The Traumatized Gatekeepers of Broadway
Theatre fans measure their passion by nitpicking. Does it do the industry more harm than good?
by Laura Wheatman Hill
Photograph by Holger Langmaier.
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Earlier this year on the Las Culturistas podcast, Tina Fey had a few choice words for theatre fans.
The subject was the film version of the Mean Girls musical, which came out in January, and Fey was expressing displeasure with the “little Broadway cunts on TikTok complaining about two lines” of a song that had been changed from the Original Broadway Cast (OBC) recording.
For context, fans were not trashing the show or the film adaptation—it has a big fan base. They were nitpicking about word choice in a show that is now seven years old, a change that’s well within the purview of the creative team. “This is why we can’t have nice things,” Fey said, frustrated with the gatekeeping and the obsessive need to be “correct” and the same as the original.
When we talk about American theatre fans, we’re usually talking about people who love Broadway—musicals or plays done at the professional level in New York City. But theatre fandom is not limited to people in and around NYC. In the social media era, theatre fans live all over—and they get very invested in their shows, their stars, and yes, tiny little changes from one version to another.
To some, it’s fannish passion; to others, it’s gatekeeping, and it affects professionals and fellow fans alike. Why are theatre fans like this? As the industry struggles to survive amidst economic changes over the last few years, a huge online fandom not limited by physical proximity should be a boon. But are theatre fans actually destroying the thing they love from the inside?
American theatre people—theatre kids, theatre nerds, whatever you want to call fans of Broadway and theatre in general—spell “theatre” the British way, which is perhaps the most streamlined way to illustrate the gatekeeping and snobbishness within this community.
In an article for American Theatre, Rob Weinert-Kendt writes, “The etymology, if we must go there, is that ‘theatre’ has been the accepted English spelling since roughly the 17th century, deriving from the French, in turn deriving from the Greek (‘theatron’), while ‘theater’ is a relatively recent American revival of an old Middle English spelling.” So “theatre” is the original way of spelling it—a sign of respect for our dramatic elders, the Greeks (like Sophocles) and the English (like Shakespeare). Weinert-Kendt suggests that people think of the spelling as a “class issue,” with the British spelling being a way to “show off.”
Theatre fans are show offs. They know all the words to the entire show. They have the OBC recording on CD since it’s no longer on Spotify (looking at you, OBC The Wiz). And those are just the musical theatre fans—there are also the “straight play” nerds, which is not to say they’re necessarily heterosexual. These scholars know soliloquies by heart and tend to fall into Meisner repetition during normal conversation. With the proliferation of videos online via TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, fans can be anywhere at any time. They are full of opinions, many of them snarky. They lurk behind gates, keeping the keys to a kingdom where most of them don’t even hold title.
Why are we like this? I use “we” here because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m above this form of snobbery—I, too, spell it with an “re.” I taught my kids the proper terms inside a theatre when we see a show: “proscenium,” “house,” etc. When it’s five minutes to bedtime, I expect a “thank you, five!” and when I need them to clean up, I tell them to “strike” or “neutralize the space.” If theatre is a cult, I’m in it.
I’m a professional dramaturg, playwright, and drama teacher. I’ve trained my whole life in the dramatic arts. I know all the words to every show I was in at summer camp—plus any I happened to be interested in at the time, regardless of whether I saw it performed live on The Great White Way or anywhere else. I’ve forgotten most of math and a good chunk of history, but turn on the Rent soundtrack and I know every word, the names of the OBC, and a slew of “fun facts.” Who are these facts fun for? Me.
In college I spent my summers at Shakespeare training institutes, playwriting intensives, and reading the shows my school would put on the next year. Our annual trip from California to New York to visit family became a vehicle to see how many shows I could squeeze in during our few days in the city. One year, I spent my allowance to see Urinetown after my mother said she wouldn’t buy tickets for a third show.
Theatre kids become invested in the medium and grow up to be theatre adults—carrying into adulthood their fervor, attention to detail, and pride in their life-long learning. Some of these theatre adults become patrons of the medium, while others—myself included—also go on to work in the industry. The supply doesn’t run out in this neverending canon: there are always new shows, new revivals, new rising stars, and new discoveries of older work.
This sustained passion keeps the industry going and constantly brings in new talent and admirers. But this level of obsession can make theatre kids elitist, particular, and overly critical—and I say that as someone who knows what actor and self-proclaimed theatre nerd Jeremy Strong meant when he said of his choices as Succession character Kendall, “I thought it made sense, dramaturgically.”
(Here’s where I have the opportunity to explain to you that a dramaturg basically means, “biggest nerd working on a play.” The dramaturg can help with rewrites or edits on a new play and, on a static piece of text, helps the production team with historical accuracy or actor and production choices, all in service to “the play.” If, as Hamlet said, “the play’s the thing,” the dramaturg makes sure that remains the case. The actor or the sets are not “the thing.” For a true theatre nerd, all choices must make sense dramaturgically.)
As much as I try not to be an obsessive gatekeeper, there is something deeply satisfying about being the biggest nerd working on the play or in the audience. Theatre kids are sticklers for details—perhaps, in part, because learning details and then challenging them is one arena in which they can really succeed.
Theatre fans' deep appreciation of—and yes, commitment to gatekeeping—the dramatic arts might stem from feeling like we didn’t belong. When I talked to Katharine Quinn, a Broadway marketer and producer who has worked on Shucked, How to Dance in Ohio, and, currently on Broadway, The Great Gatsby, she spoke about the tradition of keeping theatre elite, even among people working in the business.
“Are we just perpetuating trauma?” Quinn asks. “Theatre kids are canonically othered growing up and we perpetuate that once we gain control in our own industry and pay it forward in a not ideal sense.” Even if they don’t work in the industry, theatre fans perpetuate that othering, too. They look down on those who enjoy a show but don’t know its context. The scramble to stay in a world where our opinion matters means we sometimes step on people below us in order to seem like we’re the best.
Theatre kids also, historically, have opinions galore about shows they haven’t worked on—or haven’t even seen. A perfect example of theatre gatekeeping gone wild was the tiny tantrum online about the Wicked movie poster. In the song “Defying Gravity,” the main character says, “Everyone deserves the chance to fly.” The poster says, “Everyone deserves a chance to fly.” Spot the difference? An article. “The” to “a.” Who cares? A surprisingly large number of people on the internet, to the point that, apparently, they switched it out in the trailer to the “correct” lyrics.
About the strict adherence to the text itself, Quinn says that for fans, “It’s like a hymn. It’s almost religious”—there’s a “reverence and sanctimoniousness” which is entirely unnecessary. “The thing that is so funny,” she explains, “is having worked almost exclusively on new musicals on Broadway and in regional development, the writers are nowhere near as precious as [fans] are 90% of the time.”
Quinn invokes the da Vinci quote, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” and says that, “given the opportunity, every writer would write forever, for their whole lives.” While art is in the process of being created, it’s plastic, ever-changing and far less precious. Once a show is frozen, however, it becomes canonical, sacred text. Performance is given some leeway—but only as much as makes sense dramaturgically, a distinction that can feel arbitrary. Some fans balk at key changes, options on notes that feel too different, or other accommodations made to suit a particular cast member. Meanwhile, the production team is trying to make the best art they can.
Theatre fans also tend to draw similar black-and-white lines between “good” and “bad” shows. Jukebox musicals bad. Sondheim musicals good. Back to the Future bad. Hadestown good. Les Mis movie bad. Les Mis show good. “I don’t subscribe to it one bit,” Quinn says. “Jukebox musicals that some people fancy themselves above are exactly what those creators intended and they are the expert at what they do.” Instead of thinking oneself above a piece of art, “Something I wish we had in this community is that you can recognize that something isn’t for you and be perfectly fine with its existence because it might be for someone else,” she says. Let them like the Les Mis movie. Even let them like The Greatest Showman.
Because a lot of theatre fans have at least been practitioners on an amateur level, they feel a sense of expertise—and ownership—over the quality of a professional show or on production choices. Everyone has the right to an opinion, but in theatre fandom, it often feels that there is a right and wrong answer, when, as in all art, everything is an interpretation.
All this gatekeeping has, ironically, come at a moment when social media has democratized theatre fandom—anyone can have some degree of access, regardless of where they live, via technology.
Pre-social media, theatre fans listened to their OBC records or cassettes or CDs, talked to their friends at camp, watched PBS recordings of Sondheim shows, and, if they were lucky, saw a Broadway show at some point. The Tonys were the only video outlet for previewing Broadway, and there were virtually no ways to watch Off-Broadway or regional productions (legally). Touring companies introduced audiences to Broadway shows they may not otherwise have had access to. (While tours still bring in fans today, the culture around seeing a show on tour did not and does not have the same fervor as seeing it in New York.)
Now, there’s the internet. Entire shows are uploaded onto YouTube, avoiding copyright claims by calling the videos “slime tutorials.” Clips go viral and boost show attendance, like the Aaron Tveit “opt up” in Moulin Rouge. After the bootleg of Tveit’s Tony-winning performance went viral on TikTok, showing him singing the last note of “El Tango de Roxanne” higher and more intensely than originally written, the show put out an official clip and Tveit returned to the show for a limited run, during which fans kept tabs on the nights he “optioned up” and made special trips to see the performance. (He’s recently rejoined the show through October of this year, and I’m interested to see how the fandom handles it.)
Beyond driving ticket sales, social media drives fandom. Ironically, this obsession with the differences in the live performance versus the original recording runs counter to the gatekeeping of original lyrics and performances so rampant on the internet; theatre kids are a paradox. Yet the power of having “special knowledge” about the show remains strong within the theatre world—what an “opt up” is, who Tveit is, and even how the show on Broadway differs from the original film.
Theatre fandom online has existed in some capacity for decades, but a social media explosion happened because all the theatre nerds—professionals included—got lonely at the same moment. COVID shut down Broadway for eighteen months in 2020-2021, and after a hunker-down and mourning period (in which many people got sick and died, including several notable members of the theatre community), pros brought their skills online. Actors began offering virtual coaching sessions or appeared in interviews. The Sondheim 90th birthday concert, darkly titled “Take Me to the World,” was a live-streamed fundraiser for Artists Striving to End Poverty (ASTEP) in April 2020—a month after Broadway closed down, featuring many big Broadway and film names who Zoomed in from home.
At the same time, TikTok was becoming hugely popular with people who were isolated and desperate for connection. The platform served as the gateway for theatre fans to create, too, and before long, TikTok musicals began cropping up. Unlike other fanworks like fanfiction and fanart—where a high degree of transformativeness is one of the reasons they generally fall under “fair use” copyright-wise—these “productions” were more like direct adaptations of the originals, albeit shown on a tiny, handheld screen.
In January 2021, a Ratatouille musical (Ratousical) ran as a fundraiser for the Entertainment Community Fund (formally the Actors Fund) and raised a million dollars to help theatre professionals during the COVID shutdowns. The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical began on TikTok a mere ten days after the Ratousical performance. Written by Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, they presented the work during live streams on TikTok. That concept album went on to win a Grammy, beating out Broadway and music-industry heavyweights like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Schwartz, and Bob Dylan.
At first, the rights holders were permissive with the livestreams, but Barlow and Bear then flew too close to the sun when they did a live concert of the album, resulting in a suit from Netflix. Being sued by a streaming service over theatre content created on an app no one cared about a few years prior encapsulates how much power TikTok has gained over the theatre world in a relatively short period of time. Of theatre TikTok’s meteoric rise, Quinn claims, “It would have happened anyway, but it wouldn’t have happened with the speed and fervor and exponential growth that it did because we were all theatre starved” during lockdown.
Well past the height of the pandemic—and with Broadway struggling to recoup investments despite theatres being fully open with thirty shows on Broadway at the time of this writing—social media still drives a huge portion of theatre fandom behavior. Industry professionals have begun to understand the power of the fandom in cultivating interest in and dedicating money toward shows. As much as they might want to chide theatre kids for being a nitpicky annoyance, they know they’re a huge tool for marketing in terms of building a fanbase.
“TikTok has been a not insignificant force in getting an increased amount of young people to the theatre,” says Quinn. Fans have several attributes to bring to the Broadway table read. Quinn says, “Fandoms at their best are an amazing asset to theatre” because they add to the culture of the show. TikTokers like Kate Reinking aka “theatre is life” watch and critique shows. The Sweaty Oracle breaks theatre gossip. Cast members show us life behind the curtain. (Quinn herself joined TikTok to make content about the Bridgerton musical).
As a result of unprecedented access, fans feel closer than ever to the artists working on these shows. “Because we have parasocial relationships with people online, that probably extends to creatives of shows,” says Quinn. While this lets fans show their love for a work, it also leads to blurry boundaries. She says she has strangers DMing her unsolicited notes about shows she’s working on—definitely crossing the line. “There’s a difference between critical discourse and addressing creatives directly, assuming you’re invited into that room,” she says.
These blurry boundaries have coincided with an increased obsession with getting the creatives of a project to see commentary or fanworks about a project. Like in music and media fandoms these days, theatre fans tag artists in videos or in the comments in order to alert them to material, and creators make videos of their reactions when the artists themselves comment or repost material. The dynamics that make it feel like one big creative conversation also fuel the exact nitpicky gatekeeping plaguing the broader fandom.
But the influx of fans on TikTok and other platforms is having a direct—and very positive—result in the analog world: in a world of historically older, very white crowds, Broadway audiences are skewing younger and less white today. Quinn cites a recent report from the Broadway League that detailed these shifting demographics—and stated that theatre goers under age 25 consider the recommendations of Instagram over those of the New York Times when deciding whether or not to see a show.
Despite these demographic trends, Broadway—and theatre across the board—is struggling. Attendance is down, but especially from people traveling in from outside New York City. Shows are closing after a short amount of time due to bad reviews or a lack of immediate success—an echo of movies that are dubbed “flops” being pulled to streaming after opening weekend. Most distressingly, ticket prices are high, with the average being over a hundred dollars a person—and not even to the hottest show. Bigger shows like Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club are averaging in the $300s. Meanwhile, the average household income of a Broadway patron is $271,277, nearly $200K over the national average, which means theatre overall, is still only truly accessible to the elite.
With all the industry’s struggles, it’s clear fans’ gatekeeping and nitpicking isn’t helping anyone. Instead of “perpetuating gatekeepery” as Quinn calls it, true theatre fans shouldn’t slam a show for imperfections, or for lacking whatever ephemeral thing that makes certain theatre cool. Instead, fans should be “approaching your beloved fandom with generosity.” She says, “We have a reputation of being inaccessible. The last thing we want to do is turn people away because people feel stupid because they like a show that you think is bad or may not know as many fun facts as you.”
If a big, cheesy show like Phantom of the Opera (which, I know, just closed, but I refuse to besmirch The Lion King) gets people to New York, they might take the time to see a less famous show, giving the Broadway economy a boost and keeping these smaller shows afloat. Fans should help people who are curious about theatre by encouraging the love of “gateway shows” that appeal to the masses more than to the kids with BFAs. Being “right” or “best” will never be better than losing the thing we love the most because we were too snobby to stop criticizing it to the point of collapse. Nitpicking Mean Girls won’t help the next movie-musical get off the ground.
Theatre fandom in 2024 shows how much that passion—boosted by platforms like TikTok and Instagram—can create a true zeitgeist. The all-powerful algorithm can make or break entertainment industry subgroups like Broadway—and the fans train the algorithm. Theatre fans are knowledgeable enough to nitpick, but they’re also dedicated enough to make a show a smash success. Fans should use their passion for the latter, not the former, which is the only way to get what we want: more theatre.
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Laura Wheatman Hill (she/her) is a writer, dramaturg, and teacher. She lives in Oregon with her two children. She has a masters of arts in teaching and has taught English, writing, and drama to students of all ages. She has been published by Daily Beast, Slate, CNN, Real Simple, Parents, and others. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and her website.