I have a bad habit of over-explaining what I think a show is going to be before I see it.

A year of hearing about Mexodus—from my friends who were producing it, in hallway conversations, in the slow accumulation of buzz that happens when a piece keeps getting extended—meant that by the time I sat down in the Daryl Roth a few weeks ago, I had already written the show in my head. I knew it was two-person. I knew about the live looping. I knew it had something to do with the Underground Railroad running south, into Mexico. I knew it had won Helen Hayes Awards. I knew Lin-Manuel Miranda had said something about it online.

I thought I knew what I was walking into.

And then they knocked on the door.

The Knock

Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson don't begin Mexodus by finding themselves already in a scene. They knock. They come in. And then they explain, directly to us, who they are and why they're here.

It's a disarmingly simple gesture. And it changes everything about what follows.

When a show breaks the fourth wall—when a performer turns and addresses the audience—we usually understand it as a technique. A stylistic choice. The actor briefly steps out of the fiction to acknowledge the room, and then steps back in. It's a wink. A rupture.

What Brian and Nygel do is different. They don't break the fourth wall. They never build it in the first place.

They walk in as themselves—two multi-instrumentalists, a Black man and a Brown man, who found a story they couldn't believe wasn't in any textbook—and they tell us that. Out loud. At the top of the show. Before anyone has been asked to believe anything, they account for their own presence. They say: here's who we are, here's what we found, here's what we're going to do.

The opening call-and-response goes something like this: Did you know this shit? We didn't know this shit. And then: Why? Cuz it wasn't allowed, it wasn't allowed…it wasn't spoken aloud. It's funny and raw and immediate. And in about thirty seconds it puts the audience and the performers on exactly the same footing—equally astonished, equally implicated, equally in on it.

What I felt when that happened—and I've been trying to find the right word for it—was relief.

Theater asks a lot of us. It asks us to believe. To suspend. To accept the terms. Usually those terms aren't stated—we're expected to understand them from context, to slip into the fiction and not ask questions. And most of the time, we do. But there's always a low-grade labor in that. A kind of vigilance.

The moment Brian and Nygel knocked on that door, the vigilance released. Because they were saying, in the clearest possible terms: we see you. We know you're here. We know what this is. We're all in this together.

That's not a technique. That's a consent agreement.

The Veil

When Brian or Nygel picks up an instrument and plays a phrase into the loop pedal, they're not just making music. They're making the process of making music visible. The loop cycles. Another phrase gets laid on top. Then another. The song builds in real time, in front of you, from nothing. You watch it become itself.

In conventional musical theater, this is the opposite of how it works. You hear the finished thing. The orchestra is in a pit, or the tracks are pre-recorded, or at the very least the entire arrangement has been set and rehearsed until every element is invisible. The magic depends on concealment. You can't know how the sausage gets made because the sausage—as far as you're concerned—appears already made.

Mexodus shows you every step.

And what I kept waiting for—the moment where that transparency would break the spell, would make the whole thing feel less rather than more—never came.

Instead, the more I could see the mechanics, the more I trusted the magic. Because the magic wasn't the finished product. The magic was the act of making it. Right there, in the room, with their hands and their voices and their instruments.

This is a genuine argument about what theater can be. Not a gimmick. Not a format innovation. A philosophical claim: that the veil isn't required. That you don't have to hide how something is made for it to move people. That maybe the making is the thing that might move people most.

Director David Mendizábal put it precisely: "Looping was a metaphor for the labor that both characters were doing. The act of looping and creating music together was a metaphor for these two men working together, building trust, building solidarity." The form isn't separate from the story. It is the story. Every loop Brian lays down, every phrase Nygel records and builds on—it's Henry and Carlos, learning to trust each other across a border, piece by piece.

South

The story Brian and Nygel tell is one that most of us—including me—were never taught.

Between five and ten thousand enslaved people escaped bondage not by going north, but by going south. Across Texas. Across the Rio Grande. Into Mexico, where in 1829, Vicente Guerrero—who was himself of African descent—had abolished slavery. Thirty-four years before Lincoln. Mexico refused to sign a fugitive slave treaty with the United States. The law was simple: any enslaved person who set foot on Mexican soil was legally free.

This is the Underground Railroad that Mexodus is about.

The show they built around it is extraordinary in the way it holds two narratives at once. There's the story of Henry, an escaped enslaved man, and Carlos, a Mexican war veteran and farmer—a Black man and a Brown man finding each other across a border and saving each other's lives. And then there's the story of Brian and Nygel: two guys who found this history and couldn't let it go, who used every skill and instrument and tool they had to make sure you heard it too.

The show never lets you forget that both stories are happening. The history and the telling of it are equally present. And that doubleness is part of what makes Mexodus unlike anything I've seen on a stage.

The Impossible

At one point, Nygel says: I don't think I'm their wildest dreams. Because where we're from, you don't get to dream like this.

Take a second with that.

The wildest dream is still a dream—still tethered to what's imaginable, what the mind can reach for from inside a particular life. What Nygel is describing is something past that. A life that couldn't have been dreamed. A stage, a story, a loop pedal, sold-out houses, Lortel nominations—none of it inside the frame of what was possible to hope for. And what he's saying—as himself, as a Black man on a stage in New York City, telling a story about the Underground Railroad through instruments he plays with his own hands—is that he’s in a space his ancestors couldn't have imagined.

It's one of the most precise articulations of intergenerational possibility I've ever heard.

And it's also, somehow, a description of the show itself.

The Argument

Theater is a conservative art form in a lot of ways—attached to its conventions, its hierarchies, its traditions. The proscenium arch isn't going anywhere. Orchestras in pits aren't going anywhere. The implicit agreement to maintain the fiction, to not look at the lights, to not acknowledge that there's a human being two rows in front of you staring at the same stage—that's not going anywhere.

But Mexodus makes an argument that I think will be hard to ignore for anyone who experiences it. Not that all shows need to be like this—they shouldn't. That concealment isn't a prerequisite for transcendence. That a show can tell you exactly what it is, every step of the way, and still take you somewhere you've never been.

The veil, it turns out, was optional.

What Brian and Nygel have built is a piece of theater that trusts its audience completely. Trusts them to hold complexity. Trusts them to be moved by what's real. Trusts them to find the magic not in the illusion but in the witnessing.

That trust is rare. And when you feel it—sitting in a room where two people knocked on a door and told you exactly what they were going to do, and then did something so much bigger than they promised—it feels a little like what Nygel was describing.

It feels impossible. Made possible.

This week in One Last Thing: what it means to watch a show about crossing a border when you’ve just crossed one yourself.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

One last thing…

We (my husband and I) just moved to Los Angeles.

I’ve been sitting with that, trying to figure out what it means. Not logistically—logistically it means boxes and forwarding addresses and learning which freeways to avoid. I mean what it means about who I am now. What you leave behind when you leave a place. What you carry.

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Today I turn thirty-four. One week ago, I left New York.

I moved to the city at twenty-two. A one-way train from Boston. I landed at 53rd and 2nd—my first apartment, my first intersection, the first point on a map I didn’t know I was drawing.

Twelve years. That’s the distance between twenty-two and thirty-four. That’s also, it turns out, the distance between arriving somewhere and realizing it became part of you.

Sam and I are moving to Los Angeles. The reason is simple: Sam needs to be there for work. I’m his husband. We’re in this together. I want to say that plainly, because I think there’s a temptation to turn the move into something grander than it is. A reinvention. A statement. It’s not. It’s a marriage. It’s someone I love needing to be somewhere, and me going with him.

But the leaving part. The leaving part is something else entirely. Because it turns out that twelve years in a city doesn't just pass through you. It gets in.

This week, I wanted to understand why.

As I traipsed around the city over the past few weeks, knowing that we were on our way out, something strange started happening.

Block by block, it felt like a map was unfolding. That’s the bar where I kissed that boy. That’s the subway station staircase I cried under. That’s the pizza place on the east side where I ate dollar slices at 22 because it was all I could afford and I thought that was the dream—and I was right.

Every block has a timestamp. Every intersection holds something. And I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that living somewhere for twelve years could turn the streets into a kind of autobiography you don’t realize you’ve been writing.

In 1971, a neuroscientist named John O'Keefe discovered something in the hippocampus—the memory bank of the brain. He found neurons that fire only when you enter a specific location. He called them place cells. One neuron for the corner by your apartment. Another for the route to work. Another for the coffee shop. Your brain builds a spatial map of the places you inhabit. Not figuratively. Literally. Neuron by neuron, your brain draws the city inside itself.

There’s a famous study of longtime London taxi drivers. Brain scans showed their posterior hippocampus had physically grown over time. The city reshaped their brains. And the more years they drove, the bigger it got.

I am not a London taxi driver. But for twelve years, my brain has been drawing a map without asking permission. Every opening night. Every 3rd glass of wine. Every hug. Every heartbreak. Every subway ride home from every audition.

There’s another layer—harder to name—that has to do with how a place stops being where you are and starts being who you are. Psychologists call it place identity: the physical environments we inhabit become part of our self-concept. Not as backdrops. As structure. The place tells you: you are the person who lives here. It becomes evidence of your own existence.

And wherever we go, we pick up people the way roots pick up water—not by design, but by reaching toward whatever sustains us. We talk about “putting down roots” like it’s deliberate, like you plant yourself and grow. But roots don’t work that way. They’re opportunistic. They grow toward moisture. They find cracks and fill them. They tangle around whatever is solid enough to hold.

And New York accelerates this. Eight million people in three hundred square miles. You’re stacked on top of each other in apartments and subway cars and theater lobbies. You can’t avoid collision here. The density won’t let you. You meet your future collaborator because you were both waiting for the same bathroom at the same bar. Your friend of a friend of a friend becomes the friend who reshapes your thirties.

My people—the ones I had to hug goodbye—I knew almost none of them twelve years ago. They arrived through side doors. Through accidents. Through introductions that seemed meaningless at the time. That’s not a plan. That’s a root system. That’s what happens when you stay somewhere long enough.

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

Joni Mitchell was singing about parking lots. But the feeling she named—that something becomes most visible at the moment it disappears—turns out to be more than a lyric.

A psychiatrist named Mindy Fullilove studies what happens when people leave the places that shaped them. She found that when those bonds are disrupted—even voluntarily, even for the right reasons—the attachment doesn’t fade. It intensifies. The unfamiliarity of the new place makes the old one more vivid.

And if that’s true—the real weight of twelve years in this city will arrive after I’ve left it, when I’m three thousand miles away and some song comes on or some smell drifts past and my hippocampus fires up a block I haven’t walked in months and suddenly I’m back on 53rd and 2nd and it’s 2014 and I’m twenty-two and I don’t know anyone and everything is still starting.

The grief and the gratitude might be the same thing. The ache of leaving might be the first clear evidence that the place actually became part of you. You couldn’t feel the weight of the wall while you were leaning on it. You had to step away.

My impulse—my deep, almost cellular impulse—is to control what happens next. To arrive in LA with a framework. A plan for what the new chapter looks like, how I’ll stay connected, what I’ll build, where I’ll put my roots.

But I don’t think roots take instructions. They never did.

I’ve been asking myself all week why this birthday feels different. And I think the answer is that thirty-four, for me, isn’t a milestone. It’s a vantage point. It’s the first time I’ve been high enough to see the whole drawing—every line, every intersection, every mess that turned out to be a miracle.

Maybe that’s the thing about places and times. They become part of you so slowly that you don’t notice. And then you leave, and you notice all at once. And from that distance—from LA, from thirty-four, from the other side of a chapter you can finally read—you realize the question was never whether the city shaped you.

The question is what you do with the shape.

This week in One Last Thing: the thing I didn’t want to write about in this piece—what it means to leave the gravitational center of the thing I write about, and what I’m actually afraid of.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

There’s a version of this piece I didn’t write. The version where I talk about what it means to write a newsletter about theater—from inside the theater capital of the world—and then leave.

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Since then, the scope of this newsletter has expanded far beyond screens and feeds. But theater marketing remains one of the places my curiosity keeps returning to. Especially because, for all the attention social media gets, the industry still seems unsure how much power it’s actually willing to cede to it.

So when Katharine Quinn announced she was formally splitting her company into two distinct offerings—And That’s Showbiz, a Broadway media outlet, and And That’s Strategy, a boutique social media agency—my antennas went up.

It’s an unusual combination. One speaks directly to fans. The other advises producers. Taken together, it creates a vantage point that’s rare in this industry—one foot in the conversation shaping Broadway online, and one foot inside the rooms deciding how shows are sold.

I wanted to understand what drove the split. But more than that, I wanted to understand what the last few years of Broadway internet culture have actually changed about how shows are built, marketed, and sustained.

Let’s get into it.

The Accident

Matt: From the outside, the split felt very intentional. When did you realize this needed to become two separate companies?

Katharine: Honestly, none of it was planned.

And That’s Showbiz was always meant to be a Broadway digital media outlet. That was the original idea—red carpets, insider access, prestige content for Broadway. It wasn’t meant to be an agency.

Then Gatsby happened. I used And That’s Showbiz to start posting content for the show, and it became the strategy arm almost by accident.

At a certain point, two years in, I looked around and realized I had two different businesses living under one brand. Strategy is B2B—it’s advising producers and creative teams. Showbiz is B2C—it’s speaking directly to fans. Formalizing that felt necessary.

But it wasn’t just structural. I also wanted to make it very clear that And That’s Strategy is a team of brilliant minds. I wasn’t interested in this being the Katharine Quinn Show. These companies are made up of incredible people. So many times I get complimented on content that wasn’t my idea. The brilliant ideas and execution are being handled with great care by other people. I have a team of genuinely sharp talent, and I wanted the company structure to reflect that.

The Gap

Matt: On the Showbiz side—what gap were you seeing?

Katharine: I love prestige content. I grew up watching director’s cuts. I compulsively watch every Hollywood Reporter roundtable. Every Variety Actors on Actors.

And it felt like Broadway didn’t have much of that. We have news. We had ticketing sites. But not a lot of curatorial voice. Not a lot of opinion and editorial. Not a lot of deeper, long-form conversation about process.

There’s more of it now, and that’s exciting. The climate has shifted dramatically in the last two years. But at the time, it felt like there was space for something that wasn’t just transactional.

And part of that comes from how deeply I believe Broadway fandom is underestimated.

Broadway fandoms are essential to the core of our business. Even if you’re going to be a capitalist about it—it benefits everyone to listen to fans. They are online, telling you exactly what they’re responding to. They’re literally a focus group.

That belief—that fans are not peripheral to the business but central to it—kept surfacing throughout our conversation. It informs how Katharine thinks about both sides of her company. And it’s still, she told me, a harder sell than you’d think.

Matt: I feel like that belief informs both sides of what you do.

Katharine: It does. And it’s still a hard sell sometimes.

There’s a perception that fans aren’t average ticket price buyers and therefore somehow less valuable. I just don’t believe that. They are deeply invested. They come back. They bring people. They evangelize.

For example, people knew the New Money dance before they even came to see Gatsby. There is so much opportunity to build these brands online—and so much of it is still untapped.

If you don’t invest in community, your marketing is built on a house of cards. Fans are the core. They’re the magma, the core. Everything else builds out from there—influencers, press, celebrity, audience. But if you’re hollow at the center, the rest collapses.

That image stayed with me—fans as the molten core, the thing everything else builds out from, not the afterthought at the end of a marketing plan. In most rooms I’ve been in, the conversation starts with press, moves to celebrity, then to advertising. Community, if it comes up at all, is last. Katharine is arguing it should be the foundation.

But that only works if the data backs it up. So I asked her about the numbers.

The Funnel

Matt: What metrics is your team focused on—and is that different than what gets shared with producers?

Katharine: A huge part of our job now is education.

I have learned how to explain to producers of a certain age what a meme is. I’ve learned how to explain why it matters. I’ve learned how to explain that social isn’t just one person sitting in a corner on their phone.

When people ask if social sells tickets, I typically ask: how do you track billboard impressions? It’s an awareness tool. It’s part of a funnel. Social is the same—except it actually hits every part of the funnel. Awareness, reach, consideration, conversion. Organic social amplifies paid. You can click the link and purchase. Organic social creates press beats and highlights the ones that already exist. Social is quite literally the whole funnel.

On Gatsby, we’d see unexplained spikes in web traffic. And then we’d look at Instagram and see that a video had gone viral that day. Post-show surveys listed social as one of the top reasons people came.

Nobody questions a billboard buy, or a Times Square placement, despite the fact that measurement is essentially impossible. A full page Times ad in 2026 is a vanity buy. The impact of that forty thousand dollars would look very different coming from social.

Matt: When you talk about social hitting every part of the funnel—are you thinking more about brand building than selling tickets?

Katharine: The primary objective is to build the brand. Build the world of the show. Find the community and foster it. Let them know they are valued, that you’re listening.

Sometimes other parts of the marketing team need us to post something that looks like a paid ad on the feed, and that’s part of the job. But the primary work is world-building.

And I think if your marketing is only awareness and not community building, you’re ignoring 62% of your audience who don’t even live in the tri-state area. You’ve ignored everyone who isn’t physically walking past your billboard every day.

The Proof

Matt: If you zoom out—what feels structurally different about Broadway marketing now compared to even two years ago?

Katharine: When we started posting at volume on Gatsby, Broadway cadence was around two posts a week. Maybe. We were posting twice a day, six days a week, across six platforms. Seventy-two touch points a week. I did that for two years straight without missing a beat. And that doesn’t begin to touch the dozens of long-form videos we put on YouTube.

Nobody was doing that. I had an opportunity to demonstrate something—do a proof of concept, especially at Paper Mill. We got 75,000 followers during our out of town, which at that point was unheard of. Paper Mill gained 10,000 followers. Eva and Jeremy both gained thousands.

I had to make big swings like that because—who the hell was I? They literally called me “that TikTok girl.” And now we’ve built a reputation, which is incredibly fortunate. But so much of it was educating and explaining and proof of concept and gently taking people who aren’t familiar with these platforms by the hand and showing how powerful they can be.

Matt: And now? Has the rest of the industry caught up?

Katharine: Everyone understands social has to move faster now. But platforms are moving faster too. Producers are just now warming up to TikTok—as the platform is imploding. In a meeting last week, someone said investing in paid on TikTok is a great idea. We were having that conversation two and a half years ago. The industry is catching up, but platforms don’t wait.

What’s changed structurally is that social is no longer optional. It’s not experimental. At some point, every team realizes how important it is to their word of mouth, digital worldbuilding, reach, and longevity as a brand.

The Loop

One of the things that makes Katharine’s model unusual is that her two companies aren’t just separated—they can also work together. A strategy client might debut a piece of content through the Showbiz platform. And Strategy has taken a more content-forward, long-form approach than almost any other agency in the space—on Gatsby, they produced a creative team roundtable that runs an hour and a half. On Maybe Happy Ending, they took the writers back to NYU where they first met. It’s the kind of work that usually lives on the media side, not the agency side.

But the more interesting question is what flows the other direction.

Matt: Does running Showbiz actually change how you advise Strategy clients?

Katharine: Constantly. We’re watching fan sentiment in real time—what’s landing, what’s being ignored, what’s building organically. That intelligence feeds directly into how we build content strategy for shows. It’s a feedback loop.

Which brings up a question about positioning. Broadway marketing is increasingly being piecemealed out—influencer marketing here, organic social there, digital advertising somewhere else. Where does a boutique agency fit in that landscape?

Matt: What do you see as the value of a boutique agency versus a larger firm?

Katharine: I think there’s a place for everything. And the good news is, it’s now not uncommon for other agencies to welcome us in alongside them. They know our organic content performs, that it gets press pickup, that it feeds the rest of the funnel. The collaboration can truly be net positive for all parties partnering.

And I think there’s room for multiple agencies on a show. More creativity, more perspectives.

But I also think sometimes you want to go to the farmer’s market instead of Whole Foods. Everything we do is curated. We’re building a company culture around what we believe in and what differentiates us. And we’re selective because the work requires it.

Through talking to Katharine, it became clear to me that the split between Showbiz and Strategy wasn’t just a business decision. It’s a reflection of something that’s been changing in Broadway for a while now—the distance between the people who understand the audience and the people making decisions about how to reach them is shrinking.

For a long time, those were separate worlds. The conversation happening online among fans lived in one place. The rooms where marketing budgets were set and creative campaigns were built lived in another. And rarely did information flow cleanly between the two.

What Katharine has built—whether by design or by accident—is a company that sits at the intersection. And that intersection is, I think, where the most interesting questions about Broadway marketing live right now.

Not “does social sell tickets?”—but what happens to a show’s identity when the people shaping its online presence actually understand the audience they’re speaking to? What happens when fan intelligence isn’t an afterthought but a starting point? What changes when the person advising producers on strategy is also the person watching, in real time, what fans care about?

I don’t think we have full answers yet. But Katharine does have a sense of where things are headed:

The next phase is building the infrastructure to scale what we’ve proven works—without losing the quality that made it work in the first place.

She’s been right before.

This week in One Last Thing: intersections, Frankenstein's monster, and what it means to own the way you see the world.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, I'm grateful you're here.

One last thing…

For most of my life, I wanted people to know what I could do. My voice. My set of skills. The question in every audition room or job interview was always some version of: how well can he do the thing?

There’s a clarity in that. And for a long time, I didn’t know I could want anything else.

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By now you’ve probably seen the clip. Timothée Chalamet, sitting across from Matthew McConaughey at UT Austin, making a case for why movies still matter—and in doing so, throwing ballet and opera under the bus. “I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore.”

The internet did what the internet does. The ballet world clapped back. The opera world posted discount codes. Misty Copeland noted, with pointed calm, that Chalamet had personally asked her to help promote his film. SNL made a joke. A British opera singer called him “immature.” The cycle completed itself in about four days.

And all of it left me feeling icky. Not outrage. Something more like recognition.

The Shape of It

Here’s the thing nobody’s really saying about what Chalamet said: it wasn’t just careless. It was structural. He was doing what everyone in the performing arts does, constantly, automatically, often without realizing it. He found something below him on the ladder and used it to prop himself up.

There’s a ladder. We all know it. We just don’t talk about it out loud.

Film is at the top—or it was, until prestige television arrived and complicated things. Now it’s more like: an A24 film above an HBO drama above a network drama above a streaming procedural above the thing your uncle watches on Peacock. And below all of that, somewhere, is the franchise blockbuster, which makes a billion dollars and gets treated by “serious” film people as barely worth acknowledging.

Below film: theater. But not all theater equally. Drama at the top. The Pulitzer winner, the Sondheim revival, the new work from an important voice at a respected institution. Then musicals—but again, not equally. Original cast, the celebrity vehicle, the jukebox, the IP grab. And below that, somewhere: opera. Ballet. The forms Chalamet was dismissing.

Except the ladder doesn’t stop there.

How Low Can You Go?

Keep going and you find: regional theater. Community theater. The theater company operating out of a church basement. Theater for Young Audiences. Hairspray on Royal Caribbean. The performer doing eight shows a week in a theme park, in a costume, in August, in Orlando.

I have heard theater people—people I respect enormously, people who care deeply about this work—say things about these spaces that are functionally identical to what Timothée Chalamet said about opera. It’s not really professional. Nobody serious works there. It’s just for kids. It’s just for tourists.

No one cares about that anymore.

We say it all the time. We just don’t say it on a press tour for an Oscars contender, so nobody clips it.

The Mechanism

The ladder exists because it has to, I think. When you’ve given your life to something—when you’ve taken the financial hit, made the sacrifices—you need to believe it matters. You need to believe it matters more than some other thing. The hierarchy is a coping mechanism. A story we tell ourselves about why the hard choice was worth it.

This is one of the most human things there is. Watch it happen anywhere people choose conviction over comfort. The academic who spent a decade on a dissertation has opinions about the full time fanfic writer. The marathon runner has complicated feelings about the person doing a 5K who calls themselves a runner. The indie filmmaker has thoughts about Netflix. The mechanism is always the same: I gave up something real to be here. So here has to matter. And if here has to matter, then somewhere has to matter less.

For artists, the stakes feel especially high—because the sacrifice usually was. Nobody accidentally ends up doing eight shows a week in a regional theater. Nobody stumbles into a decade of dance training. These are choices made early, often at real cost. The hierarchy becomes the retroactive justification. It’s the story that makes the choice make sense. Which is why threatening it—even just by naming it—can feel like threatening the choice itself.

What We’re Actually Measuring

What are we measuring when we rank art forms? Ticket prices? Mass audience size? Cultural longevity? Critical prestige? Awards eligibility? The answer keeps changing depending on who’s doing the ranking and what they need to protect.

Film wants to be taken as seriously as theater. Theater wants to be taken as seriously as film. Opera wants to be taken as seriously as both. Musical theater wants to stop being the punchline. And everyone—quietly, constantly—is looking down.

Chalamet’s comment was clumsy and reductive. It revealed something about how he thinks about art that’s probably worth sitting with. But if the performing arts community’s response is just to say we matter too—and then go back to quietly dismissing the cruise ship performers and the TYA writers and the theme park dancers—then we haven’t learned anything.

We’ve just rearranged the ladder.

This week in One Last Thing: how this piece actually came together—what I kept saying when people asked me what I thought (aka why I couldn’t answer.)

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Regardless, thanks for being here.

One Last Thing

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Last Friday, I published a piece about a thirty-four-second rehearsal room clip from a community theatre in Witham, England. A guy singing “The Last Supper” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Filmed on an iPhone under fluorescent lights.

The next day, the video (which had crossed a million views in 48hrs) was gone.

No statement. No explanation. Maybe it was licensing. Maybe it was caution. Maybe it was something as simple as a clause that reads, somewhere in fine print, “no recording or distribution.” But the removal raised a bigger question for me:

What happens when the new geography of attention collides with the old architecture of rights?

Part of what made that clip feel so electric was how uncomplicated it was. A moment, captured and shared, traveling farther than anyone in that room probably predicted. The distance between a small Essex town and a million strangers shrinking in real time.

Then—poof.

Licensing has always been a form of care. It’s how writers and composers get paid. It’s how work stays intact. It’s how theatre—an art form built to disappear—maintains some kind of stability and structure.

That logic still makes sense.

The friction comes from the fact that distribution looks very different now. Anyone can post almost anything, anywhere, at any time. A rehearsal room isn’t as sealed as it once was. The lines between process and product are blurrier than they used to be.

This week, I want to sit in that friction.

Licensing in the age of virality.

Let’s get into it.

The Container

For most of theatre’s modern life, licensing functioned as a kind of container.

It protected the work from drifting too far from the people who created it. It ensured writers and composers were compensated. It created a framework for a show to exist in hundreds of different rooms across the world while still remaining recognizably itself—same story, same music, same bones.

Licensing is one of the few systems in theatre that says: this came from someone, and it deserves both credit and care.

Underneath the legal jargon lived an assumption so basic it never needed to be said out loud: what happens in the theatre stays in the theatre.

Not in the abstract sense. Literally. A performance is a live event, bounded by a place and a time. The audience for that event is the people who were there. The ticket is the threshold.

That contained-ness is part of theatre’s magic. It’s also part of its economics. When the work stays in the room, it stays intact. It builds intrigue. It creates exclusivity. Each performance is unique unto to the people making it and the people witnessing it.

So the clauses about recording and redistribution aren’t just fine print. They’re an extension of that worldview. A way of protecting the boundary. A way of keeping the work both sacred and sustainable.

That boundary is just harder to hold now.

The Environment

Bootlegs aren’t new.

For a long time, doing it required real effort—sneaking in a camera, keeping it hidden, getting the footage off the device, cleaning up the audio, uploading it somewhere, hoping it didn’t get flagged. There was friction at every step. The difficulty acted like a kind of natural limiter.

Now: the limit does not exist.

Phones are already in the room. Recording takes one tap. Posting takes another. And the cultural posture around documentation has shifted, too. Shows post curtain calls and clips filmed on iPhones. Cast members share rehearsal photos on their stories. Marketing teams treat behind-the-scenes footage as part of the life of a production. None of that is inherently wrong. A lot of it is beautiful. It makes theatre feel closer, more human, more porous.

It also blurs the line.

Not just between “private” and “public,” but between process and product. Between a proud rehearsal moment and a piece of material the licensing agreement might treat as redistribution. Between what feels like communal sharing and what counts as reproduction.

Bootlegs used to live in the shadows. Now documentation lives in daylight. The boundary didn’t disappear. It just started getting crossed in more directions, by more people, for more reasons—often without anyone acknowledging it.

And that’s the environment the Witham clip landed in.

The Friction

The Witham clip didn’t need context or a caption explaining what was happening. It carried its own proof. A big voice, a small moment, a simple room. The kind of thing people share because it feels like access—because it offers a small hit of the thing theatre does best: aliveness.

And then it disappeared.

The removal forced a question that feels uncomfortably modern: what exactly was that clip?

In a rehearsal room, it’s process. A proud glimpse. A communal “look at what we’re making.” On a platform, it reads as a piece of media—detached from the room it came from, detached from the boundaries that normally contain it. In a licensing agreement, it may read as something else entirely: a recording of copyrighted material distributed publicly.

Those interpretations aren’t just semantic. They sit on top of real stakes.

Writers and composers deserve to be paid. Rights holders have a responsibility to protect work from being freely distributed in ways that undercut its value. There are also brand and quality concerns that aren’t frivolous.

At the same time, theatre has entered an era where cultural relevance is often born out of exactly these moments. A rehearsal clip can make a person in another country feel the electricity of a show they’ve never heard of. In this case, it can turn a “community theatre” into a global attraction.

And all those things can be true.

Which is why the friction isn’t really between creators and audiences. It’s between a set of rules designed for a contained world and a culture that’s built on circulation.

The Question

The question facing theatre right now isn’t whether the work should be protected.

It’s what protection looks like when distribution is effortless.

Maybe the future includes clearer distinctions—between rehearsal documentation and performance capture, between process and product. Maybe licensing language evolves to reflect the fact that behind-the-scenes isn’t necessarily a threat. Maybe rights holders build new pathways for sanctioned proximity—because proximity is now part of how culture forms.

Or maybe the current lag continues: artists and institutions improvising in real time, trying to honor the sacredness of the room while living in a world where the room is no longer private by default.

If nothing else, the Witham clip reminded me of something simple: people want theatre. People want to be cracked open by the voice of a stranger. People want to be close to the work.

The container still matters. A lot.

The environment has changed. A lot.

And somewhere in that tension is the next version of how this art form travels.

One Last Thing is my little coda each week—the behind-the-scenes layer, the personal note after the main essay.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this newsletter alive and independent. Thank you for supporting the work!!

This week: something I couldn’t fit in the essay, but feels central to the licensing conversation. (And also a picture of my dog.)

One Last Thing

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A community theatre in Witham, England—about a thousand followers on TikTok, no budget, no campaign—posted an iPhone video of their Judas (Michael Bardot) rehearsing a moment from The Last Supper in Jesus Christ Superstar.

By the time you’re reading this, it will probably have crossed a million views.

I keep thinking about that number. About the distance between a rehearsal room in a small English town and a million strangers. About how little stood between those two things.

I’m thinking about the 22-year-old Staples baddie who filmed herself at work. In uniform, on her phone, on the clock—showing the mug she printed in-store. And millions of people watched. A legacy brand found cultural relevance it couldn’t have bought.

I’m thinking about the record store in New York City that created a micro “reality show” called Revival of the Fittest. Two-minute episodes, iPhone footage, no script, no crew. Just the store, the people in it, whatever happens when the camera rolls. And now, a devoted audience.

Three completely different worlds. Three completely different scales. One thing in common: none of them had a campaign. They had a phone and a willingness to hit record.

This week, I want to understand that pattern—and what it might mean for the rest of us making things in small rooms.

Let’s get into it.

For most of recent history, reach was a resource problem.

You needed a campaign, a publicist, a media relationship, a platform. The size of your audience was roughly proportional to the size of your budget. Which meant small organizations (like community theaters, local record stores, independent retail) operated under a permanent ceiling. You could make something extraordinary and it might never travel beyond the people who already knew you.

That ceiling hasn’t disappeared entirely. But it has lifted.

What’s changed isn’t the algorithm, exactly—though the algorithm certainly matters. What’s changed is that a moment captured in a small, specific, unglamorous place can now travel as far as something made with a full production team behind it. Sometimes further. Not because of how it was made, but because of what it feels like to encounter it.

The physics of how things spread is different today than it was even 24 months ago.

The content that travels isn’t always the most produced—it’s the most proximate. The thing that feels closest to real.

What those three examples share isn’t aesthetic. It’s not that they were lo-fi, or scrappy, or accidental—though they were all of those things. It’s something more specific than that.

Each one felt like you were being let in somewhere before someone tried to make it presentable. Before the PR layer. Before the strategizing. You weren’t watching content—you were watching a person, in a place, doing something real. And that distinction, as subtle as it sounds, is everything.

In theater we talk about showing versus telling. This is the internet version of that. Discovery feels different from delivery. When content is engineered for you, some part of your brain registers the transaction. When it feels caught rather than made, something else happens—you lean in. You share it not as promotion but as a kind of gift. I found this. You should see it.

Which is interesting, because there's an entire industry built around exactly this kind of realness—but it’s only just starting to figure out how to let the internet in.

The rehearsal room. The table read. The moment an actor cracks something open for the first time and everyone in the room feels it simultaneously. The Wednesday matinee where something wild happens and the cast has to find their way through it live. The first time everyone walks through the set and it’s all suddenly very real.

These moments happen constantly. In every production, at every level. Community theatre in the suburbs. Regional theatre in a mid-size city. Off-Off-Broadway in a black box that seats forty-seven people.

And almost none of it gets documented.

Not because it isn’t worth seeing. Because there’s a deeply ingrained assumption in this industry that the show is the product. That what happens before opening night is internal—private, protected, not fully baked. That audiences should only encounter the work in its finished state, through the front door, at full price, on the advertised dates.

That logic made sense at one point. But it doesn’t hold the same way anymore.

The formal campaign—the poster, the press release, the carefully timed social posts —reaches people who are already paying attention. People who already have some relationship to theatre, who already know where to look. But it doesn’t travel far beyond that circle.

In 2026, people want access. Not advertising.

There’s a quiet, unexamined belief that what happens in the room isn’t ready to be seen. That it needs to be finished, polished, contextualized before it earns an audience. That showing the process is somehow a betrayal of the product.

It’s also a fear that’s hard to name directly: what if people see it and aren’t impressed? What if the unguarded version of the work reflects poorly on the finished one? What if we let people in and they don’t care?

Those are all real fears. But they’re based on an old model of how attention works—one where you controlled the first impression, managed the reveal, and tried to ensure the campaign landed. Now, the question isn’t whether people will see behind the curtain. It’s whether you’re the one holding it open.

Underneath all of this is something more personal than strategy. The Staples baddie wasn’t trying to build a brand. The Witham theatre wasn’t executing a beautiful content shoot. The record store wasn’t trying to fake something. They were just present. Unguarded. Willing to be seen doing the thing they actually do, without sanding it down.

That’s what traveled. Not the content. The willingness to be seen as you actually are—in process, in uniform, in rehearsal, in the middle of figuring it out.

So please, let us in. Hit record. Post the video.

You don’t have to be Witham. But you could be.

This week's One last thing is a personal reflection on my own complicated relationship to the camera, consent, and what access actually looks like when you're one of the people in the room. Plus, a picture of my dog.

It's available to paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this work going.

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One last thing…

I’ll be honest—my relationship to these platforms is never static. It shifts. Sometimes weekly. And if I’m being really honest, a lot of it tracks with whether I’m in a show.

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Long before there are butts in theater seats, there are butts in folding chairs.

A group of actors is handed a working draft of something new—a musical, a play, an idea that hasn’t quite found its shape yet—and asked to fully commit to it for a short chunk of time. Sometimes it’s 29 hours. Sometimes it’s two or four weeks.

The arrangement is a little strange: the thing isn’t done. The writers are still finding the voice, the tone, the tempo, the heart. There’s rarely a guarantee that there will be a next step—or that you, as the actor, will be part of it if there is.

And yet, despite knowing none of this might last, something happens in that room. Actors and creatives find themselves genuinely, almost helplessly invested. Not just in the work they’re doing, but in the piece itself. Its future. Its potential. The ideas they’d bring to it if given the chance.

That’s the dirt I want to dig into this week: why we care about something we don’t own—and why the work we do in those rooms matters, even if we’re not there when the curtain rises.

Let’s get into it.

The Takeover

The ask is pretty straightforward: show up, get familiar with the material, make a few choices, ask some questions, tell the story. Execute. There is no line in any contract about emotional investment.

Then it’s day three and you’re caring in a way that goes well beyond professional. You have opinions about the show—its arc, its ending, its characters. You’ve had at least one conversation with a castmate that was less about the work and more about the potential of the work—what it could be, what it’s reaching for, whether it’s going to get there.

You’re doing creative labor nobody asked for. You’re a temporary resident acting like a legacy tenant.

Part of it is certainly the nature of the form. A reading is specifically designed to activate imagination—there are no sets or costumes. Your job is to fill the gaps. What floods in is a mysterious combination of instinct, curiosity, and (if you can believe it) feelings.

Which raises an obvious question: why? What is actually happening to us? And is it as irrational as it looks?

The Loop

There’s a psychological principle worth knowing here: the brain hates an unfinished thing.

Completed tasks get filed and forgotten. Open loops stay active, running quietly in the background. It’s why you can’t stop thinking about an unanswered text. Why you replay the last five minutes of a conversation in the shower. Why cliffhangers work.

A reading is one giant open loop.

The show isn’t finished. The future is uncertain. Nobody knows what happens next. So your brain does what it always does with something unresolved: it keeps working. On the subway. In the shower. At two in the morning when you should absolutely be asleep.

Then layer in the craft itself. When an actor commits fully to imaginary circumstances, the brain responds as if they’re real. Same pathways. Same chemicals. Belief, at a neurological level, produces genuine investment. You can’t activate one without the other. The caring is proof the commitment worked.

But here’s what makes a reading specifically strange: you’re committing to two fictions at once. There’s the fiction of the story—the characters, the world, the stakes. And then there’s the fiction of your own membership in the project. That you are a real stakeholder in something that technically isn’t yours at all. That you might be part of its future.

You have to commit to that fiction completely. Because the work suffers otherwise.

And when you commit that deeply, the fingerprints don’t wash off.

The Fingerprints

The reading ends. The actors disperse. The writers go back to the draft with fresh eyes and new questions. And the show continues—maybe without you.

But not exactly without you.

A character found more clarity because of a choice you made. A moment shifted because of something you brought that nobody wrote down. A line lands differently because you tried it five ways in a folding chair.

Your name might not be in the program. You might not be in the next workshop. You might one day watch the show open somewhere, shaped in part by conversations you remember having. And that can sting.

But your fingerprints are on the thing. Invisibly. Permanently.

It doesn’t erase the grief that comes up when a project moves on from you. But there’s something steadying about knowing that productions carry the fingerprints of everyone who ever touched them. The contribution doesn’t need credit to count.

That’s quietly radical.

We live in a culture obsessed with ownership—who made this, whose name is on it, who gets the credit, who holds the IP. A reading runs on a completely different logic. You give something with no claim on the outcome. You invest without control. You contribute without possession. And the work is better for it.

Maybe that’s the real gift of the form. Not just that it develops new musicals. But that it trains us in a rarer skill: caring about something we don’t own, shaping something we may never see finished, leaving fingerprints that may never get noticed.

Long before there are butts in theater seats, there are butts in folding chairs. And what happens in those folding chairs matters way more than we sometimes realize.

This week’s One Last Thing is a personal reflection from inside a recent reading and what it taught me about showing up in development rooms. It’s available to paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this work going.

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One last thing…

I have been sitting with a Dirty Little Secret.

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the advice: just be authentic.

It sounds generous. Encouraging, even. But I’m not sure we know what that word is asking of us anymore.

A few weeks ago, I hosted a panel at BroadwayCon that was organized by my pals at And That’s Showbiz, with six other performers who also post content online. We talked about algorithms and pressure and boundaries. But we kept circling something more subtle.

Each person, in different words, described the same strange pattern: the posts that connected were rarely the ones they labored over. They were the ones made without too much thinking. Without calculating. Without trying to win.

That stuck with me.

Because in theater (and most creative work) managing perception is a big part of the gig. You learn to read the room. You learn to adjust in real time. You learn how to stay in it.

So what happens when that instinct follows us offstage? When the same reflex starts shaping how we present ourselves online?

That’s what I want to untangle this week.

Geronimo!

The Reflex

There’s a habit theater gives you that’s hard to unlearn.

You learn to sense reception in real time: the temperature of a room, the micro-shifts in attention, the moment a moment lands (or doesn’t). It’s not manipulation. It’s how you survive auditions, rehearsals, long runs, interviews, talkbacks.

Over time, that fluency turns into reflex. You start adjusting before anyone asks you to. You smooth the edge. You offer the version of yourself that feels most legible, most like it will keep you in the room, or get you the job. And because the room is always changing, you get good at changing with it.

The internet rewards that same reflex. Not just for performers—for everyone. It quietly trains us to edit. To anticipate the comments. To curate the caption. Sincerity gets caked in strategy. You learn to manage first, express second.

And the strange part is how normal it starts to feel. Like this is simply what “showing up” requires. Like the cost of being seen is staying a step ahead of how you’ll be perceived. Until one day you realize you’re not just sharing—you’re steering.

And you don’t steer unless there’s something you’re trying to avoid.

The Risk

Rejection is sneaky.

That small drop in your stomach when you hit post. The heat-flush after you rewatch a video and suddenly hate the sound of your voice.

You’re not crazy. Being liked isn’t some shallow modern craving. It’s old hardware. Your lizard brain can’t distinguish between “this didn’t land” and “I don’t belong.” It just registers threat.

So yes—of course we steer.

We steer toward being palatable. Likable. Toward what we think people want because the alternative is sitting in the raw uncertainty of not knowing whether we’ll be chosen, or misunderstood, or quietly dismissed.

Steering lowers the odds of embarrassment.

The problem is what happens when that protective reflex becomes the default setting. When you start performing your honesty the way you’d perform a song.

And that’s the moment the steering stops protecting you and starts costing you something.

The Split

There’s a specific feeling you can clock in a performer—on stage, in a meeting, on a date, in a TikTok—when their attention splits. Part of them is in the moment, and part of them is hovering six inches above it, monitoring. Tracking. Adjusting. Watching the room watch them. It’s subtle. It can still be impressive. Still “good.” But it’s no longer fully alive.

And people can feel it. Humans are absurdly sensitive to effort that’s trying to hide itself. The second a moment starts auditioning for approval, the air changes. You don’t think, this person is calculating, but your body registers a kind of distance. Like you’re being guided toward a reaction instead of being invited into an experience.

Online, steering does the same thing. It introduces a faint layer of defensiveness. The post is technically honest. The caption says what it means. But there’s a pressure behind it—a desire for it to land. And that pressure flattens something. It keeps the moment from surprising even you.

This is why the panel kept circling the same strange reality: the content that connected wasn’t necessarily “better.” It just felt less managed. Less concerned with outcome. It had that clarity that shows up when someone stops trying to win and simply shares.

And once you notice that difference, it gets uncomfortable—because steering is the thing that’s kept you safe. But it’s also the thing that keeps you disconnected, slightly outside the moment.

Which raises an annoying question: if surrender is what makes the work land, why does it feel so impossible to access on command?

The Release

“Let go” is, unfortunately, not a technique.

On stage, you don’t surrender by deciding to surrender. You surrender because you’ve rehearsed enough that your body stops negotiating every beat. Because you’ve run it enough times that your attention can stay in the moment instead of hovering above it. Preparation makes presence feel safe.

That’s why “just be authentic” feels slippery. It skips the only part that matters: the conditions. You don’t stop trying to win because someone told you to. You stop gripping so tightly because you’ve done the work. Because you’ve failed enough times to survive it. Because you know you’ll be okay either way.

So what does loosening your grip actually look like?

Less confession. More commitment. Make the thing. Shape it. Craft it. Care about it. Then release it without fixating on the reaction.

The irony is that that willingness reads as confidence. Not performance confidence. Actual confidence. Everyone can feel the difference between a person offering something and a person begging for it.

By the end of that panel, no one had uncovered a secret formula—and no one seemed particularly interested in one. There was no hack. No posting schedule revelation. Just story after story about repetition. About flops. About hitting “post” again anyway. About stepping onstage (or online) enough times that the fear lost some of its volume.

The moments that landed weren’t engineered to win. They were the ones where someone trusted the work enough to stop steering.

So I think the biggest thing I’m carrying with me from our panel is this:

Make the thing with care.
Then give it away like you mean it.

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One last thing…

Momentum has a strange side effect.

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Sports metaphors get a bad rap in creative spaces. They’re usually deployed to sell grit and hustle, or some vague promise of eventual victory. Winning.

But I think “shots on goal” deserves a recontextualization.

In a creative life, ‘shots’ are acts of participation. An audition. A TikTok. A first draft of a pilot. A messy pitch deck. A voice note you record instead of just thinking about recording. All the big swings and the small attempts.

The ‘goal’ is more elusive. It moves and changes depending on where we are in our careers. It can be dictated by what we think will be perceived as a win. It’s unstable and unsustainable as a north star.

But what if ‘scoring a goal’ wasn’t the whole goal? Do the shots themselves have inherent value?

Spoiler alert: very much yes.

There’s a quiet accumulation of skills and stamina. There are internal shifts that come from simply staying in motion—whether or not we book the job, go viral, or get the yes.

So that’s what I want to sit with this week. What all these ‘shots’ are doing to (and for) us, independent of outcomes.

Ready set here we go.

We are surrounded by scoreboards.

Some of them are explicit: callbacks, bookings, views, likes, offers, opens, closes, and whatever else our younger selves decided counted as a “win.” Others are more ambient—who’s always working, who’s been quiet, who seems to be “having a moment.” Together, they create a sense that progress needs to be legible, provable, trackable.

It makes sense that we internalize all of this. Most creative ecosystems are organized around outcomes—attention, appreciation, awards. Over time, we’re trained to look outward for confirmation that we’re ‘in the game’ at all.

The problem is that outcomes are volatile. They’re shaped by timing, taste, budgets, algorithms, gatekeepers—variables that are real, powerful, and largely outside our control. Two identical efforts can produce wildly different results depending on when and where they land. And even then, “success” remains subjective.

Still the scoreboard blinks.

Slowly, it becomes the primary driver of whether we move at all. Sometimes disguised as patience. Or discernment. Or “waiting for the right moment.” We start to wonder whether the effort is even worth it. Action becomes conditional—taken only if the outcome feels promising enough.

The question shifts from what do I want to make? to what’s most likely to work?

And in that shift, it becomes easy to miss what’s actually happening underneath—the part of the work that was never meant to be counted by a scoreboard in the first place.

Every shot functions as a rep.

Not metaphorically. Literally. In the body. In the nervous system.

Each audition, each tape, each draft, each thing you make that asks you to make a move without certainty. Organize your energy. Tolerate the exposure. Recover afterward. Return to baseline. Try again.

You get faster at beginning. At moving from idea to action. The gap between thinking about making something and actually making it shortens.

Your tolerance for uncertainty widens. Rejection still stings, but it stops feeling catastrophic.

And you start learning things you can only learn through experience. What energizes you. What drains you. Your instincts sharpen. Your taste clarifies. Your natural voice emerges.

None of that shows up on a scoreboard.

But it does accumulate internally. Each rep subtly lowers the stakes of the next one. Each attempt makes the next attempt feel less precious, less loaded, less like a referendum on your entire worth. The work starts to feel more familiar, more ordinary. Something you do, rather than something you beg or brace for.

What repetition actually produces is far more than just a consolation for the ‘shots’ that don’t ‘score’. It changes the story we end up telling ourselves about our own effort.

The question shifts from will this work? to what is this building? And underneath ambition, something steadier and more sustainable takes shape.

Wanting to score isn’t the problem.

If we’re talking about shots on goal, then scoring is part of the game. It’s why you take the shot in the first place. No one lines up, shoots, and genuinely hopes it doesn’t go in. The goal matters. It gives the effort direction.

The trouble starts when shots only count if they score.

When that’s the rule—spoken or unspoken—every attempt carries too much weight. Misses don’t just miss, they completely disappear. They stop registering as part of the work at all. Which, understandably, makes it harder to stay in the game.

But when we can see what shots are doing even when they don’t go in—how they build timing, confidence, familiarity, trust in our instincts—the effort stops feeling so fragile.

We’re still aiming. We still want the goal. That desire doesn’t go away. But our attention shifts back to the shot itself. The mechanics. The feel of taking it. We stay in the rhythm of the game instead of constantly checking the scoreboard.

And paradoxically, scoring becomes more likely. Not because we stopped caring, but because we stayed with the process long enough to actually get better at it.

The goal is still there. It just isn’t the only thing that makes the effort count.

Most creative lives aren’t decided by a single shot. They’re shaped by the willingness to keep taking them.

Some will go in. More probably won’t. And most of the time that part is out of our control.

What we can control is whether we keep shooting.

So if you’re filming self-tapes, or writing drafts, or pitching wild ideas to friends, or doing anything that requires you to take the risk of trying—it counts.

Not because it racks up your metaphorical ‘score’, but because it means you’re still in the game. Still playing. Still growing.

Which, honestly, feels worthy of at least a few mildly obnoxious airhorn toots.

Starting this week, One last thing will be available exclusively to paid subscribers. It’s the most personal part of the newsletter—the place where I reflect on how the ideas above are showing up in my own life—and paid support is what keeps The Fourth Wall sustainable. If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter, I hope you’ll consider joining. Either way, I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

One last thing…

I took a shot and missed this week.

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This week’s been heavy.

Watching what’s been unfolding in Minneapolis, and in cities across the country, has been horrifying. For me, and maybe for you, there’s been a constant internal negotiation. How much to read. When to step away. How to stay informed without becoming numb. How to care without turning other people’s suffering into something I passively consume.

There are concrete things to do: calling representatives, donating, protesting, checking in on friends and family. Those actions matter. And yet, even after we’ve done them, there’s a kind of residue. Feelings that linger.

In moments like this, showing up to the theater, listening to music, watching a movie or TV show, even writing a newsletter can feel strange. Out of step. Indulgent. Inappropriate. When harm is happening this visibly, it’s hard not to question whether creating things—or art as a whole—actually matters at all.

I don’t know if there’s a simple or clean answer.

So this week, I don’t have an argument or a conclusion. What I have instead is an offering: some unpolished, unfinished thoughts about the relationship between art and suffering—and why sitting with that question feels necessary right now.

Here we go.

Part of what makes moments like this so difficult is the sheer volume of exposure.

We’re living in an age of constant information—headlines, stories, “real-time” updates—where suffering is served to us on an endless loop. There’s almost no space to process what we’re taking in before the next notification pops up.

Psychologists have said for years that as the scale of suffering grows, our emotional response often shrinks. Not because we don’t care, but because the human nervous system isn’t built to sustain this much empathy for this long.

So the mind does what it has to do to survive. It creates distance. It flattens feeling. It turns pain into something we can register without having to fully metabolize it.

We find ourselves caught in a quiet tension: the desire to stay informed and the need to protect our hearts. To see enough of what’s happening to stay awake, while also carving out enough internal space to hold the rage, sadness, and confusion.

What we’re craving isn’t total clarity, just a way to stay present with what we’re already carrying.

Enter: art.

A song turns feeling into melody. A play compresses years into a couple of hours. A painting isolates a moment or a color. Choreography translates energy into gestures and shapes.

Art gives emotion edges. When so much of what we consume sands down suffering into something we can scroll past, art concentrates feeling instead. It gives it form and duration.

Rather than absorbing the whole world’s pain at once, we’re invited to sit with one human experience, one emotional truth, one story—and stay long enough for something to move through us rather than pile up inside.

This is why rituals exist across cultures. Why mourning has ceremonies. Why grief has songs. Why anger has drums. Why prayer has structure. Why storytelling has arcs.

In a quiet, essential way, art organizes pain. It makes it holdable. It gives feeling a place to enter, and a way to exit.

Art is not an antidote to suffering. But it may be what keeps suffering from becoming infinite. What keeps despair from hardening us.

For the person making the work, art becomes a way of moving feeling into form. For the person encountering it, the work becomes a place to move through feeling in response. The labor is different, but the exchange is real. The work carries the imprint of someone else having already gone through something human—and invites us to do the same.

This is part of why people often describe art as an escape.

After moments of collective trauma, people need somewhere to go. Somewhere to sit together. Somewhere time can move forward. Somewhere attention can rest, even briefly, without going numb.

Broadway reopening on September 13th, 2001.
Communal singing at vigils after countless school shootings.
Streets turning into galleries after George Floyd’s murder.

That kind of escape isn’t about forgetting what’s happening. It’s about relief. About stepping out of constant vigilance and into a space where feeling can flow without overwhelming us.

Art asks for participation, not avoidance. Sometimes that participation looks like effort: staying with discomfort, emotion, complexity. Sometimes it looks like rest. Both are part of the same practice. Both restore the capacity we need to remain open, responsive, and ready for what comes next.

Which brings me back to Minneapolis.

None of this resolves what’s happening there—or anywhere else. It’s infuriating. And confusing. And deeply saddening. And in moments like this, when suffering feels endless and helplessness sets in easily, staying present matters more than ever.

History shows us that harm accelerates when people are encouraged to look away. To disengage. To harden. To accept what’s happening by slowly withdrawing from it.

The work ahead will require the opposite: attention, connection, and a commitment to seeing the humanity in one another.

Art is a place we can practice all of that. Not instead of action—but alongside it.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

If you've ever heard a song from Hamilton, RENT, The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Les Misérables—or any of the other 10,000+ musicals that have been captured and released—you've listened to an original cast recording.

Welcome to the club!

This month, a new revival of Ragtime joined that list, and the response has been visceral. I remember that feeling. Saving up gift cards. Buying the CD. Sitting on the floor with the booklet insert. Replaying tracks on my Walkman so I could follow every lyric.

It wasn't the same as being in the theater, but it was the closest I could get. For years, that's how I experienced Broadway: through headphones, imagining what it must have felt like to be there.

This week, for the first time, I’m on the other side.

The first single from All the World's a Stage—the first original cast recording I’m singing on—is streaming. And the album is available to pre-save. It’s surreal.

My life as a fan of OCRs—listening to Legally Blonde, Spring Awakening, Ordinary Days on endless loop—and my life as an artist—standing in front of a microphone, hoping what comes out is enough—are colliding in real time.

So this week, I want to look at what happens when a moment gets preserved. What it means to become listenable. And the strange, kind of magical bridge between the person on the recording and the person hearing it.

Here (pun intended) we go.

The Relationship

It’s hard to overstate how important cast recordings are to theater kids of every age. For many, they’re the only tangible tie to what’s happening in a theater hundreds of miles away.

So we listen. And as we do, the recordings knot themselves into our lives. A first kiss. Coming out. Getting through a breakup. A specific semester in college. A particular subway ride. The summer you worked that job. The music becomes a timestamp—a bookmark in our own story.

Over time, we form relationships with the songs themselves. Not just the lyrics or melodies, but the details. The orchestrations. The breaths. The vibrato on a vowel. The curve of a consonant. The exact moment the strings enter. The pause before a line. The bend of a phrase.

All of it adds up. A constellation of tiny choices we come to know by heart.

For young performers especially, these recordings don’t just hold memories—they become manuals. A kind of bible. They teach us not only what to sing, but how. What sounds “right.” What sounds “best.” Which versions are “definitive.”

And it makes sense. When you’re learning a role—or imagining a show you’ve never seen—the recording feels like the closest thing to truth. The most reliable source available.

But there’s a quiet danger in that attachment.

Because hidden inside it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cast recording actually is.

The Room

The studio is a beautiful mess of cables and mics and headphones and water bottles. There’s coffee and bagels in the lobby. And the big red clock is ticking.

Recording a cast album is expensive—studio time, engineers, musicians, mixing, mastering. For producers, it isn’t just about preservation. It’s an investment. A tool to make the show more licensable, to reach more people, to extend the life of the work beyond its run.

The cast feels the pressure too. They’re tired—body and mind. There’s excitement, of course. But underneath it is a quiet knowing: this is it.

It’s all very practical, almost without ceremony. There’s a call time. There’s a schedule. And there are limits—on time, on takes, on voices. A union break. A budget. A producer tracking minutes because there are three more songs to get through. You learn quickly that this moment—the one that will feel eternal to a listener—has edges.

What gets captured isn’t some pristine, ideal version of the show. It’s a document of a specific day, in a specific room, with specific people doing their best under very real constraints.

And then it travels. Into headphones, into bedrooms, into long walks and late nights. Frozen in time. The breaths, the choices, the things that felt unfinished in the room begin to mean something else entirely.

The Paradox

As listeners, we don’t hear cast recordings as compromised or incomplete. We don’t experience them as drafts. What reaches us feels alive in a way we might not have words for.

For the artist, the experience is almost the opposite.

The recording captures everything you’re most aware of. The breath you wish you’d supported differently. The vowel you didn’t quite place right. The choice you would absolutely change if you had one more take.

But this is the paradox: the very things the artist feels most vulnerable about are often the things the listener responds to most deeply. What feels unfinished from the inside lands as honesty on the outside.

We sense when something was captured rather than polished. When it happened once, under real conditions, and didn’t get sanded down into something safer.

The imperfections aren’t distractions. They’re proof of humanness.

What the artist experiences as risk, the listener experiences as connection.

The Magic

Theater is beautiful because it only happens once. One night. One room. One particular arrangement of bodies, breath, and attention that will never happen again in quite the same way.

A cast recording is, in many ways, the opposite of that. It’s fixed. Repeatable. It can (and will) be played again and again.

And yet, because it captures a single day, a single room, a single version of the work, it doesn’t erase that singularity. It carries it forward.

The recording doesn’t recreate the original moment. It releases it.

Like blowing on a dandelion, that one performance drifts outward. It meets people in their own singular moments, under entirely different conditions, and becomes part of their story.

That is the quiet magic of cast recordings. It’s a moment meeting a moment. A crossroads of contexts. Presence via preservation.

We meet halfway. Just by pressing play.

One last thing…

Hearing the first single from All The World’s a Stage has been surreal, to say the least.

I heard all the things performers hear—the notes I wish I’d placed differently, the tone of a vowel I might shape another way now, the tiny choices that feel enormous now that they’re frozen.

What writing this piece has given me—unexpectedly—is acceptance.

Not because I suddenly think the recording is perfect. But because I understand it more clearly. It isn’t a final version of me. It’s a timestamp. A document of who I was in that room, on that day, under those conditions.

I’m already different than the person on that recording—and that doesn’t diminish it. It actually gives it more meaning.

That’s the gift of preservation. It lets us look back and see where we were. To feel proud. To feel tenderness. To notice the growth.

So if you’re curious what inspired all this, you can listen. That’s me, on October 7th and 8th, 2025. A moment, preserved.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

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It feels impossible to talk about Broadway right now without talking about stunt casting.

Not as a scandal or some kind of moral failure. Just as a fact of the landscape.

You don’t even need me to name an example. I’m sure there’s already someone (or several someones) that come to mind.

This isn’t new. Broadway has always flirted with fame. But something about the volume of it now—the frequency, the reliance, the way it feels increasingly baked into the business model—suggests a shift.

And then, last week, on CBS Sunday Morning, Carrie Coon said the quiet part out loud: that five years ago, this path wouldn’t have existed for her. That talent alone is no longer enough. That now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you need to arrive with heat already attached.

What struck me wasn’t the critique itself, but that it came from inside the system. From a position that, on paper, looks like success. Prestige television. Cultural visibility. The very currency Broadway now openly courts.

Because every time stunt casting comes up, the conversation collapses into binaries: good or bad, fair or unfair, cynical or necessary.

But listening to Carrie, it became clear that those frames don’t quite hold. That this isn’t really a story about individual casting choices at all. It’s about an ecosystem responding to pressure.

That’s the part I want to sit with here. Not to assign blame or offer an easy fix—but to look more closely at why casting works the way it does now, and what that pressure asks of artists on both sides of the equation.

Let’s get into it.

The Pressure

Most of the forces shaping Broadway right now live in budgets and spreadsheets. In capitalization meetings and pitch decks. In the quiet math that happens long before a casting notice ever goes out.

Rising production costs. Shorter runways. A business model almost entirely dependent on private capital, in a country that offers basically zero public support for the arts.

Plus, we’re in an economy with higher costs. Of living. Of labor. Of everything. Regardless of what the current administration would have us believe, prices are on the rise and tolerance for risk is down.

And when risk tolerance shrinks, everything downstream tightens with it.

In our business, casting is one of the few places we can clearly see that pressure.

It’s easy to frame stunt casting as a creative choice, but more often it functions as a form of risk management. Familiarity becomes insurance. A known “name” doesn’t just sell tickets—it steadies investors, guarantees press, justifies the scale of the bet.

That’s the shift Carrie was pointing to. Not that Broadway creatives or producers stopped caring about talent—but that talent, or a groundbreaking original piece, or even strong brand IP alone no longer offsets uncertainty.

And this pressure—from a fragile system trying to keep itself upright—never stays abstract. It moves. Quietly. Unevenly. Until it lands on people.

Which is where the real story starts.

On The Inside

For a lot of theater actors, this pressure looks like a recalibration of what feels possible.

Opportunities narrow. The ladder gets steeper, then thinner. Not because the work isn’t good enough—but because “good enough” no longer answers the question everyone is actually asking: will this sell?

Theater has historically been a place where careers were built through craft. Where presence mattered more than profile. Where momentum came from doing the work, night after night, in front of a live audience.

But when casting becomes a primary tool for managing risk, unfamiliarity starts to read as liability. Discovery feels expensive. Taking a chance feels indulgent.

The burden on artists grows. It changes the relationship to the work. Comparison creeps in. Strategy replaces skill-building. Visibility starts to matter more than ability.

For many, the shift has been painful and disorienting. The alignment of luck, timing, and talent feels less and less likely.

Some actors adapt. Others opt out—not because they stopped loving theater, but because the math stopped math-ing.

But this is only one side of the coin.

For actors whose names fall above the title, there’s a different flavor of pressure.

Especially for artists who actually care about craft. About rehearsal. About being in the room for the right reasons. Theater, for many of them, is the place they come to strip away the machinery of fame and get back in the habit of truth-telling in front of an audience.

But stunt casting collapses that distinction.

You’re not just an actor. You’re a metric. A strategy. A stabilizer. A risk buffer. The business isn’t separate from the work—it sits on your shoulders while you’re trying to make it.

This doesn’t erase the privilege. It doesn’t flatten the power imbalance. But it does complicate the story.

Because being wanted for your draw is not the same as being wanted for your work. And knowing the difference—feeling it, night after night—changes the experience in ways that aren’t always obvious.

And when both of these things are true at the same time—when theater actors are squeezed out by unfamiliarity, and celebrities are pulled in under the weight of expectation—a pattern starts to take shape.

Add ‘Em Up

Here’s what we know: a system under pressure looks for stability. Casting becomes one of the few levers available. Celebrities are asked to carry expectation. Theater actors feel forced to find visibility (and stability) elsewhere.

Everyone is compensating for uncertainty in their own way. Not because they want to—but because the conditions demand it.

This is where tthe shorthand diagnosis of a ‘broken system’ starts to fall apart.

Because what’s happening here isn’t collapse or failure. It’s reaction and restriction.

The Hard Truth

The system isn’t broken. It’s constricted. And that distinction matters.

A broken system stops functioning completely. It’s dead. A constricted one keeps breathing—but through a narrowing passage. Less air. Less room to maneuver. Less tolerance for what hasn’t already proven it can survive the squeeze.

There is still good work getting made. Sometimes even great work. But it’s being made inside a tighter channel. Smaller margins for error. Fewer risks feel worth taking. Fewer unknowns feel worth the bet. Newness isn’t impossible—but it often requires momentum from somewhere else.

Over time, that pressure reshapes behavior.

Craft doesn’t disappear—but it’s no longer sufficient on its own. Careers feel less cumulative and more conditional, shaped as much by optics as by the work itself. Certainty starts to feel safer than curiosity. Familiarity more responsible than experimentation.

And maybe that’s what’s actually broken. Not the system itself—but our tolerance for uncertainty inside it.

Our willingness to sit with not-knowing. To make room for work that hasn’t fully found itself yet. To give artist opportunities to grow into themselves. To trust process over proof.

So no, I don’t think there’s a simple fix or that we need to “make Broadway great again.”

But if stunt casting has become one of the clearest signals of where the system feels tightest, maybe it can also point us toward what we need for whatever comes next.

More uncertainty. More unknowns. More up-and-comers. More risk. More trust. More time. More space. More nuance. More questions. More fun. More faith. More magic. And yes—more Love.

One last thing…

Clearly, that Carrie Coon clip stirred something in me.

And I wasn’t the only one. The comments and shares from artists at every stage of their careers was overwhelming. But not shocking.

Here’s the thing: she didn’t mythologize her career. She didn’t pretend it was inevitable. She didn’t wrap it in language about destiny or worthiness or “earning it.”

She just said the truth: if I hadn’t been given those opportunities, I wouldn’t be here.

That’s it.

And I think that landed so hard because so many artists are living inside that sentence right now.

Every audition can sort-of feel like a Hail Mary. Which is a football reference for throwing the ball deep, and hoping someone catches it.

It’s not that the work doesn’t matter. It’s that the relationship between the work and what comes next has grown much harder to trace.

We’re asked to keeping showing up, keep making, keep offering, keep risking, keep taping, keep learning, keep going, even when the feedback loop has gone quiet.

And maybe that’s what Carrie gave people in those thirty seconds.

Not a roadmap. Not reassurance. Just permission to tell the truth about how contingent this all is.

About how much of a career is shaped not just by talent, but by timing. Access. Visibility. Luck. And the fragile chain of events that lets someone be seen at all.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. But I do know it made a lot of artists feel less alone. And right now, that feels like something.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

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On New Years Eve, Brandi Carlile proclaimed that Heated Rivalry was all she could think about. I was relieved to hear I was not alone.

By that point, the show had already saturated the zeitgeist. From clips, edits, and memes to magazine covers and late-night appearances. Watching that kind of momentum build has been fun—and if I’m honest, genuinely fascinating.

It’s not just that a “gay hockey show” cut through. It’s that people seem deeply obsessed with this story: two people positioned as opponents, a system that needs them to stay that way, a culture that insists competition is natural, inevitable—even erotic?

As the conversation swelled, I couldn’t shake the sense that all of this felt familiar. Not because of hockey—I retired somewhere around eighth grade—but because I’ve seen this logic before.

The quiet comparison. The constant measuring. The binary of winners and losers. It’s a dynamic creative people have gotten very good at internalizing—especially in theater.

So that’s what I want to sit with this week: why opposition has become such a dominant organizing principle in our industry—and the companionship we might be missing out on.

On Thin Ice

One of the smartest things Heated Rivalry does is treat rivalry like a device.

Not an accident. Not a personality trait. Not even a misunderstanding. A mechanism.

The show understands something basic about audience psychology: we don’t just like stories—we like scoreboards. We like tracking a relationship the way you watch a game. Clear sides. Clear stakes. Rivalry gives us all of that.

And their rivalry isn’t just between them—it’s upheld by the context around them. Teams. Careers. Reputations. Public perception. It’s as if the entire ecosystem is constantly whispering: don’t cross the line.

These two men are positioned as natural enemies long before they ever get the chance to decide what they actually are to each other. The rivalry is arranged to make closeness feel forbidden and conflict feel inevitable.

Which, I think, is part of what makes Shane Hollander’s internal battle so compelling. Yes—he’s grappling with feeling deeply drawn to another man for the first time in his life. But that man is supposed to be his enemy.

As their careers accelerate, the ice gets thinner. The contradiction becomes harder to carry. The person he’s supposed to hate is the one who understands him best.

That’s the real mechanism on display. Rivalry not as drama, conflict, or opposition, but as a system that creates a split—between who we are and who we’re told we should be.

Theater’s Heated Rivalry

Theater has its own version of this, it’s just wearing a different costume.

We don’t call it rivalry most of the time. We call it the business. The hustle. Paying dues. Having thick skin. Being “in the mix.” Competition becomes a fact of nature—like gravity—rather than a story we’ve been trained to accept.

And to be fair: there is competition. There are limited seats, limited stages, limited jobs. There is scarcity. There are real stakes.

But most of the time, getting a role isn’t about beating someone else. It’s about a weird, hyper-specific alignment of timing and chemistry and taste and budget and height and vocal color and how you look next to the other person and what the director dreamed about on the subway that morning. It’s about a thousand variables, most of which have nothing to do with talent and almost none of which can be controlled.

And yet, the lived experience of it can still feel like a contest.

Once we’re in the rehearsal room, the stakes rise. Ideas start to feel precious. What should be a shared goal can quietly turn competitive—ego reframes collaboration as something to win instead of build.

Zoom out further, and shows behave the same way. We start treating attention like a finite substance, as if one show’s success has to come at another’s expense. Awards seasons amplify it. The Tonys start to feel like The Hunger Games. Even the language turns athletic: who’s “winning” or “losing” at the box office. Which show is “the one to beat.”

Add all of this up and you get the Shane Hollander fracture: the moment when the thing that makes you singular starts to feel like a liability.

You’re drawn toward honesty. Softness. Specificity. Some strange, unrepeatable essence that is actually yours. And then—explicitly or implicitly—you’re told to sand it down. To be more digestible. To be more legible. To be more appealing to more people.

Eventually, the mechanism stops being theoretical and starts being something you carry.

Alone, Together

More than anything, rivalry wears and weighs on our relationships.

It turns someone else’s success into evidence of our failure. A constant low-grade monitoring: am I doing it right, am I enough, am I falling behind?

It’s exhausting. Not in a dramatic way. More in a drip-drip way. Like a slow leak.

You can hear it in how artists talk about themselves. How quickly we default to self-deprecation. How often we speak about our work like it’s on trial. How hard it is to say I’m proud without immediately qualifying it, shrinking it, joking it away.

When peers become mirrors we can’t stop checking, colleagues and friends turn into benchmarks. Even though we’re surrounded by people who understand this life better than anyone else, we’re quietly taught—like Shane and Ilya—to see them as the ones we should be trying to “beat.”

That’s the hidden cost.

Not just exhaustion, but isolation. Not just pressure, but the erosion of companionship. The longer we live inside opposition, the harder it becomes to remember why we wanted to do this at all: to make things and experience something together. To understand ourselves and one another more deeply.

Rivalry works against all of that.

The Cottage

Heated Rivalry’s final episode is more than just a change in location.

The Cottage is a place where competition loses its utility. Where performance relaxes. Where the need to win dissolves into the relief of being understood. Where the very person they were taught to oppose becomes the one who makes real rest possible.

What’s striking isn’t just that Shane and Ilya choose each other—it’s that choosing each other allows them to choose themselves more honestly. Outside the machinery of rivalry, they don’t become less ambitious. They become more aligned. Less split. Less at war with their own instincts.

That’s the part that makes me teary.

When we stop organizing our lives around opposition—when we grant one another the grace of Love, generosity, curiosity—we don’t just change how we relate to others. We soften how we relate to ourselves.

The Cottage isn’t escapism. It’s not withdrawal. It’s a reminder that another structure is possible. One built on companionship instead of comparison. On shared meaning instead of metrics.

Turns out, rivalry isn’t the only thing capable of motivating or moving us. Love—of the work, of each other, of ourselves—can be just as inspiring, just as galvanizing, without requiring us to fracture in the process.

That’s what’s waiting for us at The Cottage.

So—see you there?

One last thing…

If you don’t mind, I want to stay at The Cottage just a second longer.

I’ve been thinking about what it might mean as a practice. What it looks like to focus less on scoreboards and more on making room to breathe.

This was my first week after closing BEAU, and it’s been…interesting. I’ve had to give myself permission to move slowly. To be quiet. To reacclimate to real life.

There’s always a kind of withdrawal after a show ends. The dopamine fades. The structure disappears. The silence can feel disorienting at best—and heavy at worst. I’m closer to the former, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean I’m totally settled yet.

When you suddenly wear the label “unemployed actor,” it’s easy for old narratives to creep in: failure, falling behind, losing—despite the fact that the label only arrives after you’ve been working.

The truth feels simpler than the stories we tell ourselves. This quiet is earned. This breath is earned. The waves need to settle before they swell again.

At some point, we all need to go to The Cottage—and the moment after closing a show feels like as good a time as any.

So I’m going to keep things slow and steady for a bit. Sit by the metaphorical fire. Listen to the loons on the lake. And trust that when it’s time to step back onto the ice, I’ll be rested and ready.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

P.S. If this essay resonated and you want to support this kind of work, the paid tier helps keep The Fourth Wall going. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

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If you’ve spent any time in a rehearsal room, or have seen A Chorus Line, you’ve likely heard someone shout, “let’s take it from the top.”

It’s what gets said when a scene stalls out, or the run of a number gets tangled, or something almost works. We don’t forget what just happened. We don’t pretend it didn’t count. The data doesn’t get erased. The notes, the muscle memory, the tiny fumbles, the massive mistakes, the small discoveries, the big “aha’s”—they all inform the next go-around.

Proof that practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes progress.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot this week, mostly because of the timing. January has a way of showing up with instructions—new habits, new goals, new versions of ourselves—as if the calendar flips and everything is politely cleared out. But that’s never really how it feels.

One day rolls into the next, and we draw a line between them because it helps us keep track, not because anything actually resets. Which might be why the beginning of the year can feel strange instead of energizing.

That tension has been especially present for me because this week marks the end of not just the year, but another major chapter in my life.

This weekend, we’ll close the second run of BEAU Off-Broadway—a project that, in many ways, has exceeded my wildest dreams. A new musical. An original story. A “star vehicle” role shaped slowly and collaboratively. The kind of work you don’t even really let yourself imagine, because it feels almost impossible.

And it was also hard.

The demand on my body, especially my voice, meant my world got very small. My social life nearly disappeared. The emotional lift was heavier than I expected, too. There were moments—honestly—where I came close to throwing in the towel. Not because I wasn’t grateful. Not because I didn’t love being onstage. But because I didn’t yet know how to hold everything the experience was asking me to carry at once.

That’s why this particular ending feels…strange. Because I don’t have a clear takeaway.

We’re taught to expect endings to explain things—to clarify what it was all for, to hand us some neat emotional summary we can carry forward, a sense of resolution we can point to and say, there—that’s what it meant. But some experiences (projects, relationships, years) don’t offer that. They leave you with more texture instead of more certainty. More information, but fewer answers.

And maybe that’s the mistake: assuming that resolution is the point. That an ending owes us clarity. That meaning is something we’re supposed to be able to extract immediately, and package neatly. Especially right now, at the start of a new year, when everything around us is nudging us toward conclusions, decisions, and declarations. But I’m not sure that’s how learning, or life, actually works.

In rehearsal we don’t stop the moment something interesting happens. We keep going. We do it again. We take it from the top. Not to resolve it. Not to pin it down. But to see what else can emerge when we stay with it a little longer.

And when I recognize that truth, the absence of resolution starts to feel different.

What’s left in its place isn’t confusion. It’s capacity.

There’s more space to hold mixed feelings without needing to sort them. To let deep pride and complete exhaustion and holy joy and profound sadness all coexist. To stay present with something that feels unresolved.

Every part of theater trains us for this. We pour ourselves into something knowing it won’t last. We rehearse a thing for months that evaporates the second it’s over. Again and again, we practice committing fully to things that are designed to end.

Over time, that teaches us how to let meaning stay porous. How to hold a moment, a melody, a line, or a lyric lightly enough that it can change and grow as we change and grow. How to accept that not every experience—every pass—will give us a neat or tangible takeaway.

And strangely enough, as our grip softens, our north star brightens. Our ability to orient sharpens. We get better at noticing what’s drawing us in and what’s pushing us away. What lights us up. What turns us off. What we’re no longer willing to fight against. What we deem worth fighting for.

In that way, every experience—onstage or off—widens us. We go through something and then step back out into the world changed in ways we may never fully understand.

That’s the real gift of “taking it from the top”—not a reset or a resolution, but a chance to continue with more information. With a little more depth. With a sharper sense of what we’re orienting toward, and what we’re ready to let of of this time around.

Which feels like a humane—and very human—place to start the new year.

A little less resolved.
A little more awake.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

This week, The New York Times ran a piece about the rise of “theatre kid” as a political insult.

To be fair, we’ve never exactly been confused about our reputation. “Theatre kid” has always carried a little baggage. Loud. Earnest. Cringe. A bit much.

But the timing of all this feels…interesting.

In a lot of ways, this year has been powered by theatre kid energy. And I don’t just mean Jonathan Bailey being named People’s Sexiest Man Alive or Taylor Swift releasing The Life of a Showgirl. There were deeper currents—carefully curated public performances like Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show. Camp crossing into the mainstream, like Parker Posey’s “Piper noooo.” A culture with a seemingly growing hunger for shared moments—for witnessing and feeling something together.

So this week, I want to get clear on what we’re actually talking about when we say “theatre kid.” To separate the stereotype from the skillset. The punchline from the practice.

And to understand what the reflex to label us publicly reveals about how attention, performance, and care are operating in our culture right now.

Let’s get into it.

The Misread

When “theatre kid” gets used as an insult, it usually means the same handful of things.

Performative. Fake. Loud. Dramatic. Over-eager. Overzealous. Over-rehearsed. Someone who plays to the room. Someone who needs attention.

It’s an old suspicion—the idea that sincerity and performance can’t coexist. That if something is staged, it must be dishonest. That awareness of the audience somehow cancels truth.

But the truth is that being seen is inevitable. Rooms have energy whether we acknowledge it or not. Tone, timing, posture, silence—all of it contributes to communication. Performance is happening everywhere, all the time. And it’s something we either fumble or learn to do with care.

That presentation you’re giving at work? That story you’re telling your family at the dinner table? That breakup text you’re drafting and redrafting? That’s performing.

You’re navigating the relationship between what you’re doing and who’s receiving it. You’re channeling your inner theatre kid.

So no—we’re not just Broadway super-fans, or crazy cast parties, or loud for the sake of being loud. I mean…sometimes we are, but not exclusively.

We’re the ones who understand that all the world is a stage.

The Reality

Being a theatre kid, at its heart, is an attunement to attention.

It’s understanding how rooms work. How energy shifts. How timing changes the way something lands. How to listen for what isn’t being said. How to read an audience without pandering to it. How to hold attention without squeezing the life out of it. How to show up prepared, then stay flexible. How to recover when something goes wrong—because something always does.

That fluency is easy to mistake for confidence or charisma. But it’s closer to literacy.

A sensitivity to tone. An understanding of the relationship between intention and impact. A comfort carrying emotion without flattening it. A knack for making something, someone, some part of the human experience legible to others.

Yes, we’re often emotionally available, solid storytellers, and quick to analyze the meaning of any given moment. But all of that is an expression of our innate grasp of attention. Not like hog-the-spotlight attention. Like attention to breath, gaze, and our inner worlds.

The reality is that attention was always baked into reality. We just learned what to do with it.

Which is probably why, this year, it felt like we were everywhere.

The Reveal

Culturally, this year, theatre kids have dominated the headlines: Late Night with Stephen Colbert (theatre kid) getting canceled, David Corenswet (theatre kid) taking flight as Superman, Sabrina Carpenter (theatre kid) selling out stadiums.

Musicals took over screens and feeds: Wicked and its press tour, Evita’s balcony sequence, Death Becomes Her and Hamilton sounds becoming massive TikTok lip-sync trends, K-Pop freakin Demon Hunters.

Theatrical camp perforated the mainstream: “Nothing Beats a JET2 Holiday”, KJ Apa’s Mr. Fantasy alter ego, Katy Perry in space.

One could even argue that the year-end obsession with earnest yearning—from Heated Rivalry to Hamnet—carries unmistakable drama-club undertones.

And yet, all of these feel less like causes than symptoms.

Theatre kids aren’t just shaping culture from the top down—we’ve been building it from the inside out.

Theatre kids are teachers who know when a classroom is slipping, and how to bring it back without humiliation. Doctors who understand that bedside manner matters as much as diagnosis. Waiters and bartenders who can read a table before the first drink order. Managers who sense morale before it shows up in a spreadsheet.

They’re parents who know how to narrate a moment, soften a transition, make space for big feelings without rushing to fix them. Partners who know which sweet treat will turn your day around. Friends who know when to speak, when to listen, and when to let the silence do the work.

When you look at all this from 10,000 feet, this year doesn’t really look like a takeover as much as a reveal.

The instincts we associate with theatre—attention, timing, emotional fluency—didn’t suddenly appear in culture. They’ve been circulating quietly for decades, centuries even, carried by people who learned how rooms work and how moments land.

What’s changed isn’t the presence of theatre kids—it’s the visibility of the skills we’ve always had.

A culture that needs, maybe more than ever, what we know how to do.

The Reclamation

It’s true that the world has always been, and may always be, in some degree of a tailspin. I’m not here to litigate whether or not right now is the worst of times.

What feels present in a different way is the desire—or the clear demand—for what theatre kids have in spades.

A willingness to listen.
A default to empathy.
A focus on process.
An eye on narratives.

The instincts instilled in theatre kids don’t expire. We don’t grow out of them, regardless of whether our life’s path leads us to the stage.

Maybe we deserve a kind of reclamation of that age-old “theatre kid” label.

To let it be a source of warm pride. To trust it as a simple truth. To carry it confidently as we navigate whatever next year has in store for us—as individuals, as a culture, as a species.

So, not to be dramatic, but: long live the theatre kids.

One last thing…

If I’m honest, I’ve had a complicated relationship with my inner “theatre kid.”

For a long time, it felt like something I needed to keep at arm’s length—not because it wasn’t true, but because I worried it made me sound unserious. Like something I was supposed to outgrow.

Writing The Fourth Wall this year helped change that.

Week by week, this became a place where I didn’t have to sand that part of myself down. Where caring about how things land wasn’t a liability. Where attention, timing, and feeling deeply could be the point—not something to apologize for or translate into something cooler.

In the process, I remembered why I loved that part of myself in the first place. Not the volume or the performance of it—but the care. The curiosity. The belief that the meaning of a moment matters.

Reclaiming that has felt grounding. Steadying. Like coming home.

But that shift didn’t happen alone.

Knowing the words had somewhere to land each week—being read, held, carried by people willing to sit with long thoughts in a loud year—made it possible to keep showing up honestly.

So thank you for being here this year. For staying with it. For letting me take my time.

See you next year ♥️
—Matt

P.S. A few people have asked how they can support The Fourth Wall beyond reading and sharing. If it’s been meaningful to you this year, I’ve opened a paid tier that includes one extra monthly letter focused on process, practice, and what I’m working through in real time. Thank you for considering it.

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Pace is a word that comes up often in rehearsal rooms, critics’ reviews, and casual conversations about the show we just saw or the thing we just watched.

On the surface, we’re talking about speed—how quickly the story moved. But underneath, it’s really about attention. The push and pull between actors and audience. Were we bored? Checking the time? Waiting for something to happen? Or were we dropped in—alert, surprised, not sure what might come next?

Pace is strange because it often contradicts itself. The experience we’re chasing is momentum—that downhill feeling. Forward flow. But the process that gets us there almost always looks like the opposite. Slow. Methodical. Confusing. Sometimes even a little treacherous.

I’ve been thinking about pace a lot while writing The Fourth Wall. In the micro—where a piece tightens, where it breathes, when it lingers. And in the macro—what it means to return to something week after week without rushing to prove it’s working or decide where it’s headed.

And as this week marks one year (!!!) of writing and sending these dispatches, I find myself less interested in taking stock than in getting curious. Curious about what happens when we don’t push past the slow parts. Curious about what pace actually makes possible—in our work, in our thinking, and in the way meaning sneaks up on us when we give it time.

Here we goooooo 🙌🏼

Pace ≠ Speed

We tend to talk about pace as if it’s interchangeable with speed. Faster scenes. Shorter runtimes. Tighter edits. But speed is just a measurement. Pace is an experience—shaped by how the brain processes time, information, and attention.

Human attention isn’t continuous. It moves in pulses. We orient, engage, drift, re-engage. When something has “good” pacing, it works with those rhythms instead of against them. It gives the mind enough structure to stay present, and enough space to make sense of what it’s taking in. When pace is off, attention doesn’t wander so much as it slips its grip.

That’s why something can move quickly and still feel like it’s dragging. Rapid inputs without room for integration overwhelm the nervous system. Over time, that creates a low-grade sense of effort—a feeling that you’re being asked to keep up rather than come along.

This is often what people are pointing to when they say the pacing felt slow or uneven. The issue isn’t duration. It’s whether attention had time to land. Whether the experience made room for absorption, contrast, and pause. We need those conditions for a deeper understanding to form.

Pacing and momentum are byproducts of alignment—when an experience moves at the speed attention can actually travel.

The problem is that very little in our current cultural machinery is built to honor that speed.

How Speed Spun Out

Ironically, speed didn’t arrive so speedily. It crept in quietly, cloaked in efficiency.

Because I saw Ragtime last week, I’m thinking about Ford’s assembly line. The moment when the world realized it could make things faster, cheaper, and at scale—and how quickly that logic turned into a value system.Faster wasn’t just useful. It became good.

That mindset never really went away. It just…changed costumes.

The internet cranked it up a notch—or ten. TikTok is literally branded as a “short-form” video platform. Contemporary audiences say they prefer a one-act banger to a four-act epic. Clips instead of scenes. Moments instead of arcs. Slowness isn’t just unfashionable—it can feel almost rude, like it’s asking too much of us.

Speed also has a way of smoothing things over. It lets us skip the middle. The stretch where something hasn’t fully formed. Where you’re not sure how you feel. Where the work might ask you to sit in a little discomfort or ambiguity before it clicks. Moving quickly gives us a sense of progress, even when nothing has had time to land.

And because speed is so easy to track—views, minutes, frequency, turnaround—it becomes the thing our systems reward. Pace, on the other hand, is harder to see in real time. Its effects show up later. That delay makes it harder to protect, even when it’s the thing we actually want.

So we adapt. We skim. We scroll. We move on quickly. We train ourselves to expect things to hook us immediately or we bail. Over time, that expectation starts to shape not just what gets made, but how we experience it.

Which is probably why this past year, this newsletter, has felt like a wild and often uncomfortable practice in choosing to trust pace over speed.

A Practice of Pace

When I started The Fourth Wall, I mostly just knew I wanted a place to think out loud. A space to name what I was noticing without rushing to conclusions or packaging half-formed ideas into something neat and clickable.

But writing every week has a way of revealing your habits. Where you want to skip ahead. Where you want to smooth things over. Where it’s tempting to publish something just to feel the relief of being done with it.

There were weeks when it would have been easier to chase whatever was trending. To collapse a complicated thought into a cleaner takeaway. To move faster and call it clarity. Choosing not to do that—choosing to stay with the messier middle—was often uncomfortable. Sometimes it felt indulgent. Sometimes inefficient. Sometimes like I was falling behind or missing the boat.

And yet, over time, something opened up. The pace began to change the work itself. There was more room for nuance. For contradiction.

What began as an observatory for theater marketing trends slowly transformed into a laboratory to examine cultural moments, personal experiences, and industry shifts. It became more about the questions than the answers.

Which is probably why, a year in, I feel more energized than ever about what comes next.

More on that below.

Putting Pace in Its Place

Pace isn’t a virtue. It’s not something to optimize or get right once and for all. It’s just a relationship—between attention and time, between effort and absorption, between what’s being offered and what’s actually being received.

Too fast, and things blur. Too slow, and they stall. What we’re usually looking for isn’t one or the other, but alignment. The feeling that something is moving at the speed it wants to move.

That alignment looks different depending on the moment. On the work. On the season you’re in. What felt sustainable once might feel rushed now. What used to feel indulgent might start to feel necessary. Pace shifts because we do.

The trick isn’t to choose slowness forever or to reject speed outright. It’s simply to pay attention to pace—and whether it’s helping or hurting our ability to be (and feel) here, right now.

What Comes Next

One thing I’ve learned this year is that pace doesn’t sustain itself automatically. It needs boundaries. Structure. Care.

Writing weekly has been a practice in choosing slowness in a world that rewards speed. Depth where we could take shortcuts. Attention where distraction is easier. And like any practice, it’s something I want to protect as this grows and evolves.

That’s part of why I’m introducing a paid tier of The Fourth Wall.

Not to make this louder or more frequent, but to make space for work that asks a little more time on both sides. Longer pieces. Looser thinking. Conversations with artists and thinkers. Deeper dives into ideas that don’t fit neatly into a weekly dispatch.

It’s also a way to keep this project independent. Unrushed. Unoptimized. Free from needing to chase clicks, trends, or scale for the sake of scale.

Nothing about the main newsletter is going away. This isn’t a gate or a pressure point. It’s an invitation for anyone who wants to step a little further into the room and help sustain the pace that made this space meaningful in the first place.

If that sounds like you, I’d love to have you there.

One last thing…

I have to be honest: this piece took me longer than usual. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because every time I tried to say it, something felt off. Like I was skipping a step. Or smoothing over something that was, in reality, still unfinished.

This could’ve been a neat one-year retrospective. A greatest-hits moment. That was tempting. I felt the pull to wrap it up cleanly and move on.

But what kept interrupting me were bigger, messier questions. About pace, yes—but also about ownership. About what it means to let something grow up a little. About what changes when a project stops being “just for fun” and starts asking to be taken a little more seriously.

It’s stirred up old stuff around worth, permission, and whether putting structure around something makes it stronger—or risks changing it entirely.

There’s excitement and pride in that. But there’s also the familiar flutter: Is this the right time? Am I ready? Will it change this thing I love?

What I do know is that this newsletter has become a place where I practice not rushing past those feelings. Where I let myself sit in the questions long enough for something new to take shape.

So this piece—and this moment—aren’t a big declaration. They’re more like a check-in. I’m still learning how to hold this. I’m still paying attention. And I’m choosing, again, to trust the pace that got me here.

Thank you for being part of that process. Truly.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

PS: If One last thing is your favorite part of these emails, the paid subscription includes monthly Work Notes—a slower space for longer reflections, conversations with artists and thinkers, and ideas I’m still working through. Totally optional. Just an open door.

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If you’ve made creative work in the past decade, you’ve probably seen or felt the slow collision of process and promotion.

The moment a project becomes public—tickets on sale, dates announced, graphics shared—a low-grade pressure kicks in. A sense that your job now includes not just making the thing, but helping to move it.

That knot isn’t new. College productions, concerts, readings, workshops, fundraisers, regional runs—the same questions always surface. Should I post about this? How often? Does it help? Does it look like too much? Will people think I’m begging? Will the team think I’m doing enough?

Over time, those small internal negotiations begin to take on a shape of their own. A sort of condition. A phenomenon without a name.

So this week, I want to give it one. A working title: “See My Show” Syndrome. A way to trace where this pressure comes from, what it does to artists, and how we might learn to navigate it with more gentleness.

Let’s start with a soft diagnosis.

The Diagnosis

If I had to put “See My Show” Syndrome on a medical chart, it would live somewhere between hope and responsibility. It shows up in actors, musicians, designers, directors, choreographers, playwrights, producers—anyone whose work eventually steps into public view. In the Age of Visibility, participation creates a subtle sense of duty. If you helped make it, some part of you feels accountable for who walks through the door.

Put more simply, it’s the inherent pressure artists feel to promote the work they make.

The Symptoms

There are four main ways that the syndrome shows up in the body. They’re small, quiet, and so familiar that they’re easy to miss.

The first is what I’ve come to think of as the negotiation loop. On the surface, the behavior looks simple: posting the poster, sharing the ticket link, resharing reviews. But beneath those gestures is a cycle of inner negotiations. You want to support the work. You don’t want to seem overeager. You want people to come. You don’t want to exhaust them. You want the show to succeed. You don’t want to become a billboard. These opposing impulses become a steady thump-thump we feel even while we’re doing the thing we love.

Another is the background scan. Over time, the brain starts tracking things you never gave it permission to track. You clock the likes on posts. You notice who viewed your stories. You remember which friends were “so excited” to come and never bought tickets. None of this takes over your day, but it gathers in the margins, shaping how you feel when you open your phone between shows or on your way to work.

Then there’s the scarcity trigger—the flare that happens when ticket sales dip or houses feel light. Even if you know audience behavior is complex and unpredictable, the emotional leap is immediate: if the seats are empty, I didn’t do enough. We connect dots for a living; when a clear cause doesn’t present itself, we cast ourselves as the culprit.

And finally, there’s the identity drift. Because we’re constantly reminded that an artist’s online presence is part of their “brand,” support for the show starts to tangle with self-worth. A post about tickets becomes, somewhere in the back of our minds, a post about our own value. The question drifts from does anyone care about this thing I’m doing? to the far more vulnerable does anyone care about me?

Interestingly, none of these symptoms are driven by ego or neediness. They’re the emotional residue left by years of invisible micro-decisions—each shaped by a culture that, more and more, asks artists to be both the makers and messengers of the work.

The Cause

If the symptoms live in the body, the cause lives in the culture we’re working inside of. “See My Show” Syndrome is born from the modern overlap of scarcity, visibility, responsibility, and love—forces that weren’t designed to coexist but now sit shoulder to shoulder in every rehearsal room, backstage hallway, and marketing meeting.

The scarcity part is nothing new. Theater has always operated on thin margins and short timelines. But when you combine that with the Age of Visibility—where the work doesn’t end when the curtain falls—sharing stops being a generous gesture and starts feeling like part of the job.

The same is true of our artistic instincts. Digging for nuance, asking hard questions, tracking subtle shifts—these skills serve the work. But when you layer on things like public grosses, online chatter, and the ever-present hum of the algorithm, all of that external feedback starts turning into internal narratives. Not because we’re fragile, but because we’re trained to care about our impact.

This convergence of creativity and commerce—of numbers and narratives—makes systemic pressure feel personal..

Understanding the cause doesn’t make the syndrome or the symptoms disappear. But it does give us a clearer map of what the remedies might look like.

The Remedies

As much as I’d love to provide prescriptive answers, I think what’s required might be more like re-orientations. Shifts in how we hold what we’re experiencing.

Start simple by remembering the scale of things. The show is bigger than any one person. The audience is bigger than any one algorithm. The forces that shape a run—timing, taste, weather, word-of-mouth—move in ways no single individual can steer. When we widen the frame, our part in the picture takes its true size: meaningful, but not all-powerful. It’s kind of a relief to realize we were never meant to carry the whole thing.

Another is reclaiming intention. Sharing about the work can be joyful, connective, electric—when it comes from desire rather than duty. There’s a big difference between “I must” and “I’m moved to.” One pulls you out of yourself; the other roots you deeper inside the experience you’re actually having. When the impulse is light rather than heavy, the act of sharing becomes easy and maybe even fun?

There’s also something to be said for letting the work be the work. Not everything needs to be captured, posted, or pushed. Some moments are meant to be lived, not broadcast. When you allow parts of the process to remain unmediated, the center of gravity returns to the here and now—to the people in front of you. Not every step has to serve the machinery.

And maybe the most healing remedy is returning to Why We Theater: the invisible handoff at the center of all this. The part untouched by marketing, metrics, or momentum. Night after night, artists and audiences make a quiet energetic exchange. And when we return our attention to that—the thing that can only exist in the room—the pressure to “move the needle” loosens its grip. We stop trying to control the invitation and start tending to the encounter.

If we can do that—if we can gently reclaim our agency from algorithms and expectations—“See My Show” Syndrome becomes less of an emergency and something far more manageable. A condition of being visible, being vulnerable, being an artist. A reminder to return to the room, where the real medicine lives.

One last thing…

I’ve had this piece sitting in drafts for a while. I wasn’t sure how to approach this strange new straddle so many of us are doing—the space between creating work and sharing it, between the craft and the call to promote it.

Something shifted a few weeks ago when I posted a short video about BEAU’s ticket sales. All I said was that even with our producing and marketing teams doing everything humanly possible, we were still having a hard time getting butts in seats.

I hesitated before posting it. I wasn’t sure if it was my place. And yet I felt that familiar tug—as someone with a tiny platform, and someone leading the show—to say something. To help in whatever way I could.

No one asked me to do it. And because of that, I questioned myself. Would it come across as desperate? Ungrateful? Would I be stepping on toes? Would anyone even care?

Sitting with all of that is what brought me back to this idea of “See My Show” Syndrome. To the knot I’ve felt since college, trying to convince people to come see the miscast cabaret we’d cobbled together. It’s not new. It’s just louder now—more constant, more collective. Every artist I know who’s in a show or putting up a concert is navigating some version of these same questions. It feels baked into the job in a way it never used to.

I guess writing this was my way of saying, simply: you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.

So here’s to continuing to navigate the labyrinth of modern show business, together.

Side by side by side by side.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

When the closing notice for The Queen of Versailles hit last week, mixed in with the sadness and analysis was something that caught me off guard: celebrating. Not for the artists or the effort, but for the closure itself. As if a verdict had been delivered and the jury could finally cheer for getting it “right.”

Closings happen. Not every show lands. But this reaction felt different. Less like fandom, more like spectators keeping score. A competition to predict which show falls next.

And it made me wonder: when did being a Broadway fan start to feel like sitting on a panel of judges? When did hopeful curiosity turn into arms-crossed skepticism? And what happens to an art form this fragile when even a slice of its most passionate audience starts rooting—for real or performatively—against it?

That’s what I want to sit with this week. Not the show itself necessarily, but the culture around it. What’s shifted, what it’s costing us, and what we stand to lose if closures start feeling like wins.

Shall we?

The Shift

There was a time when Broadway conversations lived in a few familiar places: the Times review, message boards, a couple of blogs, or a heated debate between BFA students. People cared, but the conversation moved at a steady pace. A show opened, critics weighed in, word of mouth followed, and the culture reacted in its own time.

As social platforms grew, that cadence changed. Slowly at first, then all at once.

The first preview stopped being an internal milestone and became the start of a public story. Bow clips, TikTok reactions, Instagram stories, backstage photos—an entire narrative unfolding in real time, shaped by thousands of voices instead of a handful. The conversation no longer waited for opening night; sometimes it didn’t even wait for intermission.

This shift didn’t shrink the circle; it widened it. Shows found new audiences, and audiences found new shows. But the atmosphere changed. The room carries a different charge when every production steps into public view long before the official critics arrive.

That’s what I keep noticing—not fading passion, but redistributed influence. The gravity that once lived inside the theater now lives online, moving at the speed of the platforms.

Which leads to the bigger question: what really drove this shift? And that’s where things get interesting.

The Machine

Online discourse runs on three forces: speed, status, and simplicity.

Speed comes first. Platforms reward immediacy, which means early reactions travel the farthest. A bow clip or a ‘first preview thoughts’ video can reach more people overnight than a full review might in a week. Once a take starts circulating, it gathers momentum. Narratives lock in quickly and rarely pause long enough for nuance to catch up.

Status layers itself on top of that. Once reactions live publicly, they become tiny portraits of who we are—or who we want to be seen as. In many corners of Theater Internet, being perceptive, bold, or early earns credibility. Posting becomes a way of shaping identity. A take isn’t just about the show anymore; it’s a small act of self-presentation.

Simplicity ties it all together. Our brains latch onto clean, coherent arcs, especially in crowded digital spaces. A show becomes a “smash” or a “mess.” A rumor becomes a storyline. A closure becomes confirmation of something people felt weeks earlier. These simplified frames move faster than the slow, complicated reality of how musicals actually develop, wobble, grow, or surprise.

Speed accelerates the conversation. Status personalizes it. Simplicity makes the narratives sticky.

Put those forces together, and the discourse shifts from being commentary to having real influence.

Which leads us to the people caught inside that force—and the toll it takes.

The Cost

When the conversation around a show starts to swirl early, everyone inside the production feels it. Actors, musicians, crews, designers, stage management, producers—the whole company becomes aware of the chatter before the work has even found its footing. Previews take on a different charge when narratives are already forming online. A single take can shape morale, investor confidence, ticket sales, timelines, and the sense of whether the show is gaining traction or losing it. None of this stops the process, but it adds pressure to a stage of development meant for flexibility, experimentation, and uncertainty.

And then there’s the closing itself. When a show ends, hundreds of people lose work: performers, musicians, stage managers, ushers, dressers, electricians, carpenters, front-of-house teams, marketing staff, press reps, producers. A closing notice isn’t a storyline—it’s a financial and emotional shock that ripples through health insurance, rent, childcare, debt, and the scramble for whatever comes next. Treating that moment like a victory—or even a punchline—ignores the scale of what’s actually happening.

Zoom out, and the industry feels the strain too. Risk tolerance narrows. Investors lean toward safer bets. Producers hesitate on original work. Shows get fewer chances to find an audience, and the pipeline for new musicals tightens. An art form that depends on imagination starts getting boxed in by fear of the discourse that surrounds it.

This isn’t a call for silence or blind support. It’s a recognition that the way we talk about theater shapes the conditions under which theater gets made. And the weight of that talk is carried by real people.

The Invitation

None of this means audiences should soften their opinions or pretend every show works. Engaged, thoughtful criticism is a vital part of the ecosystem. Curiosity lives next to taste; honesty lives next to preference. The goal isn’t to mute the conversation. It’s to remember the role we play inside it.

To be clear: generosity doesn’t mean unearned praise. It’s asking us to let the work to live outside binaries. It means recognizing that our reactions travel farther and faster than they used to. It means holding awareness that the stories we tell about a show, even casually, shape the people building it and the future of the form we love.

Theater asks something simple of us: to gather, to listen, to respond from the seat we’re in. Online conversations can honor that same spirit if we let them. We can hold strong opinions and still hold empathy. We can name what isn’t working without cheering for collapse. We can stay curious long enough to let the art breathe.

Because theater has always relied on something deeper than verdicts: presence, patience, the willingness to meet a piece of work with an open heart.

And when we do, we create the conditions—and the culture—that make room for the thing we’re all secretly hoping for: a new show we can fall in love with.

One last thing…

Working on BEAU this season has brought all of this into sharper focus for me. I’ve written about reviews before, and I’ve always believed in the role criticism plays in our ecosystem. But being inside a new musical—one I’ve poured years of time and heart and sweat into—and watching it get dissected online is something different. Necessary, yes. Illuminating, yes. But complicated in ways I couldn’t fully understand until I was living it.

Because the lines between thoughtful critique and a quick comment are blurrier than ever. An aside on TikTok, a throwaway line on Reddit, a niche blogger’s review—they all count as word-of-mouth now. They all shape how people decide whether to buy a ticket. They all become part of the story a show has to outrun or grow into.

It hasn’t made me cynical. If anything, it’s widened my perspective. Every piece of this industry—red carpets, press cycles, marketing, reviews, the discourse swirling online—feels more interconnected than it ever has. And holding BEAU inside that context has given me a deeper sense of how fragile, resilient, and human the process really is.

Mostly, it’s made me think more carefully about the stories we tell about the work and the people making it. They travel farther than we imagine. And they matter more than we realize.

My hope is that we keep talking about theater in a way that helps it grow—not to score a point, but to help fuel the next wave of work we all deserve.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

Theater people are fluent in giving thanks. We bow, we applaud, we stage-door, we stand-ovation. Or ovationally-stand?

And these aren’t just cute traditions. They’re rituals—ancient ones, honestly—that do something to us. Something that shifts us, connects us, opens us. It’s like there’s a part of us that craves those moments of intense connection, and Gratitude is the mechanism that gets us there.

So in this Thanksgiving edition of The Fourth Wall, I’m poking at the science, the spirit, and the strange magic of Gratitude—and why these familiar end-of-show moments might matter more than we think.

Geronimo!

The Inheritance

If you strip theater down to the studs—before the curtains and critics and cold brew in the green room—it started as ritual. A circle. A story. A group of humans gathering to make sense of the world together.

And rituals have always had two ingredients: attention and thanks.

The Greeks poured libations before telling their stories. Indigenous cultures made offerings to the land before beginning ceremony. Medieval mystery plays opened with prayers. Even early commedia troupes had pre-show gestures that weren’t about warming up—they were about orienting themselves to the moment.

Across cultures and centuries, people paused before creating or receiving meaning. To mark the moment. To acknowledge the forces—seen or unseen—that make gathering possible. To say: something is about to happen, and we’re grateful to be here for it.

Theater inherited that impulse.

So when we talk about gratitude in the arts, we’re not talking about manners. We’re talking about lineage. About something humans have been doing for thousands of years to prepare the body and mind for meaning-making.

Gratitude isn’t just something we express. It’s something we practice—often without knowing we’re doing it.

And once you start looking at these gestures as more than tradition, you begin to see them for what they actually are:

Tools. Technologies. Inherited mechanisms designed to shift our internal state.

Which is where this gets interesting.

The Rituals

A bow is easy to misread as an invitation—a polite “your turn” to the audience. But that’s not what’s actually happening. A bow is the performers’ way of physicalizing their gratitude. It’s “thank you for being here,” “thank you for your attention,” “thank you for participating in this.” It’s a gesture of recognition: a quiet surrender, a soft acknowledgment that whatever happened here wasn’t created by us alone. It came through us, but it was completed by you.

Understanding that helps us see applause differently, too. On the surface, applause reads like approval—the audience’s way of saying “well done.” But underneath, it’s a response to what passed between us. It’s a thank you to the performers as vessels, not just laborers. When an audience applauds, they’re recognizing that the creation they just witnessed wasn’t solely the product of skill or rehearsal or talent. It was something more ephemeral. Applause honors both the human effort and the intangible force that made that effort feel like more than craft.

In that sense, applause is a mirror of the bow. The performer says: thank you for your presence. The audience responds: thank you for being a conduit. And somewhere in that exchange, both sides acknowledge that the real star of the evening wasn’t any of the individuals involved—it was the moment itself: the unrepeatable combination of people, breath, and energy.

So if the bow and the applause reveal what we’re exchanging and acknowledging, the next layer is understanding what these moments actually do to us—chemically, emotionally, spiritually. Because gratitude isn’t just symbolic. It’s physiological.

The Bodies

When scientists study gratitude, what they’re actually studying is what happens to the body when we feel connected—to another person, to a moment, to something that feels larger than ourselves. Gratitude shifts our chemistry almost immediately. Cortisol drops. Serotonin and dopamine rise. The nervous system regulates. Our attention widens. Our breath deepens. The body stops scanning for threat and starts looking for meaning.

This shift isn’t subtle; it’s structural. Gratitude creates the internal conditions for openness, attunement, and receptivity—the very qualities we ask of ourselves as artists and audiences need in order to actually receive what’s happening onstage.

The gestures (bows, applause) don’t just mark an ending; they pull us into coherence. They synchronize us. They move us, collectively, into a state where we can sense each other more clearly. Gratitude primes us for connection, which is why these moments hit different. The body recognizes them as safe and meaningful.

This is the physiological magic of gratitude: it prepares us. It tunes our instrument. It tells the mind and the body, “You can be here now.” And once that shift happens—something else becomes possible. Something relational. Something creative. Something slightly beyond the grasp of language.

This is what every gratitude ritual, across every culture and every era, has been trying to do: move people into a state where they can actually feel the moment they’re in.

The Remembering

Gratitude has always been part of the theater, but maybe not for the reasons we assumed. It isn’t just a gesture or a tradition or a polite way to end an evening. It’s a technology. A way of tuning ourselves to one another. A way of preparing the body for presence. A way of acknowledging the invisible currents that move through us when we gather.

Which makes sense, because theater has always been a place where something larger than the sum of its parts shows up.

So if this week is about giving thanks, maybe what we’re really doing is remembering the rituals that make us available to each other.

Remembering that gratitude isn’t a nice-to-try in a creative life. It’s an essential ingredient.

One last thing…

My first memory of the word “Gratitude” is at 16, listening to Jason Mraz like he was a fedora-donning prophet. I became obsessed with the idea of being grateful—full hyper-fixation mode.

I definitely didn’t understand it, but something in me woke up.

Gratitude gave language to a feeling I’d had for years without knowing how to name it: that there was something beyond the tangible, the measurable, the five-sense reality I’d been handed. A kind of quiet “more-ness” I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for.

In that way, gratitude was my gateway drug to spirituality.

What followed was nearly two decades of exploring that doorway. Heartbreak, Love, loss, drugs, silent discos, and an immeasurable number of conversations all nudged me deeper.

I’m not hunting for answers as aggressively as I once did. I’ve learned to catch peace in pieces of music, to find guidance in all kinds of scripture, to let Sondheim songs wash over me when I need a reset. The frantic digging has slowed. The itch itches less.

But whenever I do lose my footing—when I inevitably feel unsteady or like I’m totally lost in the wilderness—Gratitude is always what I return to. It is home base. It allows me to appreciate, dare I say Love, the miracles and the mundane. It is neutral, stable ground. It connects me back to my body, my breath, and the belief that something bigger than me might be steering the ship.

So let me take this moment to thank you, reader, for whatever string of improbable events brought you to this exact sentence. For the life you’ve lived, the memories you’re carrying, the ideas you’re marinating on, and the Love you’re made of.

I am, sincerely, eternally grateful.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

Dear friend,

Whether you’ve been reading The Fourth Wall for ten months, ten weeks, or you somehow landed here ten minutes ago, my hope is that you can sense I’m trying to show up honestly. Not perfectly. Just honestly.

And this week, I wanted to take that one step further.

Over the past year, people have asked me some real questions. They came through emails, DMs, classes, stage doors, late-night texts, coffee dates with friends. They stretched me. They lingered. They made me confront things I’ve avoided in myself.

So this week, instead of writing a big essay or a grand thesis, I wanted to try something simpler and scarier: answering four of those questions as honestly as I can—without pretending I have perfect clarity, or perfect perspective, or perfect anything.

I’m going to get some of it wrong. I already know that. But I also know these are the conversations I keep circling back to, and maybe they’re ones you’ve been circling too.

Shall we?

Am I allowed to want stability and to pursue a creative life? Or is that cheating?

I’m always struck by how often “stability” and “a creative life” get framed as opposites. As if they can’t coexist—or if they do, it’s only for the chosen few: movie stars, Broadway leads, music moguls.

But what if stability isn’t the enemy of a creative life? What if it’s one of the conditions that lets creativity breathe?

Most of the time, “stability” really means financial stability. Fair. And the cultural script says a creative life is inherently not a money-maker.

If we take that at face value—even just for the sake of argument—I think there’s something to learn from Elizabeth Gilbert’s (imho) masterpiece Big Magic.

She lays out a path for those of us who haven’t “hit it big” yet: don’t quit your day job. Instead, weave creativity into the life you already have. Consistently. Sustainably. It’s both a practice of gratitude for the present and a form of devotion to your creative spirit.

Financial stability isn’t selling out. It’s paying rent so you can keep making stuff.

And wanting something different isn’t bad—but wanting can cast a long shadow over what’s already working in your life.

When that friction between stability and creative fulfillment shows up for me, I treat it as a signal. Energy looking for an outlet. A nudge to start something small.

A newsletter, for instance.

I don’t need it to be life-changing. I just need it to get me moving—present, grounded, and painting a little outside the lines.

Wanting stability doesn’t make you less of an artist. If anything, stability gives the art (and the artist) room to grow.

How do I know if I’m creating art or just making content? What’s the difference?

I’ll cut right to the chase: I don’t think the label matters.

If what you’re making gets you present—if it shifts your state, helps you process something, gets you out of your head, or drops you back into your body—who cares what it’s called?

Filming a dance trend, writing a song no one will hear, running lines, doodling, voice-memoing a new lyric, taking a photo that accidentally feels profound, journaling in your notes app, moodboarding on Pinterest, playing with lighting in your bedroom—if any of it wakes you up, it counts.

Creativity is both a muscle and a miracle. It’s the practice of sharing something within us and letting something bigger move through us. Art and content are both generative in that way.

The only time the distinction matters is when the thing you’re making starts to feel like it’s taking from you.

Not in the “good workout” way. In the “this is chipping away at my spirit” way.

If something—art or content, highbrow or silly, polished or chaotic—starts hollowing you out instead of filling you in? It’s not worth your time. Life is too short to trade your lifeforce for an audience.

What I’m seeking, always, regardless of what I’m making, is presence. To feel challenged, or curious, or delighted. To feel alive.

So how do you know if it’s art or content? You don’t. And honestly? You don’t need to.

The better question is: how does it make you feel while you’re making it?

If the answer is “here,” “awake,” or “more myself,” you’re doing it right.

Does making your own work actually lead anywhere, or is it just wishful thinking and self-imposed homework?

Short answer? Yes, it leads somewhere. Always. Just not always where you expect.

There’s this fantasy that making your own work immediately opens doors, lands you an agent, or gets you cast in the thing you’re dreaming of. And sure, sometimes it happens like that. But most of the time, the return isn’t linear. Or immediate. Or obvious.

Here’s what I’ve learned: making your own work is less about outcomes and more about orientation. It points you toward yourself. It keeps you awake. It gives you momentum when the industry won’t.

I’ve made a lot of things that didn’t “go” anywhere on paper. Red carpet videos. Weird sketches. Tiny projects. Conversations. Experiments.

And yet: those things did lead somewhere. Creation breeds movement. Movement breeds possibility.

And even when a project doesn’t “hit,” it still changes you. It sharpens your taste. It clarifies what you want. It reveals your voice. It builds the muscle that whispers, I can make something—which is the antidote to almost every artistic crisis.

But here’s the part people skip over: making your own work only becomes self-imposed homework when you start doing it to appease the algorithm instead of your curiosity.

If it’s draining you, flattening you, or turning your creativity into obligation—that’s not “making your own work.” That’s just performing productivity. You can opt out of that.

The projects that count are the ones that feel like little sparks. The ones that challenge you or delight you or just light you up in some way. Those are the ones that create real momentum.

So is it wishful thinking? Sometimes. But wishful thinking is the birthplace of almost every good idea we have.

And does it lead somewhere? Yes. Not always where you think. Not always on your timeline. But somewhere deeper, wider, and more honest than if you’d waited for permission.

If your work is moving you, it’s already moving you forward.

How do I know if I’m chasing a dream or just clinging to an identity?

I think this question shows up when the dream and the identity have gotten tangled—when the thing you’ve wanted for so long quietly becomes the thing you’re afraid to let go of.

Underneath it isn’t ambition; it’s fear. Fear of outgrowing a dream you built your life around. Fear that letting go would make the past feel wasted. Fear that wanting something different means you’re lost or inconsistent. Fear of what people will think if you pivot. And maybe the deepest fear: who you are without the label you’ve been wearing for years.

For me, the difference between the two comes down to the why. A dream is something you’re reaching toward. An identity is something you’re trying not to lose. A dream can evolve as you evolve. An identity asks you to stay who you were.

When I’m trying to sort it out, I ask myself: If no one knew I wanted this—if no one was watching—would I still want it? If the answer is yes, it’s usually a dream. If the answer is no—or “I’m not sure”—I might be holding on because the identity feels safer than the uncertainty underneath.

That’s not a flaw. It’s human. We all outgrow versions of ourselves. And you don’t owe your past self lifelong loyalty. You’re allowed to want differently. You’re allowed to evolve, even if other people don’t fully understand it. You’re allowed to disappoint the imaginary jury in your head.

A dream changes with you; an identity resists change. So when you’re unsure, look at the fear beneath the wanting. Are you moving toward something? Or holding on because you’re scared to let go?

Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t chasing the dream you had—it’s admitting the dream has changed, and letting yourself change with it.

One last thing…

This week’s newsletter ended up being an interesting exercise for me—and, no surprise, it made me think about the questions I’m asking and who I bring them to.

I’ve realized the people I trust most—the directors and creative collaborators I love, the friends I go to for advice—aren’t the ones who claim to know everything. They’re the ones who say, “I don’t know, but let’s look at it together.” Their POV feels like an offering, not a verdict.

That’s the energy I want for The Fourth Wall.

So if there’s a question you want me to dig into someday—big, small, personal, philosophical, messy—hit reply and send it over.

Consider this an open invitation to wonder out loud with me.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt