Where do musicals live?
Many people would say on Broadway or on film. Maybe on tour or in a community theater.
But don’t tell that to TikTok.
TikTok, the video sharing platform with 2 billion mostly younger users, is now home to songs and dances from Broadway and beyond. It’s where more and more fans go to experience musical theater — and to recreate it. Step for step, smile by smile, in bursts of 30 seconds or so, they imitate the originals and put their bodies into the scene.
Yet these content creators are not just copycats; they are attempting and sometimes mastering the complicated dance moves and distinctive performances of shows they may never see live, let alone be cast in. Sharing the result with the world, they are making TikTok a theater of their own.
Just in Time
‘Splish Splash’
Consider “Splish Splash,” a giddy number sung and danced by Jonathan Groff and members of the ensemble of the Broadway musical “Just in Time.”
Last May, the production’s social media team posted a snippet of the dance on TikTok, featuring black-and-white rehearsal footage in a split screen with the colorful finished product.
Influencers like Jojo Siwa took up the implicit challenge: Can you do this at home? In June, Britini D’Angelo, a popular TikTok dancer, posted a half-speed tutorial. Soon the flood of facsimiles overwhelmed the original; the official video has now been viewed 1.6 million times, the responses nearly twice that.
From cramped apartments, suburban kitchens, classrooms, alleys, parks and garages they come. (Is that pompadoured guy in the white terry cloth robe at a spa?) They perform with or for their spouses, colleagues and classmates, or solo except for a partly interested pet underfoot.
Some are professionals — check out Garrett Clayton and Thomas Whitcomb doing the dance backstage at a regional production of “Frozen.” You expect them to be good and they are.
But for others, the choreography, by Shannon Lewis, is hard. It was even hard for Groff. For 10 weeks before regular rehearsals began, he told me, he took classes with Lewis to master what she calls the dance’s “deceptive difficulty.” To Groff it is “the most Peloton, high-energy workout ever.”
That’s clearly the case for the TikTokers. They pant. They wobble. You can sense the strain as well in their expectation-lowering captions. “Guess which one of us is a trained dancer?” writes a woman in a trio who isn’t. An Australian man in his living room excuses himself: “This is the closest I’m ever gonna be to Broadway or a West End stage but at least I tried my best.”
Lewis loves it all but does have notes. “A lot of them get vampire fingers and T. Rex arms,” she said in a video interview, meaning that their bodies are tense in the wrong places. “Or they swing their elbows to and fro without taking the weight from foot to foot.”
The strain, of course, is part of the joy: If they can do it, maybe we can too? Amateurs let us see the hard work professionals are trained to mask.
Chicago
‘We Both Reached for the Gun’
For those professionals, the challenge is different. Their TikToks are often calling cards, cataloging their skills or providing an outlet between gigs.
“We Both Reached for the Gun,” choreographed by Rob Marshall for the movie “Chicago,” is a perfect template for them. The clip originally posted on TikTok features a large ensemble doing a jazzy Charleston overlaid with marionette moves. On TikTok it quickly became something else, as performers customized the choreography to their talents.
So Michael and Matthew Gardiner, who call themselves the tap twins, offer bravura ball changes and synchronized shuffles. Ellington Hoffman gives the material a ballet makeover, whipping 10 Italian fouettés in 20 seconds. Alex Wong and Melissa Becraft perform in front of the show’s Broadway marquee, dressed as if they were already in the cast. Olivia Alboher adds aerobics into the mix, while her father, eating ice cream, looks on in admiration.
But somewhere between the slick professionals (check out the scalpel-like precision of Cost n’ Mayor) and the winded amateurs are the almost-weres and wannabes. Devin Gibson, who goes by dev.the.menace on TikTok, danced for 12 years in his youth; now 27 and working at a Charlotte, N.C., airport, he told me he has “dreams of opening my own dance studio or taking some Broadway classes or dance classes in general so I can get back into it.”
For the time being, in his pajamas, he can appear in his favorite musical, sampling what that future might feel like.
The Great Gatsby
‘New Money’
These videos aren’t happening by chance. The social media teams behind new shows drop clips into the TikTok ocean like chum, hoping to net a reward in engagement. Groff told me that around Thanksgiving, six months after the original “Splish Splash” post, he noticed audience members doing the dance moves in their seats. That kind of connection helped “Just in Time” become one of the few recent musicals to approach profitability.
Tutorials are an important part of the process. Like “Just in Time,” “The Great Gatsby” posted a split-screen TikTok of one of its big, athletic numbers. Choreographed by Dominique Kelley and led by Samantha Pauly, the video of that number, “Big Money,” offered an implicit home challenge. A step-by-step demonstration by the show’s associate choreographer and dance captain (“We want to see the biggest shaking hands you’ve ever given!”) then broke it down. Soon, dance teachers around the country took it up.
Jennifer O’Keefe, who worked “for many weeks” with her amateur students at the Spotlight Performance Academy in Homewood, Ill., before making a video, told me the “New Money” dance was “a tough one.” She added: “Those two women behind me were the only brave souls willing to go on camera.”
Elsewhere there are many such souls. At a time when Broadway fears that its shrinking place in popular culture may turn it into a niche product for the rich and connected, TikTok pushes in the other direction. The scope of these responses is enviably wide, because none of the usual barriers to participation — money, age, race, gender, geography, ability, body type or even skill — exist.
That’s only fitting for the “New Money” videos; slipping past identity markers is, after all, a central “Great Gatsby” theme. Joelis Martinez Santiago, whose profile page features a Puerto Rican flag, performs the number with her Boston Conservatory classmate Caitlin Eswein. Chris Ramos, recently cast in a Queens production of “Newsies Jr.,” offers “New Money” as his “off-bway dance audition.” Sarah Jane Simpson, a member of the Rollettes, a Los Angeles-based wheelchair dance team, makes her chair a part of the choreography. Kristabel Kenta-Bibi, a University of Michigan student in hot pink, writes in a caption, “Gatsby brings us together.”
Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
‘New York’
Musical theater used to have that kind of reach. My parents got their fix from the radio. My friends and I nodded our heads to vinyl cast albums. My sons listened to CDs on headphones, then streamed. Other than possibly humming along, our engagement with those mediums was a one-way street. None of them asked much of us, or offered much beyond the ear.
Now, even for people who have never dreamed of doing jazz hands, TikTok has changed the shape of the experience. To participate in the challenge from “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” requires no dancing. The video of its semi-title song, “New York,” taped a few months before the show opened on Broadway in November, features its leads, Sam Tutty and Christiani Pitts, standing basically still for three minutes.
TikTokers recreating the clip basically stand still too. The drama is not in their movement but in the subtlety of their lip-syncs and the specificity of their expressions — uncanny, considering how many different types of people are doing it.
“That’s the beauty of it,” Tutty told me. “You don’t have to be a dancer, and I can promise you I was the worst dancer ever. It gives an accessibility we’ve never had before.”
So Landon Hawkins, a 27-year-old wedding photographer in Oregon who “captures queer love and elopements,” could shoot his video in a tiny bathroom. George Cook, a 33-year-old Irish gardener and wildlife photographer working in England, made his while walking home through open heathland. A plumber, two drag queens, a mother baking, the front-of-house staff at a theater near London, a Filipino teenager in braces and a boy of about 7 with his dad around a table: All nail the impersonation.
I mean “impersonation” in the richest sense: the embodying of a self outside oneself. Groff, at 17, did something similar when learning the opening number of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” by repeatedly watching the 2002 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on a VCR in his bedroom.
His viewership? One — in the mirror. Now, with an army of TikTokers reaching millions, musical theater may be in luck. Many newbies echo what Hawkins, the wedding photographer, told me: “I’ve just never been really into musicals but this was amazing.” Or as Groff put it: “It’s so cool that Broadway has the potential to hit that pop culture button again.”
If so, it won’t just be the playback button. It’ll also be the one that starts the recording.
Produced by Maridelis Morales Rosado and Rebecca Lieberman. Rachel Sherman contributed reporting.
Videos: “Splish Splash,” original clip via producers of “Just in Time”; via Garrett Clayton and Thomas Whitcomb; grid, clockwise from top left, via Beth Bowles and Cheryl Baxter, Robert Rene, The College Audition Edge, Breanne Allarie. “We Both Reached for the Gun,” original clip via Miramax Films; grid, clockwise from top left, via Chayil Brooks, Olivia Alboher, Devin Gibson, Alex Wong and Melissa Becraft; via Michael and Matthew Gardiner. “New Money,” original clip via producers of “The Great Gatsby” on Broadway; via Rachel Arianna; grid, clockwise from top left, via Sarah Jane Simpson, Jennifer O’Keefe, Joelis Martinez Santiago and Caitlin Eswein, Kristabel Kenta-Bibi. “New York,” original clip via producers of “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” on Broadway; grid, clockwise from top left, via Theatre Front of House Team, Landon Hawkins, Daisy Diamond and Lola Fierce, George Cook.
Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for The Times.
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