28 April 2019

'Be More Chill': The Journey, Part 1


[On 18 April, I posted a collection of articles on Alien: The Play, a high school stage adaptation of the 1979 sci-fi movie, which caught the nation’s attention on social media.  The attention ended up garnering a $5,000 donation from the film’s director, Ridley Scott, to allow the student cast to give an additional performance beyond the two shows the original schedule allowed.  That performance was on 26 April, and was attended by no other than Sigourney Weaver, the actress who starred in the film (which celebrated the 40th anniversary of its release on that Friday). 

[Now I’m going to chronicle the unlikely rise of the Broadway musical Be More Chill, which reached the pinnacle of theater success also through social media.  I’ve collected the New York Times coverage of the three productions—the world première in Red Bank, New Jersey, which should have been the end of its road except that the cast recording of the score went viral on the ’Net; the short Off-Broadway run on New York City’s Theatre Row; and its transfer to Broadway where it opened on 10 March for a commercial run (which currently stands at 30 previews and 56 regular performances as of 27 April).  In two installments, here are the three reviews plus a couple of additional features on the phenomenon of Be More Chill, the little play that could (and did). 

[The Street of Broken Dreams, indeed!]

“A NERD TURNS COOL WITH A LITTLE SCI-FI HELP”
by Christopher Isherwood

[Charles Isherwood’s review of the début of Be More Chill appeared on 9 June 2015 in “The Arts” section of the Times.  Isherwood clearly dismissed the play, and in another world, that would have been the end of the production’s dreams.  The New Jersey production ran at the Two River Theater in Red Bank on the Jersey Shore from 30 May to 28 June 2015 (including a five-performance extension).]

RED BANK, N.J. — Teenage angst: the grief that just keeps on giving, to popular culture, at least. The woes of the misfit and the wallflower, the snooty brutishness of the jocks and the mean girls have been a bottomless well of material for television, movies and books for decades, and the well shows no signs of running dry.

Finding novelty in such a well-worn genre becomes the challenge. “Be More Chill,” an energetic if still familiar-feeling new musical based on the young-adult novel by Ned Vizzini, updates the classic nerd-who-yearns-for-popularity story by adding a sci-fi twist. Jeremy (Will Connolly), the skinny geek protagonist, becomes transformed into the cynosure of his high school’s popular crowd when his persona is tweaked, or upgraded, as one of the songs announces, after he ingests a mysterious Japanese pill.

The show, making its premiere at the Two River Theater here, features music and lyrics by Joe Iconis, who supplied songs for the second season of NBC’s “Smash,” and a book by Joe Tracz. It introduces Jeremy in a song announcing his mild ambitions: “I don’t want to be a hero/ Just wanna stay in the line/ I’ll never be a Rob De Niro/ For me, Joe Pesci is fine.” But his desire to shine is supercharged by a wicked crush on a perky girl named Christine (Stephanie Hsu); so desperate is he for her attention that he finds the courage to sign up for the school play — ever the mark of a loser in most high schools. (Although, thanks to “Glee,” this has begun to feel so 20th century.)

“Gay!” exults his nemesis, a nasty fireplug of a kid named Rich (Gerard Canonico). Perhaps because the musical features a cast of just 10, however, the supposedly “gay” school play troupe is instantly invaded by most of the cool kids, a development that goes unexplained. (Maybe they’re all “Glee” fans?) Anyway, when harassing Jeremy in the bathroom one day, Rich reveals that he was once a “loser just like you,” until he swallowed a gray pill from Japan that includes a “quantum computer,” which implanted itself in his brain and proceeded to direct his every move. What depressed terminal nerd could resist?

And so, after acquiring a magic pellet from a pusher who, amusingly, covers his tracks by working at a Payless shoe store, Jeremy downs his pill — which must be consumed with Mountain Dew — and acquires his very own Squip, or Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor. Portrayed by Eric William Morris as the commanding-voiced epitome of chillness, the Squip begins directing Jeremy’s every action, making like a cyberstylist to give his wardrobe a makeover, and making Jeremy’s former best and only friend, Michael, invisible so that Jeremy won’t be tempted to slide back into his pathetic, constant video-game-playing ways.

As those who watched the second season of “Smash” may recall (all 26 of you), Mr. Iconis composes music in the vein of post-“Rent” pop-rock. The songs for “Be More Chill” lean toward hyper up-tempo numbers, with singsong choruses (and the occasional random singing of “na-na-na”). The more idiosyncratic songs are the fresher ones: Christine’s paean to the joys of play rehearsals, or a funny number sung by Michael (an endearing George Salazar), who locks himself in the bathroom after sneaking into a cool-kid party, and laments the loss of his best friend.

There’s also a charming 21st-century update of “The Telephone Hour,” from “Bye Bye Birdie,” called “Rich Set a Fire (The Smartphone Hour),” although it is nowhere near as infectious as the original.

Mr. Tracz’s book is along the same lines: predictable in its contours, occasionally quirky in its details. And despite performances that are bright and Red Bull-energetic, the characters tend to be well-worn types newly decked out in high tops and H & M gear. There’s the stud-jock, Jake (Jake Boyd), who somewhat implausibly proves a rival for Christine’s affections, and the bitchy popular girls, the queen bee Brooke (Lauren Marcus) and her sidekick, Chloe (Katlyn Carlson), who sets her sights on the newly cool Jeremy.

Mr. Connolly’s Jeremy doesn’t exactly transform before our eyes from neurotic milquetoast to gleaming king of the cafeteria. But he’s a genial performer with a singing voice that has a tang of Billie Joe Armstrong about it. When, inevitably, Jeremy begins having second thoughts about being controlled by the Squip and abandoning his best friend, Mr. Connolly proves affecting in his ambivalence.

And Paul Whitty, who plays all the adult roles — the hyper-enthusiastic drama teacher, the pill pusher and Jeremy’s sad-sack dad, who refuses to put on a pair of pants — differentiates each with admirable expertise.

Despite its unusual cybertwist, “Be More Chill,” which is directed at a brisk pace by Stephen Brackett (“Buyer & Cellar”), hews so closely to formulaic stories of adolescent insecurities and the brutal ecology of high school that the quirky bits register as just that, little fillips of novelty adorning a boilerplate tale, like weird squiggles scrawled across a generic plastic binder.

Even the show’s efforts at more zany comedy sometimes have a whiff of the stale about them, as when the drama teacher announces that because the club’s funding has been threatened (didn’t this happen on “Glee”?), its production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will have to be set in a postapocalyptic future.

“Instead of frolicking with fairies,” he sadly intones, “there will be fleeing. From zombies.” At which point I expected one of the cool kids to roll his or her eyes and snark: “Zombies? They’re, like, so over.”

Be More Chill

Music and lyrics by Joe Iconis; book by Joe Tracz, based on the novel by Ned Vizzini; directed by Stephen Brackett; choreography by Chase Brock; sets by Dane Laffrey; costumes by Bobby Frederick Tilley II; lighting by Tyler Micoleau; sound by Zachary Williamson; fight director, Unkledave’s Fight-House; production stage manager, Amanda Michaels; music direction by Nathan Dame; orchestrations and musical supervision by Charlie Rosen. Presented by Two River Theater, John Dias, artistic director; Robert M. Rechnitz, executive producer; Joan H. Rechnitz, associate producer; Michael Hurst, managing director. At the Two River Theater, 21 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank, N.J.; 732-345-1400, tworivertheater.org. Through June 21. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Jake Boyd (Jake Dillinger), Gerard Canonico (Rich), Katlyn Carlson (Chloe), Will Connolly (Jeremy Heere), Stephanie Hsu (Christine Canigula), Katie Ladner (Jenna Rolan), Lauren Marcus (Brooke), Eric William Morris (the Squip), George Salazar (Michael Mell) and Paul Whitty (Jeremy’s Dad/Mr. Reyes/Scary Stockboy).

[The play-rating site Show-Score doesn’t generally score regional productions, but sometimes, when an out-of-town show comes into New York City, the site posts a few local reviews and scores them.  For the New Jersey première of Be More Chill, Show-Score included four notices: NJArts.net, which got an 80; Talkin' Broadway, 70; the New York Times, 65; and Scene on Stage, 65.]

*  *  *  *
“EVER LOVE A SHOW YOU HAVEN’T SEEN?”
by Elisabeth Vincentelli

[The next article to appear in the New York Times was on 14 April 2018.  The little show from the Jersey Shore was about to open at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row and was already a hit with some theatergoers because the New Jersey cast recording had gone viral on the ’Net.  Elisabeth Vincentelli’s article was originally published in the “Arts” section of the paper.]

Before “Be More Chill” even starts previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center on July 26, it will already be one of the most popular new musicals in America, with a passionate fan base that dwarfs the number of people who have ever seen the show.

All this after a barely noticed monthlong run in New Jersey three years ago. And a little cast album that could.

When the show’s songwriter, Joe Iconis, and co-star, George Salazar, did a joint cabaret evening at Feinstein’s/54 Below this month, audience members flew in from Paris, Berlin and London. A dad got behind the wheel to ferry his daughter from Michigan. A pair of friends drove from Florida.

Annalise Heffron, 13, and her mom, Amy Cobb, spent 17 hours on a bus from their home in Cincinnati. “She picked that over the school trip to Chicago,” Ms. Cobb said by telephone later.

Still, even musical-theater aficionados may be asking: What exactly is “Be More Chill”?

Based on a 2004 novel by Ned Vizzini, the pop-rock musical, with a book by Joe Tracz, tells the story of a high school junior, Jeremy Heere, who ingests a pill-size supercomputer that makes him cooler.

Its only professional production came in June 2015 at New Jersey’s Two River Theater, which commissioned the show. The New York Times review was tepid, and despite Mr. Iconis’s spirited score and growing track record — he contributed the cult classic “Broadway, Here I Come!” to the TV show “Smash” — no commercial producer came knocking. The chill looked like rigor mortis.

And yet less than three years later, the cast album has passed 100 million streams in the United States. This, of course, is nowhere near the 2.3 billion clocked by “Hamilton,” but just under half of the streams for the vastly more established “Dear Evan Hansen” (211 million), and a lot more than another teen-oriented show, “Heathers: The Musical” (23.4 million), which ran Off Broadway and has had numerous regional productions.

So it’s not a total surprise that on Friday, a producer announced a commercial Off Broadway run, only the second professional production so far. “Knowing that people in such large numbers are connecting to it felt like a perfect opportunity,” said Gerald Goehring, whose credits include “A Christmas Story: The Musical.”

Most of the original cast will be back, and in a neat connection, Will Roland, who originated the role of the acerbic Jared in “Dear Evan Hansen,” will take on Jeremy in “Be More Chill” during the summer run, slated for nine weeks.

It’s hard to tell what ignited the frenzy, but about a year and a half after “Be More Chill” closed, the sci-fi-tinged story of the teenage dork and his friends somehow started getting traction.

Newbies would discover videos in the “recommended” column on YouTube, usually after they’d clicked on “Hamilton” or “Dear Evan Hansen” videos, and the internet helped link fans all over the world.

“I was getting tagged in fan art, then I started noticing people were writing fan fiction about my character and Jeremy,” Mr. Salazar said by telephone. “I was dumbfounded by all of it.”

Nowadays, even a show with a short run outside New York can get a cast album that may go viral. “For shows that don’t have productions, it’s a very easy way to get to a wide audience,” said the producer Ken Davenport, whose “Once on This Island” is now on Broadway. “And then the licensing companies respond.”

Indeed, Rodgers and Hammerstein picked up “Be More Chill” in July 2017 and made it available as a licensed show to schools and amateur companies.

The fan phenomenon was picking up velocity. The recording entered the Billboard Cast Album chart’s Top 10 a whopping 97 weeks after its release, by Ghostlight.

Illustrations and stories connected to the show spread on Tumblr, where “Be More Chill” inspired the second biggest musical-theater fandom of 2017, just behind the following for “Hamilton.”

Animated storyboards known as animatics popped up on YouTube; the most frequently rendered is the tour-de-force song in which Mr. Salazar’s character has an anxiety attack.

“Right after I discovered ‘Michael in the Bathroom,’ I decided to try drawing an animatic for it, even though I still didn’t know what the musical was about,” Claudia Cacace, a 22-year-old who lives near Naples, Italy, said by email. “I just related to the character so much that I felt the need to draw the scene.”

In turn, Dove Calderwood, 27, discovered Ms. Cacace’s art and commissioned her to animate the entire musical.

“It was something I wanted, and it was something I knew the fans wanted, because we didn’t have any visuals for the show,” Ms. Calderwood said by telephone from her home in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Another popular take on “Michael in the Bathroom” is an inspired cosplay performance (that is, lip-synced in character and in costume) by a 20-year-old who goes by “Jack or Aless, depending on the situation” and hails from Toronto.

“Everyone I’ve ever talked to about this musical has told me that they’ve been in the situation Michael was in,” Jack said in an email. “Being in such a vulnerable moment in your life, and then listening to a song that has a character that knows what it’s like to go through it, it really does make you feel that you’re not alone in this.”

Ms. Heffron, the Cincinnati teenager, prefers the score’s “The Pitiful Children” and “The Squip Song” to “Michael in the Bathroom,” which, she said, “is really good but a little overrated.”

Still, she made sure to seek out Mr. Salazar during a meet-and- greet after the 54 Below concert that went on longer than the show itself. She had brought him a Pac-Man toy because his “Be More Chill” character has a Pac-Man tattoo. (The show, “Two-Player Game,” has a few more performances through the end of May.)

There is no denying that fans are committed. They turned up in droves for an amateur production of “Be More Chill” in November at New Jersey’s Exit 82 Theater.

“It was the most insane attention any of my shows has ever received,” said Mr. Iconis, still sounding slightly stunned. “We needed security for a talkback at a community theater. Security!”

[The on-line version of Vincentelli’s article was entitled “How an Anxious-Adolescent Musical (No, Not That One) Found Its Fans.”  I found that amusing!]

*  *  *  *
“DON’T CRY. IT’S ONLY A TEENAGE MELTDOWN”
by Ben Brantley

[On 10 August 2018, the Times ran Ben Brantley’s review of the Off-Broadway (and New York) première of Be More Chill (“Arts” section, as usual).  The production ran on the Irene Diamond Stage of the Pershing Square Signature Center on West 42nd Street from 9 August to 30 September 2018.  The production was nominated for four 2019 Lucille Lortel Awards, including Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical (George Salazar), Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical (Stephanie Hsu), and Outstanding Projection Design (Alex Basco Koch), and one 2018 Clive Barnes Award (Will Roland, actor).

Brantley’s review was middling and Show-Score only rated it at 55, a moderate score in the “mixed” range.  The show got an over-all average score, based on 35 published notices, of 71 with 54% of the reviews positive, 37% mixed, and 9% negative.  TheaterScene,net got the site’s highest score with a 93 and The Wrap got a 30 as Show-Score’s lowest-rated review.  (The viewers gave Be More Chill an average rating of 84 on the site.)]

Two teenage girls seated near me for a recent matinee at the Pershing Square Signature Center agreed that they were so over “Hamilton.” Ditto “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Spring Awakening.” They had loved each of these youth-oriented musicals in turn, but now they had discovered the real thing.

The object of their passion is “Be More Chill,” the high-energy, high-anxiety musical that officially opened on Thursday night but is already all but sold out for its limited run (through Sept. 23). Few of the audience members, I might add, heed the injunction of the title.

On the contrary, the decibel level of their responsive shrieks matches, and sometimes overwhelms, that of the heavily amplified music. Eat your hearts out, Harry Styles and Katy Perry and all you other kiddie pop idols. This is the stuff of teen dreams with a vengeance.

Unfortunately, anyone for whom adolescence is a distant and unpleasant memory is unlikely to feel like screaming, not in ecstasy, anyway. Unlike the more nuanced “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Spring Awakening” — never mind “Hamilton” — “Be More Chill” seems like a members-only club for those caught in the hellish here-and-now of the middle teens.

Written by Joe Iconis (songs) and Joe Tracz (book), with direction by Stephen Brackett, this production not only addresses but also embodies the exhaustingly excitable metabolism of its target audience. As a consequence, what’s happening onstage feels like a closed-circuit communion between young adults and performers portraying young adults. It’s a show that might have been assembled in the bedroom of one of its unhappy characters and then streamed to the world via YouTube.

Which, by the way, is one of the principal media that turned “Be More Chill” into the sui generis sensation it already is. First staged to lackluster critical response at New Jersey’s Two River Theater three years ago, “Be More Chill” went on to become a disembodied hit with an audience that discovered the show online (via videos and a cast recording that has been streamed more 150 million times worldwide) with little or no prompting from its creators.

This is a grass-roots success story that could have happened only in the age of social media. And audiences for this show’s current New York incarnation, which is only its second professional production, arrive with a fierce sense of proprietary pride. “Be More Chill” really is all about them.

Its plot and tone exist between the brooding “Dear Evan Hansen” and another, perkier Broadway hit, “Mean Girls.” Like both those shows, “Be More Chill” — which is adapted from Ned Vizzini’s droll and eminently readable 2004 novel — deals with the anguish of feeling like an outsider in that treacherously stratified purgatory called high school.

The schlubby hero, in this instance, is Jeremy Heere (Will Roland, the nerdy Jared in the original cast of “Dear Evan Hansen”). Living in a rudderless household since his mom walked out (his dad, played by Jason SweetTooth Williams, can’t even be bothered to put on pants), Jeremy is equally low on confidence and friends.

As for school, he just wants to get through each day there unnoticed (which means not pranked, hit or generally bullied). The high points of his life are masturbating to computer porn and playing video games with his only pal, Michael Mell (the crowd favorite George Salazar). Jeremy does have a crush on the lovely Christine Canigula (Stephanie Hsu), the star of the drama program, but is more or less resigned to hopelessness.

As in “Mean Girls,” our leading nerd is given the chance to become Cool, an opportunity he will accept and live to regret. The key novelty here is that he is made over into popularity not by groovy mentors and stylists but a tiny, pill-sized computer that, once swallowed, teaches him all the right moves. The soulless soul of this machine, known as a Squip, is embodied by a dark angel who resembles Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” and is played with welcome wit by Jason Tam.

Beowulf Boritt’s set, accented by fluorescent frames, ingeniously suggests lives held in thrall by technology. But even once the Squip takes effect on Jeremy and (spoiler) others, the activity onstage is frantically human. From beginning to end, the score has an “OMG” urgency that never lets up, whether what’s being sung about is hooking up with a hottie (full of lyrics groaning with double entendres) or betraying your best friend.

Such breathlessness is most enjoyably deployed in a gossip-girls number inspired by “The Telephone Hour” from “Bye Bye Birdie.” This one is called “The Smart Phone Hour (Rich Set a Fire),” and it is led with vigor by Tiffany Mann as the chatty Jenna Rolan. A similar frenzy pulses through the breakout agony anthem “Michael in the Bathroom,” in which Mr. Salazar’s character barricades himself into teary solitude at a party.

The musical sequences, featuring slapdash choreography by Chase Brock, tend to blend into one another. And at times, I had the feeling that many of the uniformly intense cast members could change parts (and Bobby Frederick Tilley II’s costumes), and no one would notice.

The amplification level means that many of the lyrics are undecipherable to the previously uninitiated. Admittedly, this is sometimes a blessing (“Add some swagger to your gait or/You’ll look like a masturbator.”)

Personally, I was happiest when the plot careened off the rails into sci-fi apocalypse territory, which happens during the school’s politically corrected version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That was a hoot.

The rest of the show is more of a sustained holler, and being receptive to its charms surely requires a much younger set of ears than mine. It may be helpful to think of this bounding, exhaustingly enthusiastic puppy of a show as the theatrical equivalent of one of those high-pitched dog whistles that only those under 25 can hear.

Be More Chill

Credits Music and lyrics by Joe Iconis; Book by Joe Tracz; Choreography by Chase Brock; Directed by Stephen Brackett

Cast Cameron Bond, Gerard Canonico, Katlyn Carlson, Stephanie Hsu, Troy Iwata, Tiffany Mann, Lauren Marcus, Will Roland, George Salazar, Britton Smith, Talia Suskauer, Jason Tam and Jason SweetTooth Williams

*  *  *  *
“IT’S GONE VIRAL. NOW IT’S GOING TO BROADWAY”
by Michael Paulson

[On 6 September 2018, shortly before the Off-Broadway production closed, Michael Paulson reported in the Times that, due to its popularity in social media,  the show was going to Broadway.  Paulson recounted the astonishing rise of Be More Chill that resulted from its status on the Internet.]

“Be More Chill,” an energetic sci-fi musical set in the anxious halls of a high school, is coming to Broadway, propelled not by a presold megabrand or raves from critics, but a surge of social media.

Producers are betting that Broadway, increasingly dominated by movie adaptations, jukebox musicals and plays starring celebrities, has room for a no-name show whose early evangelists have been adolescents converted to fandom by streaming the cast album online.

Encouraged by the success of a current Off Broadway production, which sold out its run before the first performance, the producers announced Wednesday that they would open on Broadway in March at the 900-seat Lyceum Theater. The show, directed by Stephen Brackett, features a pop-rock score by Joe Iconis and a book by Joe Tracz.

“I’ve never ridden a horse like this,” said the lead producer, Jerry Goehring, a college theater administrator whose only previous Broadway outing was the six-week run of “A Christmas Story: The Musical” in 2012.

Broadway is a risky business — about three-quarters of all productions fail, and many a show with a strong tailwind has crashed. But angsty adolescents are hot these days, as evidenced by “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Mean Girls” and even “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Mr. Goehring said he had raised the “Be More Chill” capitalization costs — up to $9.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — in just a few days.

“Be More Chill,” adapted from a young-adult novel by Ned Vizzini, is about a high school student who seeks to boost his popularity by swallowing a Japanese pill that turns out to be a computer chip that functions as a de facto life coach.

The central characters, as in much popular culture about high school, are teenagers who feel socially ill-at-ease, and the universality of that experience appears to account for much of the show’s popularity. Its breakout song, “Michael in the Bathroom,” is about a boy who feels so marginalized that he shuts himself away during a Halloween party.

“Even though the story is pretty nuts and there is this crazy sci-fi element, it really is a celebration of misfits and geeks and people who feel like they don’t quite belong, and actual young people relate to the characters,” said Mr. Iconis, who wrote the show’s music and lyrics.

Mr. Iconis, a favorite on the city’s cabaret scene, enjoyed a flash of success writing songs for the television series “Smash,” but has yet to have a commercially successful musical, and “Be More Chill” will be his Broadway debut. (His most popular song, by the way, is titled “Broadway, Here I Come!” but it’s darker than that title might suggest.)

“Be More Chill” had a production in 2015 at New Jersey’s Two River Theater, which commissioned the show, but after an unenthusiastic New York Times review, Mr. Iconis thought its journey was over.

“It just kind of fizzled there — the audiences were loving it so much, but we didn’t get the review that a show like that needs to have a life, and we didn’t have a commercial producer or a famous person attached, so I felt like that was the end, and it was a huge bummer,” he said.

But then Two River and Ghostlight Records agreed to make a cast album. The release, in the fall of 2015, was unremarkable. Yet in 2017, the creative team and stars began getting an unusual number of Twitter notifications and Instagram tags for no apparent reason.

Mr. Tracz, the book writer, said people even started emailing him to ask questions about the characters.

“We started to see these fanimatic, homegrown videos of ‘Michael in the Bathroom,’ and these Tumblr and Reddit pages were getting a lot of traction, and the streaming numbers were going up substantially,” said Kurt Deutsch, the founder and president of Ghostlight Records, using the word “fanimatic” to describe animated storyboards created by fans. “It was completely organic — we don’t have tons of marketing dollars to make this happen. It just grew to become a viral sensation.”

The cast album, discovered and shared online, has now been streamed more than 170 million times worldwide, making it among the most streamed theatrical cast albums.

Mr. Goehring, the director of the theater arts program at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, had not seen the Two River production and was unaware of the show’s growing online fan base, but he was an admirer of Mr. Iconis’s work and decided to direct a college version of the show. When fans started to fly in to see it, he snapped up the commercial rights.

That, in turn, led to this summer’s Off Broadway production, in a rented theater at the Pershing Square Signature Center, which runs until Sept. 30. Again, the Times review was unenthusiastic, but the crowds have been raucous. Most days, 1,500 people enter a digital lottery for two to four last-minute seats, and a one-week extension sold out in six hours.

Among those who saw the show this summer: Robert Wankel, the president of the Shubert Organization, which then offered the producers the Lyceum on Broadway. Mr. Wankel said he had been struck by the youthfulness of the show’s fan base, a sharp difference from the usual Broadway audience.

“This has truly been created by social media, which is fantastic,” he said. “Social media these days, I don’t have to tell you, can make or break something, and in this particular case, they’re loving it.”

So now the show’s creative team is discussing tweaks as they prepare for what they are thinking of as “Be More Chill: 3.0” — Broadway.

“The fact that we’ve gotten here because actual human beings love the show is truly remarkable,“ Mr. Iconis said. “It gives me faith.”

[Please come back to Rick On Theater on 1 May for the continuation of this series of New York Times articles on the musical phenom called Be More Chill.] 

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