks, the fight, the Vanessa Usnavi fight.

34:27And this had gone viral on TikTok, like over a million videos were made with this soundbite from the movie. The Vanessa, that part, every student, okay, maybe not every, I don't want to be hyperbolic, everyone. But let's say 80% of the students in that auditorium of 120 students sang along to In the Heights, the In the Heights film, they sang along to this like 20 second section. That's the only time that was the most engaged they were in the two and a half hours. But it just was sort of this like

34:57another like, wow moment where I was really seeing in real time how this musical In the Heights was popular with, like, they knew In the Heights, even if they didn't think they knew In the Heights, like they knew of it in the same way that someone in the 50s or 60s might have recognized songs from Guys and Dolls, or West Side Story, The Music Man, or whatever it might be, or like a Rodgers and Hammerstein, of course, one of those musicals. You might not have been able to sort of, you know, have a detailed conversation about the dramaturgy of that musical or the plot of that musical,

35:33but you knew those songs because they were popular standards. They were part of the American songbook. And so I don't want to go on it. I don't want to say that, you know, these TikTok trends are part of the American songbook, but they're sort of part of a songbook, right, in a lot of ways. And that's part of this canonization, is these young people who are on this app very much recognize parts of Broadway, of musical theater culture, because they're just engaging with the app. And so I think that is sort

36:05of, that's one of the more interesting things about this whole conversation to me, is that I can go somewhere, engage with a musical theater, or reference musical theater, and people know it, right, in a way that they might, you know, 20 years ago, I write about in the, at some point in the book, I write about growing up a musical theater fan, and sort of not having anywhere to express it, not being able to talk about it for, you know, social reasons. But also, it just wasn't something

36:38that was part of, like, being in the 90s. It wasn't something that we walked around and, like, talked about, in the same way that kids today very much are open to. I think the thing that a lot of adults miss, and I'm a millennial, everyone, but Gen Z loves musicals. Like, they really like musicals. I mean, not every single one of them likes musicals, but as a, as a group of people, they are very much into musicals, far more than millennials are, or Gen X. It's quite remarkable. And I mentioned earlier,

37:10they love Mamma Mia. Like, they love ABBA, they love Mamma Mia, they love Mamma Mia 2. They will love Mamma Mia 3, whenever that comes out. But musicals are popular with young people, and it's, it's sort of, you know, there's, of course, multiple different ways that this happened. We could also look at the Disney Plus, Hamilton on Disney Plus. And of course, you know, Disney has been holding down the fort for musical movies for a very long time for these animated musical movies. And of course, you know, Frozen, Moana being mega hits, but TikTok is part of that conversation as

37:42well. There are also some maybe more complicated dynamics that I think you get at in your book. Especially, I'm especially interested in this, you talk about how, you know, TikTok is this space that, in your words, spawned an organic movement from the people for the people. You give examples, like, for instance, Ratatouille. And maybe in some ways, that's the sort of perfect example. It's this group of people with, as you said, no grants needed, no funding necessarily. They get together, they develop this musical. And it's kind of this interesting, creative process that that's unmoored

38:16from what you would normally expect in terms of the money, the corporate support, etc. On the other hand, you know, it's being done on this very financially lucrative app, right? And, and certainly in the case of both Ratatouille and Bridgerton, it's, you know, the term IP, the term brand keeps coming up. So there's this sort of interesting tension between what you call, you know, things that are occurring far from the capitalist constraints that dictate commercial theater in the United States. But then when we look at the content, I'm curious what you make of that

Contradictions

38:49contradiction. Exactly. So it can be both things, right? TikTok can be an incredibly commercial space, but it can also be a space where fan cultures are thriving. And also part of this conversation is that musicals are multimillion dollar corporations at the end of the day. And they are relying on unpaid fan labor, right, to make these sort of shows popular and to sell tickets. And so, and we can even look at just different musicals today and how they are very

39:23much relying on cast members of these shows creating content. Now these cast members, so for instance, Amber Artelino, who is in Back to the Future at the moment, I believe, and JJ Neiman, who is definitely in Back to the Future at the moment, are two examples. But if you go through, you know, Jordan, I'm going up on his last name, but he is playing, he's in Hadestown, he's playing Orpheus. Jordan, this is going to drive me insane the rest of the day. But there

39:54are these people that are creating content weekly, sometimes daily, backstage, on stage, walking to the theater, and they're not getting paid for this, right? Now they're getting, you know, if it's something official, like the official account for Hadestown, Hamilton, Back to the Future, that's one thing. But this is a case where these folks are doing extra labor to promote their show. Of course, they're promoting themselves, but they're promoting the overall brand of the show, and they're not getting paid to do it. Just for anyone who, you know, also might not know,

40:28you do not make money from TikTok unless you're in a creator program, and it has to be content that's over a minute. So a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today are things that are not qualifying for monetization. Now, of course, you get the views, you get the virality, you get the followers, which then helps you make money in other places, right? So some of these folks might have, you know, a million followers, which helps them get cast. They still have to have the talent, the goods to do eight shows a week. But if you're looking at two actors, and one has a million

41:02followers that are dying to see this person on stage, and then the other person has very little social media presence, you're going to go with the person who has the million, because you want to sell tickets. And so there is sort of, you know, on the one hand, it's this organic, this sort of, the fans decide, people have the agency, so on and so forth. But on the other hand, it is about making money, right? And so there is unpaid labor happening, which we don't like. But also,

41:32fans have been doing this forever, right? Like, okay, I don't want to say forever, because I, I'm a, I'm a good historian here, but for a very, very long time. And if we look at musical theater fandom, you know, I'm going to really, this is embarrassing, this is going to be embarrassing for me. But like, when I was young, when I was a rent head, back in my youth, I had like a rent journal, and I would like, it was like a big ass, like, hardback journal book I bought. And I would like cut, I would do like clippings from the newspaper, and I would like do fan art. And like, I was obsessed

42:06with rent, I wrote a sequel to rent. I hope that doesn't exist. I hope I can't find no one finds this. But I did different ways of fan engagement, and devoting my time to this musical that I loved. And so it's the same thing. It's just something that's happening in a more public way. Because people are into musicals right now, right? Like, I couldn't go to high school and be like, look at my rent notebook, right? Or like, I even had a rent shirt. But I was like, I could only wear it when I was like, really confident, right? Because I didn't want people

42:38to on the street to be like, musical theater fan. I know that I have, I need therapy, everyone. I have my own, you know, skeletons in my closet, apparently. But, you know, fans have been doing fan engagement for a very long time. And so this is just a public way that they're doing it. And, you know, it would be dismissive to not recognize that fans are getting something out of it too. So there are, I don't write about this as much in my book. But there are a, there is a nice sizable cohort of 30, you know, to 40 theater talk creators. These are largely musical theater fans,

43:14but really just theater fans that see a lot of, you know, a lot of shows in New York and around the country. And they document everything about it. They are not paid. Some of them are in creative programs. But even if you're in a creative program, you're not making enough to pay your bills. I'm just gonna be very transparent there. But these folks, they might get free tickets to go see a show, but they're very much just engaging with the musicals that they love. And they love theater, and they're putting out that content and they're getting stuff out of it. They're getting invited

43:47to press nights. They're getting invited to rehearsals. They're getting invited to cast album launch parties. And so they're getting some things out of it. Sometimes they get swag as well. So it's sort of, it's a very nuanced conversation. And I think, I think it's, it's something that is, it's complicated and I'm not going to solve at this moment. And this being the theater history podcast, I feel like I have to ask, you know, you were just talking about the experience of being a millennial in the nineties. You write in the book about sort

44:21of the early, earlier years of, of internet fandom, musical theater culture. And, you know, having the warning from, you know, your parents or whoever, be careful what you post on the internet, that's forever. And it's become this increasing cliche, I think, among many historians to say, oh, we wish that was true. We wish it was forever. In some ways, stuff from five, 10 years ago is almost maybe leaving less of a trace than something from five, 10 decades ago. Websites, platforms,

44:54publications that are entirely online disappear. And, and it's harder to find those sort of historical traces of, of things that were very important, uh, very formative of certain cultures or, uh, sensibilities. Uh, I'm curious how you see that applying to TikTok, how that's going to maybe change our shared sense of musical theater history. Yeah. I mean, that is the, the major issue with the internet, of course, is just how it can disappear. It can change, it can shift. And as we're having this

45:27conversation, uh, TikTok has been in the United States has been banned, uh, or is facing a ban. Um, but legally it is being fought in the courts. Um, and we'll know within the next, uh, four or five, six months, whether that is overturned or not. Um, of course, if this is banned, this is still a phenomenon happening in Canada and the UK and Australia and basically everywhere around the world, except for India, it's not available in India, but so it can go away. But what I tried to sort of,

46:00the way I approach this is one, I do document this sort of moment, this sort of a five-year moment and, and musical theater history, but I also try to write about it in a way, and this is my second book on, on TikTok or my second, you know, so single authored book on TikTok. And a lesson I learned along the way was to really focus on the overall culture of what was happening and the, not so much the trends, so much as the through lines, because I wanted this to be something that was legible in

46:3510 years, 20 years, even if TikTok is not around or someone's not on TikTok. And, you know, like, you know, I, I've been on a few different podcasts with, uh, folks like yourself and different theater historians or theater folks who are not on TikTok, who have been able to like very much follow what's happening based on the book. And so I think that's something I, I'm very into is how this is sort of documented in a certain way. And I think, you know, sometimes we focus, so like my big gripe with,

47:06with our like playbill.com, broadway.com, all these different sort of websites is whenever a TikTok trend happens, or some sort of TikTok phenomenon happens, they write about it in a very trendy way that to me is boring. Um, it doesn't have context. It doesn't really offer anything. It's just like, Ooh, a song from Chicago is going viral and people are doing this dance and here's some videos of it happening. And what I try to do is offer context. What is, you know, so all these musicals I write about in this book, you know, Wicked, Six, Heathers, uh, Encanto, Ratatouille, uh, Hamilton

47:41and the Heights. I sort of offer like a Beetlejuice. I offer a, like a, you know, a primer, a little historiography, like this is the quick and dirty. This is what the show is, where it was done. Like, you know, who are the main players, like the conversations and engenders, all these different things before we actually get into sort of looking at what's happening on social. And so I think, you know, I think what this does, this sort of social media conversation about musical theater history, it is one that absolutely has its perks. Like we can definitely look at the benefits of

48:17what's happening and how it's changing the face of musical theater. And I think of course, the difficult part is that sort of lack of memory that could happen, right? Collective memory. And if we think about just a band going through, we lose all of this content. We lose all of this sort of momentum in a lot of ways. We lose, um, an archive. It's sort of, you know, uh, so Danielle Rose Valley, if you're listening, shout out, um, has an article coming out in one of our journals. I

48:48can't think of which one, one of our theater history journals and equates it to sort of, um, burning libraries and burning books that has happened historically and sort of theater fires and different things that happened historically that in ways that we've lost information. And so there is a fear that we will lose this information and it's sort of, it's a scary moment, right? Because we've gotten so much out of this. We'll post images and links in our show notes that will let you learn more about Trevor's book and the connections between TikTok and Broadway. Trevor, thank you so much for

49:22coming on today to talk about your book. Thank you for having me.

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