Taryn Delanie Smith raced back and forth through the rows of seats at the empty Metropolitan Opera House, dressed in a cream-colored gown from the Met costume department and holding a candelabra from the Met props department. This December morning, she was playing a ghost, an online character familiar to her 1.2 million Instagram followers.
“It was always my dream to be a phantom of the opera,” she said, pulling up her white opera gloves, as a camera crew recorded her ghostly moans, which she would post on her account. “The next time you are at the Met Opera, you may not see me but really remember I am with you.”
She stopped and looked at the crew. “OK — cut!”
A few hours later, Smith, 29, and Tiffani Singleton, 27, her partner in social influencing, sat in Box 29 in the parterre, usually set aside for the Met’s top donors, to tape their podcast, “We’re Your Girls.” (“A podcast for divas, by divas.”) They had spent hours touring the subterranean levels of the opera house, and their “surprise guest” for the show, they told their audience, was Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.
Gelb, 72, seemed heartened by their excitement about opera even as he gamely corrected their occasional error, such as when they insisted that a mule appears on the Met’s stage for Puccini’s “Turandot.”
“‘La Bohème,’” responded Gelb, who has run the Met for 20 years. “I am pretty sure. I am actually quite positive.”
No matter. Smith and Singleton are part of a new cadre of opera promoters recruited from the very online world of social influencers — and just what the Met has been looking for in its relentless effort to convince a broader public, particularly a broader younger public, that opera is accessible and even affordable.
“We just have to adapt to where our audiences are,” said Gillian Brierley, the Met’s assistant general manager for marketing and communications. The Met is building relations with influencers, she said, “the way we build relations with journalists. Their reach is a huge part of it, and the type of audience they are engaging.”
Smith and Singleton are among 70 social influencers who are promoting the Met and its 2025-2026 season with as much fervor and innovation as, say, a millennial candidate running for mayor of New York. With their millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and their bubbly online presentations, these influencers have offered a new window into what happens under the chandeliers. And they have muscled into a field once commanded by arts and society opinion leaders, not to mention reviewers and writers from newspapers and magazines.
This army of influencers, nearly all under 45, have a combined audience of 16 million people, by the Met’s calculation. Newcomers to opera — many are self-described theater enthusiasts — they have been invited to spend a night at the Met, not just to popular fare like “Turandot,” but also to more challenging works like “Arabella.” And they share with their followers their delight and surprise at what they have found: the lack of a dress code; the English-language translations on the backs of seats; the Hollywood-worthy projections and videos; and, yes, the existence of cheap seats.
The Met found most of the influencers through its advertising agency. Only a handful are paid, but there are plenty of perks and enticements to get them through the Met door: backstage tours, selfies with opera stars, invitations to the most exclusive events and openings. Smith and Singleton will be on hand for the New Year’s Eve gala, the premiere of a new production of Bellini’s “I Puritani,” a high society night on the Met calendar. They made a point of talking up the opera (after checking with Met staff on how to pronounce it) in their podcast with Gelb.
The invitations come condition free, the Met and the influencers said, with no Met approval of content. “Most of this is, ‘We are inviting you,’” said Ashley Hufford, 35, an influencer. “‘If you want to make a video, great.’”
“I am a big theater person,” she added, “but honestly, I never saw any opera and it always seemed very inaccessible.”
Hufford made a three-minute TikTok video in which she reels through the similarities between “Rent,” one of her favorite musicals, and “La Bohème,” the Puccini opera upon which it is based.
Kim Hale, who at 57 is one of the older influencers, said she didn’t know what to expect when the Met invited her to “Turandot.”
“I was super excited because I had never been to the opera before,” she said. “I had a lot of preconceived notions about the opera — it’s so long! I’m not going to understand it. Then I realized you watch 45 minutes and drink Champagne.”
This is an unlikely alliance, to put it mildly, between two worlds that exist in very different universes. Met executives are always trying to keep one step ahead of what Jen Luzzo, the opera’s press director, called this “constantly evolving” landscape. Some of these new operagoers are still learning how to pronounce “Turandot,” while the sight of young influencers twirling on the red-carpet steps inside the Met, or on the grand terrace in front of the building, is no doubt jarring to some of the more tradition-bound attendees.
But for the Met, that is a small price to pay. The influencers have been lavish with their reviews, praising the productions, the singing and the only-in-New-York experience. “It was larger than life,” Hale told her followers on Instagram. “Magnificent sets and costumes that took my breath away.” It is a far cry from a critic pointing out an ill-conceived plotline, an orchestra struggling to keep pace or a missed note.
Hufford used her TikTok account to document that opening night at the Met — “One of the most beautiful buildings in the city” — and the premiere of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Mason Bates.
“A superhero opera?” she said on TikTok. “As a newish opera fan, I never would have expected to see comic books and opera in the same sentence. But somehow, at the Metropolitan Opera it not just works, but feels like it was always meant to be.”
Another influencer, Kaisha Huguley, 35, used her posts to highlight the discounted seats that can be found through the luck of a lottery. “Did you know that tickets start at $25 for most performances?” she says.
Huguley, one of handful of influencers who is paid by the Met, said she approached the assignment with trepidation when asked if she would help promote Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded,” which opened the 2024-25 season.
“This is a new world to me,” she said. “When I was invited, I wasn’t sure if it was actually a space that was for me. The majority of the audience is older and white. I am young and Black. It really opened my mind as to what it is.”
The “We’re Your Girls” podcast was probably the biggest social media production to take place at the Met in the opera’s courtship of influencers, which the Met started in 2019. The podcast, which began in February promising “the ultimate dose of real talk, hilarious shenanigans, and heartwarming sisterhood,” has an audience of 300,000, who find it on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, iTunes and Spotify. Among its followers are Zohran Mamdani and Marcello Hernández of “Saturday Night Live.” With the podcast and their personal social accounts, Smith and Singleton reach an audience of nearly 4 million, according to their producers.
Given that, it’s little surprise that the Met gave Smith and Singleton the run of the opera house that day. They arrived with their own crew of producers and videographers, and were met by a full crew of Met staff, from the communications department to the security force. They were fussed over by Met hairdressers and makeup artists. They borrowed gowns from “Arabella” (for Singleton) and Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” (for Smith). In costume, their entourage in tow, they were taken all over the vast Met complex interviewing a cobbler at one stop and a dressmaker at another.
This was, Met officials said, the first podcast ever recorded inside the opera house. When Smith and Singleton arrived in Box 29, they seemed momentarily staggered by the grandeur of it all. (“This is bananas!” Singleton said.) They bounced up and down in excitement in the red velvet chairs as they waited for the more reserved Gelb to come on their set.
“When we had first asked if we could do something with the Met opera, we were just excited in general that they said yes,” Smith said into the camera. Little did she imagine that “Tiffani and I will be actually spending New Year’s Eve here.”
At that point, the two women briefly joined hands as they turned to the camera and said, in unison, “together.”
“For the show ‘I Puritani,’” Smith continued. “Which you can still buy tickets to, by the way.”
Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering cultural, government and political stories in New York and California.
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