[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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