My mom knew first.

Her text was waiting when I woke up. I'd figured it would happen sometime overnight, so I opened our dashboard to check, and there it was: theater.games had crossed one million puzzles played.

A million. Built by two guys with no computer science degree between them, one puzzle at a time.

I looked at the number for a while. I thought: that's cool. And then the day started, the same as any other day.

On paper, it's the biggest thing that's happened to this project. I kept expecting it to land somewhere in my body, and it kept not landing.

Back in July, when the app went live in the App Store, I wrote about how strange it was to cross a finish line and feel almost nothing. I ended that piece with what I thought was a pep talk: when you cross the finish line, there'll be another one waiting.

I meant it as encouragement. Two months later, it reads more like a warning label.

That's what I want to sit with this week—what happens to a win once you've reached it, and why the finish line always seems to be somewhere up ahead.

Places.

Halfway

The million wasn't the only number this week.

To mark the milestone, we launched a fundraiser. Everything we've done on theater.games so far has come out of our own pockets. So we went straight to the people who play and asked for $5,000, enough to run the platform for another year. (It's called Keep the Lights Up, and it lives here, if you're so inclined.)

A few days in, we're almost halfway there. Nearly $2,500, from people who play a theater puzzle every morning and decided they wanted it to keep existing.

When I tell people, they say that's great. And somewhere in my head, a voice answers: it's $2,500. Real companies raise hundreds of thousands.

I know that voice well enough to know what it would say if we'd raised a hundred thousand. It would say: well, it's not a million.

Whatever number I hit, the voice has a bigger one ready.

The Bar

Theater teaches this one early.

When I booked my first regional gig, I called my mom sobbing. What I told her, through the tears, was: "Well, I'm never going to work again. This is it."

I'd just been handed the thing I wanted, and I was already grieving the next one.

If you've spent any time in this business, you probably have your own version of that phone call. The business hands you the next rung the second you land on one—usually as a question, usually from someone who loves you.

You book the tour, and someone asks when you're coming back to New York. You open Off-Broadway, and everyone wants to know if it's transferring. You get nominated, and the first question is whether you think you'll win.

Nobody means any harm. They're excited for you. But every one of those questions says the same quiet thing: this is a step, and the real thing is still to come.

After a while, you don't need anyone to ask. You ask yourself. The whole career becomes a staircase—first paid job, regional contract, Off-Broadway, Broadway, the nomination, the win—and each step is the dream right up until you're standing on it. Then it's the floor.

And then there's the second layer, the one nobody warns you about. You know you're supposed to be grateful. You are grateful. Plenty of people would kill for the contract in your hand. So on top of the job feeling like not enough, you feel guilty that it doesn't feel like enough.

It should feel bigger. You should be happier. The win shows up with homework attached—feel great about this—and when you can't, that becomes one more thing you're behind on.

Silver

Psychologists have a name for the first part of this: the hedonic treadmill.

The phrase comes from two researchers, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, who argued back in 1971 that we don't measure good things on some fixed scale. We measure them against whatever we've gotten used to. Something wonderful happens, we adjust, and the wonderful thing becomes the new normal. You walk faster and faster and end up exactly where you started.

A few years later, Brickman and two colleagues went looking for the most extreme test they could find: people who had won the lottery. The winners weren't meaningfully happier than people who hadn't won. And they took less pleasure in the everyday stuff, like reading a magazine or getting a compliment. The big win faded, and it took some of the small ones down with it.

That's the fading. The second part stings more.

In the mid-'90s, a different team of psychologists pulled footage of medalists from the 1992 Summer Olympics and had people rate how happy each athlete looked, right after their event and again up on the podium.

The bronze medalists looked happier than the silver medalists.

The athletes who did objectively worse felt better. The researchers' explanation comes down to which way you look. Silver looks up, at the gold it just missed. Bronze looks down, at the version of the day where it went home with nothing.

Most of us spend most of our lives as silver medalists. Up on the podium, holding something real, staring at the step above.

The Receipt

Nobody moves a goalpost they haven't reached.

For the line to move, you have to have gotten there first. A million plays only feels ordinary because it happened. The regional contract only feels small once it's signed. The Broadway ensemble job only starts to feel like "just the ensemble" once you're inside the building.

The moving line is the receipt. It's proof you already crossed the last one.

And when I sit with the [theater.games](http://theater.games) numbers long enough, the ones that get me are smaller. More than two thousand people play every single day. I've written and built more than a thousand individual puzzles. Something that didn't exist is now a small, daily part of people's lives. None of those are 'viral' but they're what I feel most proud of.

The bar is going to move. None of us gets a vote on that. It's how we're wired, and it's probably part of what keeps us making things.

What we do get is the beat before it moves.

So here's what I want, for all of us: look down once in a while. Whatever you're standing on right now—the contract, the callback, the closing night, the thing you finally finished, the thing you're halfway through—there was a time you would have given anything to stand exactly there.

Take a beat. Let it land.

Be the one grinning on the podium.

This week in One Last Thing: the other number I check, right next to the plays—and the finish line I haven't said out loud.

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

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

I can’t think of the last time I first heard a piece of theater news from a mainstream outlet. Honestly. In last few years, my theater news comes exclusively from social media, sometimes before the story even reaches an outlet.

Posts, reposts, stories, reels, carousels, and TikToks have slowly become a language of their own, and there's wave of creators who are fluent. Their skill and speed mean they're able to outpace traditional theater news sources.

That's what I want to get into this week—where theater news actually lives now, how this all started, and what this means for an industry that is feeling fragile.

Read all about it.

The Record

Here's how an official piece of theater news becomes a story in 2026: a publicist writes a press release, the release goes to the outlets, and the outlets run the release.

Casting news. Revival announcements. Closing notices. Opening dates. The information arrives pre-written, pre-approved, pre-formatted, and it runs pretty much as-is. And if a story shows up without a release attached—an independent project, a small company, something weird and new—most of the time it doesn't run at all.

I want to be careful here, because this piece has no villains in it. That's economics. Shrinking staffs, corporate owners, more shows opening in any given month—on Broadway, off it, across the country—than any masthead on earth could cover. Running what's official and pre-packaged is a rational answer to an impossible math problem.

And the function the outlets settled into still matters. They became the record: the place where a thing gets confirmed, dated, spelled correctly, and archived where you can find it in ten years. Somebody should do that job. I'm glad somebody does.

But being the record is a different job than being the news.

The news went somewhere else.

The Talk

There's a theater creator who moves faster than every outlet in New York combined. He runs a Patreon where paying subscribers get scoops early, before the public does. That's a subscription trade paper—an early-access tier, a paywall, a beat. One guy with a phone rebuilt the whole model from scratch.

The gap is structural. When he hears something, the distance between hearing it and publishing it is however long it takes to film a video. An outlet has the process—editors, fact-checks, legal reads, sign-offs—and the process is exactly what makes it slow. He has thumbs.

And speed is only half of it. The other half is the take. When a creator brings you the news, it arrives with a face on it—an eyebrow, a wince, a full editorial in the presentation. You might agree. You might spend the afternoon drafting the comment you'll never post. Either way you felt something, and feeling something is the reason you'll come back tomorrow. A press release can tell you the revival is happening. It can't tell you whether it should be.

He has company. There's a whole wave of creators covering theater news this way now—scoops, recaps, reactions, box office breakdowns, each with their own following and their own flavor. I'd guess the wave started when the stages went dark in 2020: an entire industry suddenly home. But the true takeover is more recent than that. Somewhere in the last eighteen months, it became the default—the first place theater news really lands.

It would be easy to file all of this under fan behavior. Except the industry is watching too. Producers, agents, casting offices, marketing teams—people who do this for a living—find out what's happening in their own business the same place you do.

These creators carry more influence over the industry than the industry likes to say out loud.

Sardi's

The talk was always this fast. The publishing never was.

Theater has run on gossip since before it had electricity. Who's in, who's out, who's replacing whom, which show is quietly in trouble—that information has always moved through this community at the speed of conversation. It moved through Sardi's. It moved through lobbies at intermission. It moved through the chat boards at two in the morning. The conversation has always outrun the coverage.

Print was the bottleneck. By the time a story was assigned, written, checked, and set, the industry had known for a week. So the record and the talk lived in separate rooms, and everyone understood the arrangement: the paper made it official, and everybody else made it interesting.

The gossip predates the feed by four centuries. What's new is the plumbing. For the first time in the history of the art form, publishing moves at the speed of talk. A creator with a phone posts at the pace a rumor travels.

Proof of Life

The speed has a price, and it's gossip's oldest one: sometimes the talk is wrong. And now it compounds—reposted, stitched, screenshotted—before it's been verified as true. In a business that lives week to week on advance sales, a wrong rumor moving that fast does real damage.

And still. Pull back far enough and the same noise reads completely differently.

You know the messaging by now. The industry is dying. Everything is closing. Nothing can sustain itself. It's all over soon. Some weeks that drumbeat gets loud enough to believe.

But nobody gossips about a dead thing. You don't argue in the comments about an art form you've given up on, and you can't build a paid subscriber base on news about a thing nobody loves. A community that can spread a casting announcement coast to coast in an hour—that fights about a revival before the outlets confirm it exists—has a pulse. The talk is a vital sign. Millions of people caring out loud, every day, for free.

Fragile things die in silence. This is loud.

Keep spreadin' the news.

This week in One Last Thing: why the press release pipeline cannot reflect what's really happening in the industry, and how I know.

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

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

On Sunday, in a town of nine thousand on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, Come From Away will play the final performance of its summer run—in Gander, where the story happened.

The same day, in Lower Manhattan, members of its Broadway cast will sing the score at the World Trade Center, steps from where the towers stood.

It's been twenty-five years. Long enough for a musical about that week to be written, workshopped, opened, awarded, toured, closed, and brought home to the town that lived it. And long enough for the people in the seats to change.

That's what I want to sit with this week—how theater carries history, once the people who lived it begin to hand it off.

Welcome to the Rock.

Every high schooler in America was born after the towers fell.

So was every middle schooler. So were most college students. When Come From Away opened on Broadway in 2017, the show could assume its audience remembered. Nine years later, that assumption is dissolving in real time. Every season, the house fills with more people for whom the show is the first telling.

Which means the same hundred minutes are doing two different jobs, in the same room, at the same time. For one seatmate, the show is a reliving: the grounded planes, the jammed phone lines, the week the world stopped. For the seatmate one armrest over, it's an introduction. One of them is grieving. One of them is learning. They're breathing the same air, laughing at the same screech-in, going quiet at the same moment.

I sent my parents to see the show when it was on Broadway. They carried a different September 11 into that theater than I did—I was nine that morning; they were adults with a nine-year-old. Same seats, different remembering. The show made room for all of it.

A documentary plays for whoever presses play, alone on a couch. A play gathers the rememberers and the learners into one room and asks them to feel it together.

The Diary of Anne Frank opened on Broadway in 1955, ten years after she died in Bergen-Belsen.

It won the Pulitzer Prize. And for seventy years it has done something the history books couldn't: it put her voice in a living girl's mouth, in front of a living audience, over and over, in theaters and classrooms and black-box basements. Generations met the Holocaust through Anne first—person before number, attic before archive.

The Laramie Project was built the way Come From Away was built: writers with recorders, listening. Today it's a staple of school theater seasons across the country—staged by students born long after Matthew Shepard died, saying real people's words out loud.

That's the pattern, and it's older than both shows. When we can't bear to forget something, we make it a play. A textbook holds still. A film holds still. A play refuses to exist unless living people gather in a room and do it again—so the remembering has to be re-inhabited, every time, by whoever is alive to do it.

Come From Away joined this lineage before it was a musical at all. In 2011, Irene Sankoff and David Hein flew to Gander for the tenth anniversary, when the plane people came back to say thank you. They stayed, and they listened—interview after interview with the townspeople and the returned passengers. Some of the lyrics are transcripts. The show was an act of listening before it was ever an act of singing.

Nobody remembers September 11. Not all of it.

You remember your piece: one kitchen, one classroom, one tv screen. Human memory doesn't hold events whole—it holds slivers, hard and bright and specific.

Come From Away holds the day the same way. One town. Thirty-eight planes. Five days. Out of the enormity, a sliver—held completely. The show never tries to tell the whole story, because nothing can. And in that, the form and the memory match: a play is built like a memory. Specific, partial, embodied, warm.

That match is what makes the remembering portable. The whole day is too big to hand to a sixteen-year-old. Gander fits: nine thousand people making seven thousand beds.

A sliver, truly held, can somehow encapsulate everything around it. Ask anyone who's seen the show: you leave the theater carrying five days in Newfoundland, and also parts of that day, that time, that the show never depicts.

Some year soon, a sixteen-year-old will stand in a high school gym with a chair, a Newfoundland accent she practiced in her bedroom, and a real person's words about five days she never lived.

It's already how The Laramie Project survives. It's how Anne Frank still speaks. The remembering doesn't stay in the audience forever—eventually it climbs onto the stage. A kid born a decade after 2001 will learn the beats of that week the way actors learn everything: in her body, out loud, with her friends. For a hundred minutes, the history will have her heartbeat.

Every performance is an act of remembering.

That's what it means to never forget.

This week in One Last Thing: what I actually remember from September 11, 2001—all three pieces of it—and why, twenty-five years later, I've been bingeing the documentaries. It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm grateful you're here.

See you next week ♥️

—Matt

Next Tuesday, September 8th, at 6:45pm, the marquees of all forty-one Broadway theaters will go dark together for one minute to honor a list of thirteen theater people including Josh Grisetti, Glen Hansard, Harold Wheeler, Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Anna Louizos.

A name that isn't on the list is Ray DeMattis. A man I met in a rehearsal room for a regional production of Saturday Night Fever in 2015.

He had played Roger in Grease on Broadway starting December 22, 1972. He was in City of Angels in 1989, covering half the men in the company. Zoya's Apartment in 1990. Mushnik's understudy in the Little Shop revival in 2003. Off-Broadway he did Flora, the Red Menace and Fifty Million Frenchmen, and Enter Laughing: The Musical in 2008, and again in 2009, and again in 2019. He turned up on Ryan's Hope and The Cosby Show and The Sopranos and, like every working actor who has ever lived in New York, on Law & Order.

Fifty-three years. Thousands of rehearsal rooms. Hundreds of companies. Countless young actors who marveled at his tenacity, joy, and wholehearted love of this craft. I know that because I was one of them.

That summer, I was filming a behind-the-scenes vlog series, and Ray's in a bunch of the episodes. In one of them, he darted into the room where I was filming and when I asked him for advice he spouted this gem:

"This cost me like $150,000 in forty years of analysis. You ready? Here's the key to the whole thing: stay in the present. It is the key to acting. It is the key to relationships. It is the key to life. And it's a lot harder than you think. You can't bring the past to the present. It makes no sense. The future hasn't happened yet. It's all what ifs. Stay in the present. I just saved you $200,000!"

When I learned of Ray's passing, I revisited these videos and was surprised at how much I cried when I stumbled upon this piece of guidance. His enthusiasm and zest were contagious. And I wasn't alone in feeling that. An afternoon of text exchanges with cast mates confirmed that his playfulness was a major ingredient of the sweet summer we all spent together. We just adored him.

Now I want to be clear: this is not me campaigning to get Ray added to the list.

It's a list. Somebody will always be left off. And knowing Ray, I think he'd have waved the whole conversation off. Far too modest for it. He'd probably have told you he was just glad to have spent his life working alongside so many incredible artists.

The truth is that the marquee dim, even with its limited list, is one of the most beautiful things this industry does. Forty-one signs blazing over midtown, and then a full minute of dark. It's a deeply moving gesture.

But there's another object, burning inside every theater across the globe, that may already have the ability to honor more theater people than the marquees ever could.

Enter: the ghost light.

A bare bulb that burns, every night, center stage, after the shows have come down and the audiences have gone home. Practically, it's there so nobody crossing a dark stage walks off the lip and into the pit.

Traditionally and spiritually, there are countless theories about its purpose. Some say it gives the theater's ghosts a stage of their own, so they'll leave tomorrow's show alone. Some say it's there to keep them out.

For me, the ghost light is how we keep the people we've lost inside the rooms we're still playing in. It's the hour of the night when the building belongs to everybody who ever worked in it, and the ghost light is a beacon: a way to call them in.

It's a kind of vessel for grief. It fills a hollow, dark room with light. It stays on, keeping the space alive. It's a simple piece of technology with massive symbolism. It carries the beautiful bothness that I learned to hold when Gavin Creel passed away.

So when I look at one, I can't help but think about Ray.

I can't help but think about the usher who handed out Playbills for thirty years. And the spotlight operator who decorated the booth and made it their home away from home. And the swing who never went on but knew the blocking and choreo better than anyone in the building. And the teacher who painted the set, sewed the costumes, and ran the light board, gleefully. And the season ticket subscriber who started coming with her grandparents and now brings her own grandchildren. And on and on and on.

Our lists could never cover the countless people in community theaters and county playhouses and high school auditoriums who shaped hundreds of lives inside their own zip codes.

"The industry" has been touched by thousands of people we will never hear about, and their legacies are just as important as the ones the marquee dim will honor.

So let's give that job to the ghost lights.

But not just the ones burning in midtown Manhattan. There's little bulbs lighting up dark rooms near you, every single night.

And I like to think they're on for Dolly, and Tim, and Anna, and Harold, and Glen, and Josh, and Ray.

And, no doubt, whoever you're thinking of too.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

A put-in rehearsal is a full Broadway show, performed once, for almost nobody.

In May, there was a put-in at the Belasco Theatre on West 44th Street for the new cast of Maybe Happy Ending. I know that because there's footage of it on YouTube. Right now.

Meet the Models is a three-part documentary about three actors joining Maybe Happy Ending—a month of rehearsal, a put-in, and one debut, from the subway ride in to the stage door after. It's a rare glimpse into the reality of "uploading" a new cast to an already running show.

Broadway documents its beginnings obsessively. First day of rehearsal, first preview, opening night, the ten-years-later reunion concert. This week we're looking at what happens when a show decides a notoriously un-glamorous part of the process is a story worth telling.

Power on.

The Changeover

Darren Criss played Oliver for the last time on a Sunday in May. Zachary Noah Piser played him for the first time, on Broadway, that next Tuesday.

The apparatus for that changeover is small and well-oiled and works fine. A press release goes out. The outlets pick it up. There's a photo call, and a first-curtain-call bootleg-style iPhone video, and eventually a new Playbill with new headshots in it. (Once upon a time, there was also a slip of paper!!)

All of it is notification.

Because a replacement gets filed under a different heading than an opening. An opening is an event. A replacement is upkeep—the thing you do so the show can keep being the show.

Which means the second cast inherits the audience and not the occasion. The anticipation, the reviews, the party, the whole sense that people were gathered to watch something start—that belongs to whoever was there first.

Unless...

Meet the Models

Three episodes, one month.

Episode one is the first day of rehearsal: Zachary Noah Piser, Savy Jackson, and Cathy Ang, with twenty-eight days to learn a show that won six Tony Awards.

Episode two is the put-in, the first time they wear the costumes and stand in the real light on the real set.

Episode three follows Piser through the day of his Broadway debut in the role.

It lives in the lineage of classic theatre documentaries like Every Little Step and ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway.

Mason Robert Bray created and produced it, with Katharine Quinn executive producing. I asked him what it was for. He wrote:

It feeds the fans that are already hungry to see the behind-the-scenes of the show, and it creates a clear pipeline of discovery for audiences to fall in love with the new cast members.

We wanted to help celebrate the very real accomplishment of joining an already-running show, which doesn’t often get time in the light. We, as a team, are emotionally invested in their success, and want audiences to be too.

Emotional investment in their success. That's a strangely humane strategy sentence. Theatre strategy, most of the time, boils down to one goal: butts-in-seats. This idea, to create audience investment, is a different approach.

By highlighting the humanity of the people making the show, you're speaking first to people's hearts instead of making a sell to their wallets.

Which is what the show does too.

Newer Model

Oliver is a Helperbot-3. Claire is a Helperbot-5.

Their first real scene together is an argument about which of them is better built. She's newer, faster, more advanced, and her battery is failing. He's slower, obsolete on paper, and he will outlast her. They live in a facility for retired HelperBots in Seoul because the people who owned them upgraded.

The show shows us, in some ways, two machines in maintenance. We watch them stumble through the mess of falling in love—with each other, and themselves. Two non-humans having the most human experience there is: discovering they're valuable. One-of-one.

Show people that upkeep and they'll find the person inside it. That's the show's route to the heart.

And it works. The night I saw it, the house was tourists—a night-out crowd, people who picked the robot show. And they were laughing. Big, easy, unguarded laughing. Also sniffling, and going quiet in the right places. Bringing a non-theater audience all the way inside a piece of theater is one of the hardest things in this business to do. A year and a half into the run, a brand-new cast, and that room was all the way in.

The docuseries runs the same route. Open up the Broadway machine, and let an audience fall in love with the people keeping it alive.

Two obsolete machines arguing over which of them is more replaceable. Played by actors this business typically considers replacement parts.

The Occasion

Fun fact: Zach first workshopped this show years ago, back when it was still a maybe—before the Belasco, before the Tonys, before Darren Criss.

Then it went on without him. It happens.

Four years later, he got to walk in the stage door and play the part on Broadway. Twenty-eight days to learn what was years in the making.

That's a pretty compelling story. Thankfully, the team at Maybe Happy Ending realized it too.

But truth be told, countless replacements and stand-bys and understudies are living stories like this all the time. Callbacks and almosts turning into debuts and last-minute swing-ons. Long-running shows are designed to outlive their original casts—a replacement cast succeeding is a major marker of a show's success.

The rare part is treating these turnover moments like the occasions they are. Documenting one is generous and smart marketing in the same breath. The material is everywhere. Somebody just has to decide the story is worth telling.

This team did. They filmed the maintenance because it mattered.

What they made is a very happy ending.

This week in One last thing: what it's actually like to sit in a house and watch one of your closest friends walk into a role he waited years for—and the history he and I share that made it hit even harder.

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

One last thing...

Saturday night, in a field in Kingston, New York, I hosted a campfire. Which is how I ended up sitting four feet behind Kelli O'Hara while she sang "Both Sides Now" with her daughter.

That campfire also had Adam Pascal doing an acoustic "Memory," and Jenn Colella, and Lauren Patten, and Norbert Leo Butz. It was the second night of The Festival—three days of Broadway in a reclaimed brickyard on the Hudson.

Earlier that same day, thirteen of the fifteen original Broadway cast members of RENT closed their set with "Seasons of Love."

This Festival was filled with moments like this. Out-of-body. Tangibly ephemeral. You could feel the precious seconds slipping by. Wholly present and then suddenly emotional that the present had passed.

I've come to call these moments in the woods.

That sensation, the awareness of the magic of a moment, and then having to process what it means, that's what I want to sit with this week. How we reconcile the sweetness and the sorrow of an experience being once-in-a-lifetime. And what remains.

Into the woods it's time go.

I keep getting asked, "how was it?" Which, I've found, is nearly impossible to answer.

There's no clean way to describe watching Chris Jackson sing "One Last Time," and Audra McDonald sing "Stars and the Moon," and Brian Stokes Mitchell sing "The Impossible Dream," and then walking onto that same stage, in front of more than 2,500 people, and singing "Getting Married Today."

Or what it was like to see my name printed alongside people I have looked up to my entire life. People who are, in a real way, part of the story of how I got here.

So as a fan, and as a performer, what was this weekend like? Honestly?

It was hard to hold.

Researchers who study awe have watched this hard-to-holdness happen on brain scans: the default mode network—the system that runs your self-narration, the constant commentary about how you're doing, how you're coming across, what's next—goes quiet.

People in a state of awe report their sense of self gets smaller. They merge with the moment. The internal machinery slows down, and what's left is whatever is happening directly in front of you.

It’s a close cousin of collective effervescence, with an extra splash of wonder on top.

Your mind may try to calculate, in real time, the convergence of circumstances that lined up to create this moment, but it all falls away. You are just there. Completely, unrecoverably present.

That's why I can't describe this weekend simply. The part of my brain that would normally be taking notes was completely offline.

On Monday, when I got on a plane to fly home to LA, I was carrying immense gratitude for what had transpired and deep grief that it was over. Whole body elation, and overwhelming sadness. I spent the flight trying to make it all make sense. Trying to reconcile the bothness. And frankly, I struggled.

For a long time I concluded that this was a personal defect—some inability to be normal about good thing. Incapable of just saying thank you and moving along with my life like a well-adjusted adult.

But science has an answer for this as well.

Awe, by definition, requires an experience to NOT fit neatly into our existing frameworks. If our minds are able to sort a moment into a pre-existing slot, then we can't and won’t experience that all-consuming sense of wonder.

The struggle to make sense of something like this is evidence that it was, indeed, profound. No wonder!

So when we arrive at Moments in the Woods in Act II of Into The Woods, we get to witness this happening in real time for The Baker's Wife.

She's just had an encounter with Cinderella's Prince. He charmed her, kissed her, and then disappears into the trees. She's left alone, in the middle of the woods, having just had a profound experience that she now needs to reconcile.

We watch her processing. She can't quite believe it. She plays it back. She wants more of it (and says so.) She does the math on her actual life—the husband, the baby, the bakery—against this thing that just happened amongst the trees.

And what she arrives at, in about three minutes, is that she cannot have both.

The moment was real, and the moment is over. And because she can't have that moment all the time, her life is richer. She understands that the "or" makes both the moment and her real life more meaningful.

In my opinion, it's Sondheim at his best. Taking something that is nearly indescribable and packaging it, neatly, inside a rhyme.

And now, no surprise, it's become part of my personal dictionary of feelings.

A festival is hardly the only kind of moment in the woods.

A birth. A death. A wedding, a breakup, a disaster, a miracle. The architecture is the same every time. Circumstances converge, and you're consumed by what's happening. Then it's over, and you're somewhere ordinary—a kitchen, a parking lot, an airplane seat—holding something enormous.

You're forced to create a new space in your head or heart that can carry this new experience. Your internal framework has to change. You are fundamentally different than who you were before.

That's what happened, for me, at The Festival.

It was a moment in the woods.

It was beautiful and profound and heart-opening, and then it was over. I left feeling inspired and proud and sad and depleted and totally lost and completely found.

On Sunday I was in the woods, crying from Audra's performance of "Some People," and then on Monday I was picking up my dog's poop off the sidewalk.

As The Baker’s Wife says:

Let the moment go
Don't forget it for a moment, though
Just remembering you've had an "and"
When you're back to "or"
Makes the "or" mean more
Than it did before
Now I understand
And it’s time to leave the woods

This week in One last thing: the first moment in the woods I ever had, what I did with it, and how long it took me to truly understand it.

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

This weekend I fly to New York for ten days, to rehearse and perform in The Festival—a Broadway Coachella of sorts, but more on that soon.

In truth, ten days is not a particularly long trip. But it's also ten days away from my husband, my dog, and the life we've been assembling out in LA since we moved here in April.

I'm excited for the trip, and sad to leave. I want to go, and I want to be home. These contradictions inspired me to revisit a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago.

"What We Do For Love" went out on the first of August last year, the week the theater community marked fifty years of A Chorus Line. I was closing the first run of BEAU off-Broadway that weekend, I was still living in New York, and I was contemplating the sacrifices this crazy business asks us to make.

Our Fourth Wall community has nearly doubled since then, which means many of you probably never had the chance to read it—so this week I want to share it again. Think of it as my way of reminding you (and me) that being in show business is messy, magical, and always a work in progress.

Here we go again.

Originally published August 1, 2025.

Fifty years ago, what started as a series of late-night sessions—dancers sharing stories about their backgrounds, dreams, heartbreaks, and the brutal realities of life in the chorus—became something unprecedented. Those conversations, recorded over months of vulnerable confessions, would become the foundation for A Chorus Line.

This week, as the theater community marked the 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking musical, I've been reflecting on Marvin Hamlisch's lyrics in "What I Did For Love." For me, it's the embodiment of the show's central question. In the context of the story, it's Diana's answer to "How would you feel if you couldn't do this anymore?"—but it speaks to something bigger that's at the heart of A Chorus Line: that a life in the arts is quite often a life of sacrifice.

And I've been wondering: What would my answer be?

This weekend, we'll close BEAU Off-Broadway. A show that, in so many ways, is a dream come true. The kind of project you hope for when you're just starting out: a new musical, an original story, a role that's been built with your fingerprints on it. But with that dream has come the inevitable fine print. Long hours. Low wages. The quiet, persistent ache of knowing that, despite how much love you're pouring into the work, sustainability is still a distant luxury.

I've found myself thinking back to Company, too. The national tour that took me across the country for a year. A milestone, a career highlight, and yet—a year away from my husband and my dog. Or the summer production of Hair that kept me from attending my best friend's wedding. Or watching my grandfather's funeral on FaceTime in a rehearsal studio.

I know these experiences aren't unique to me. I think they're baked into the DNA of this industry. It's a strange duality: to love something that can't love you back in the same way. To willingly barter pieces of your life for the chance to feel fully alive for a few hours each night.

This isn't a complaint. It's not even a critique. It's just an observation. A noticing.

Because I don't resent the work. I love the work. I love the way a story can crack you open in the middle of a matinee. I love the quiet moments backstage. I love the strange, beautiful alchemy of a live audience breathing with you in real time, all of you suspended together in the same fragile moment.

And I think we—artists, audiences, anyone who cares about this art form—can talk about the parts of the dream that don't fit into an Instagram caption. We can be honest about what it means to dedicate your life to something that is, by design, ephemeral. You build it, you share it, and then it disappears. Eight shows a week until it doesn't exist anymore.

These are the things I'm sitting with. Not in a bitter way. Not in a defeated way. Just in an honest, open-hearted way.

Because the truth is, I don't have answers. I don't know what the "right" amount of sacrifice is. I don't know how to measure when the cost becomes too high. And maybe there isn't a clean metric for that. Maybe it's a negotiation that changes with every chapter, every project, every season of life.

Maybe that's what I'm trying to understand right now: how to hold all of it. The pride and the sadness. The gratitude and the grief. The way a role can feel like a once-in-a-lifetime gift—and still leave you wondering how you'll pay next month's rent. The way a standing ovation can coexist with a quiet longing for something more stable, more predictable, more kind to the people who love you.

I don't think those contradictions cancel each other out. I think they're part of the shape of this thing we've chosen.

That's the part A Chorus Line gets so right. It doesn't offer resolution. No one gets a perfect ending. Not everyone gets the job. No one gets a happily-ever-after. But they all get to be seen. To stand on that white line, say their name, share their story, and be witnessed.

That kind of honesty still feels radical. Especially now, when so much of what we share is curated, compressed, and optimized for an Instagram caption. Even in our industry, where storytelling is supposed to be the currency, we're not always encouraged to tell the truth about what this life costs. About how lonely it can be. About how much uncertainty we carry in our bodies. About the quiet negotiations we make with ourselves every time we say yes to another project that we love more than it will ever love us back.

And yet, we stay. We keep showing up. We stay because there are moments that make it feel worth it—moments when the work transcends everything else, when you remember why you started, when the communion between performer and audience feels like the most important thing in the world. We stay because we still believe in the possibility that the next thing might offer something the last one didn't. Because somewhere inside the heartbreak, there's still joy. Still connection. Still the electric crackle of presence when the lights go down and something new begins.

So no—I don't have a clean answer to the show's central question. I don't know what comes next, or what the sustainable version of this life looks like, or how long I can keep choosing love over logic. I'm not even sure what I'm hoping to figure out.

I just know I'm asking different questions now. Questions I might not have had the courage to ask a few years ago. Questions that feel more honest than the ones I used to ask—the ones that assumed there was a right way to do this, a perfect balance to strike, a moment when it would all make sense.

Maybe the real legacy of A Chorus Line isn't just that it told the stories of chorus dancers, but that it gave us permission to ask harder questions about what we're willing to give up for the thing we can't live without. What we're willing to risk. What we're willing to lose.

Maybe that's what we did for love. We chose the ephemeral over the permanent. The uncertain over the secure. The beautiful over the practical.

And maybe, fifty years later, we're still working on our answers.

This week in One Last Thing: a year later, I went looking for what that run of BEAU actually bought me—and what I'm handing over again without knowing the price.

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

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On December 8, 1960, NBC taped Mary Martin playing Peter Pan.

Thirty-six years later, that tape was on loop in our suburban Chicago living room. I was four.

I have no memory of learning that musicals existed. By the time I could form memories I was already deep in that VHS, rewinding it, wearing it out, wholly obsessed in the complete and humorless way only a little boy could be.

Last Friday, a "pro-shot" of Hadestown opened in 1,949 movie theaters across North America. It was booked for five days. It made $10.2 million in its opening weekend, passed Hamilton's theatrical record, became the highest-grossing live capture ever made, and the five-day run turned into an indefinite one.

And the common questions resurfaced. Whether a camera can translate what a theater holds. Whether this counts as access or as a consolation prize. Whether anyone who watches it on a screen will ever buy a ticket to the real thing.

That's what I want to get into this week—the specific job these pro-shots do, and why they stand on their own next to the cast album and velvet seats.

All aboard.

The Loop

Speaking from experience, a five-year-old does not watch a musical once.

A five-year-old watches it forty times. Rewinds the same ninety seconds until the tracking lines go fuzzy. Learns the words, then the breaths between the words, then the exact half-second before a cue. That repetition is how a kid falls in love with anything, and it's how they eventually work out that a person made all of it on purpose.

You cannot do that with a live show.

Even with money, even in the right city, even if the tickets were somehow free—it plays once a night, and then it's gone, and eventually it's gone for good. Live is a one-time offer, every single time.

Earlier this year I watched Next to Normal three times on YouTube. Three times, in six weeks. I can't tell you the last time I saw the same musical three times in six weeks, because I haven't. It felt like a gift.

Sixty-six years of technology sits between that VHS and that YouTube tab, and the behavior is identical.

Passing Strange closed on Broadway on July 20, 2008, after 165 performances. Spike Lee filmed it on July 19. The run is eighteen years gone and the movie is still right there.

So before a pro-shot does anything else, it makes a show available more than once, and in more than one town. Nineteen hundred and forty-nine movie theaters at once, in places that were never getting a tour, on a Thursday afternoon, for the price of a ticket.

Hadestown has been at the Walter Kerr since 2019, eight shows a week, running about 98 percent full. That comes to roughly 380,000 people a year. The film did that number in three days.

Cast recordings, one could argue, are close cousins—but there's something these pro-shots have that the albums don't.

What You Can't Hear

The original cast recording of Peter Pan has "I'm Flying" on it.

If that's all you have, you hear Mary Martin singing about flying. You believe her completely, and your brain builds the rest—the window, the nursery, whatever a kid decides Neverland looks like. I wrote a whole piece in January about what that act of building does to us, so I'll leave it there.

Watching is a different event.

Watching, she leaves the ground. You can see the harness if you look for it. You can nearly see the wires. Behind her is a painted set, and past that, sometimes, an audience you can hear reacting in real time. Almost nothing is left to the imagination, and that turns out to be the gift. A kid doesn't have to picture any of it, because it's all right there being done. By a person.

An album can't hand you that, and a live show can't either, because a live show asks you to already be in the building.

An album tells you what a show sounds like. A capture tells you that it's a place, that people go there, and that you could be one of those people.

The Math

So the obvious next sentence is that we need more pro-shots. I'm not going to write it.

Hamilton's Broadway production was capitalized at $12.5 million. Filming it reportedly cost another ten to twelve. Nine cameras, two live performances in June of 2016, in front of people who had bought tickets. Disney then paid $75 million for the worldwide rights, reportedly the largest film acquisition anybody had ever made.

That's the version where everything goes right.

There is no standard contract for releasing a filmed Broadway show on demand. Every capture gets negotiated from scratch. Actors' Equity for the cast. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society for the director. United Scenic Artists for the designers. Then the composers, the crew, and whoever controls the underlying rights, each one settling what a person is owed for a use their contract was never written to cover. Theater's labor structure was built for live work. Nobody has gotten around to writing the other one.

Then there's the arithmetic underneath all of it. Hamilton was an outlier. Filming a musical usually runs somewhere between one and a half and four million dollars. About one in five Broadway musicals earns back what it cost to open in the first place, so the ask is that a business failing four times out of five spend it anyway. And if the film rights have already been sold, the capture is off the table entirely. A producer picks one, and the film sale is usually the bigger check.

Even with the money and every signature, the math only closes for titles people have already heard of. Film everything, and most of it sits there unwatched.

So we get the captures we get. What happens after one of them lands is a different question.

The Sign-Up Sheet

Almost nobody I know got here by walking into a theater first.

Ask around. The theater people in your life were recruited by a screen or a pair of headphones. A tape. A PBS broadcast. A cast album from the library. Stepping inside a theater came later.

I'm one of them. I'm here, in part, because NBC rolled tape in 1960.

None of these forms could ever replace actually being there. It happens once. Things go wrong. An actor makes a choice on a Tuesday they will never make again, and the people in that house are the only ones who will ever know it happened.

The thing that actually moved me was much smaller than $10.2 million.

My parents watched me wear out that tape and did the obvious thing: they took me to a musical I could actually get to. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, at the local high school. That's where the second obsession started. And then they signed me up for KIDSTAGE, the children's theater company in town.

A woman flying on a screen in my living room. A high school auditorium. A sign-up sheet.

The tape did its half. My parents did the other half. They noticed what a four-year-old was doing in front of a television, and they went and found him the nearest stage.

When Hadestown eventually hits streaming, there's some kid, somewhere, who will probably watch it more times than I watched Peter Pan.

That is how a screen becomes a door.

This week in One Last Thing: the musical movie I'm in that almost nobody has seen—and what it's been like to sit with that while writing a love letter to captures.

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

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Picture it: one of the best-reviewed musicals of the season. Nine Tony nominations, three wins—including the first Tony ever given to an openly trans woman, Qween Jean. Booked through January. And then, gone in four months.

The Jellicle Ball will close August 8th. With it, a massive community of self-proclaimed kittens will lose a space, and a piece, that made them feel like they were finally home.

André De Shields said the show has sewn "the seeds of a cultural revolution." And as someone who saw it on a rush ticket I can tell you plainly: you could feel it in the Broadhurst.

From inside, the disco ball burned bright. But in the context of our increasingly desaturated, matte-finished business, there was no sustainable path forward for our beloved fur-friends.

That's what I want to sit with this week—what that theater had, why the math closed it anyway, and most importantly: what a closing like this can't take away.

Let's walk.

Turned Down

A closing notice starts an autopsy.

How much did it cost. What did it gross. How far ahead were tickets selling, and how long could the producers keep carrying it. The questions are fair, and they're serious, because there are real people inside every answer. A single notice changes the shape of a calendar for actors, musicians, dressers, stage managers, the front-of-house crew, the press reps—everyone whose August opened up.

Commercial theater has to ask whether a show can pay for itself. The nightly math is real. So are the structures underneath it: ticket prices, what it cost to capitalize, what the theater takes off the top, how much a producer can spend to be seen, and how little time a show gets to find the people who'd love it before the money runs out. This summer, it ran fast. Audiences thinned across the board, and a show that had been extended into January was suddenly counting weeks.

None of that makes the producers villains. They're running a business built on rent and risk, and that math has hard edges.

The ledger can tell you whether a show can carry itself. It can't tell you what that show did to the people in the seats.

For that, you had to be there.

Turned Up

For most of my life, I couldn't have told you why a show about cats made any sense.

By the end of the Jellicle Ball, I got it.

The ballroom unlocked it. Strip Cats down and it was always a competition to be chosen—a company of outcasts, each one walking to be seen, one of them lifted up and sent off to be reborn. Hand that to ballroom, a culture Black and Brown queer people built over fifty years out of exactly that raw material—being told you're too much, and walking anyway—and it all snaps into focus.

Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch directing, Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons on the choreography, Qween Jean's costumes: artists who know that world from the inside imbued the show with new, long-awaited meaning.

When the kitties took the runway, it stopped being something I was watching and turned into something I was part of.

Clacking fans. Hooting and hollering. Strangers calling out like they'd been waiting their whole lives to. A freeness in the air I haven't felt in a Broadway house maybe ever. I was completely bought in and wholly let in.

The Broadhurst was undeniably overflowing with joy. But filling a theater with feeling is one thing. Filling it with enough ticket buyers to run eight shows a week, every week, is another. The Jellicle Ball had the first in spades. It ran out of the second.

The work never changed. The same production that felt like a revelation from my seat read, on a spreadsheet, as a risk that couldn't cover its costs. Put Cats in the ballroom and it becomes the truest version of itself. Put that version inside a commercial Broadway economy, and it goes from nine lives to none.

Same show. Different math.

Full Volume

So: who turns out when things get turned up?

That question decides far more than one show's fate. It shapes who a producer believes will actually buy a ticket. Which neighborhoods a marketing budget bothers to reach. How long a new kind of show gets to find its people. What stories get a stage big enough to grow up and glow-up on.

Because a best-reviewed, Tony-winning show still read as a bigger gamble than something safer and more familiar. That common calculation reciprocally reinforces the narrow idea of who a Broadway audience is.

And yet despite it’s early departure, The Jellicle Ball will forever be a part of show business history.

Before the ball drops, the New York Public Library is filming The Jellicle Ball for its archive. Generations of artists will be able to study what happened here. This revolution will, in some ways, be televised.

You can close a show. But you can't close what it proved. You can measure a show’s financial success. But you can’t truly measure a show’s cultural or emotional impact.

No matter what, thanks to Cats, our industry will never be the same.

For four months, they turned Black and Brown joy all the way up at the Broadhurst. And a whole lot of us finally heard it.

This week in One Last Thing: the first time in a long while that hope felt like it met me halfway—and the warm Pacific that had a little to do with it.

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

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On July 10th, thousands of people lined up to audition for the new revival of Spring Awakening. The producers saw around 2,500 of them.

Some folks on the internet decided the whole thing was a marketing play. Twenty-five hundred props for a content campaign. And I get it. The casting call was packaged into a highlight reel while people were still warming up in stairwells. When a producer points a camera at your hope, it's fair to ask what the camera is for.

But I think the fight online is about something bigger.

Because an audition—especially an open call like this one—is already one of the heaviest things a person can voluntarily do. And when a few thousand people do it at once, in public, on camera, all the contradictions this business usually keeps backstage come out to stand in the line too.

That's what I want to get into this week: the mess of the maybe that runs through all of show business—and why we keep trying to wrestle it into something simpler than it actually is.

Sign in.

Around the Block

In March of 2020, an open call for a national tour of Hairspray at Pearl Studios drew a line that ran the length of an avenue, around the block, and down another avenue—until they had to shut down an entire floor of the building because it got too crowded.

Nobody called that a stunt.

Open calls have always been mob scenes, because they're required to be open. Every Equity production has to hold them. It's in the contract—the union's whole point—the door that stays open so the industry isn't only appointments and connections and who-you-happen-to-know. Thousands of people, one long shot, a door somebody is obligated to leave unlocked.

That's the maybe the whole system runs on: anyone can walk in and take the chance. Spring Awakening didn't dream it up. They just posted a public invitation to it.

So "it was just marketing" gets the order backwards. The call was first. The post came second.

The Front Door

Spring Awakening was built on open calls.

The original 2006 company—the one that became a whole generation's entire personality—was largely discovered in rooms exactly like this one. Kids with no names yet, singing sixteen bars for Michael Mayer. One of them, a now Tony winner, sang a song from Rent at his open call and walked out with a Broadway career.

Rent, by the way, is the patron saint of the whole idea—a show about people on the margins that made a point of casting people from the margins.

That's the myth of the open call. It's the front door—the one place the machine has to let anyone walk in. Sometimes they don't hire a soul. Once in a while, it changes a life. Either way, it's the closest thing this business has to putting its money where its mouth is when it says that everyone gets a shot.

Which is why, when it looks like a stunt, it stings. You only feel betrayed by something you believed in.

The Count

The (valid) argument goes like this: they took 2,500 people's hope and turned it into free advertising.

And the anger isn't stupid. There's something real underneath it—the sense that showing up in person, before the sunrise, ought to mean more than an impression; that those are people in that line, with their own mornings and their own nerve, standing there because they wanted something badly enough to lose sleep over it.

But the producers weren't the only ones with a camera out.

Scroll long enough and you'll find the auditioners filmed it themselves. Get-ready-with-me for my Spring Awakening call. The 4am alarm. The subway at dawn. Live updates from outside the building, callbacks announced in real time, the whole nervy day narrated to a front-facing camera. The people we're told got used were authoring the exact same day—for themselves, on purpose.

So who used whom? The question falls apart, because everyone was doing everything everywhere all at once. It was marketing. It was also a genuine search for real people—I wrote almost that exact sentence a year ago, about the hunt for Dolly. But even two undersells it. It was a rite. A reunion. A dare a few thousand people made with themselves at six in the morning. A Tuesday.

Nothing that gets 2,500 people to stand outside in the New York City summer heat is doing just one thing.

Maybe it wasn't one thing. Or two things. Maybe it was all of it.

Nerve

Think about what an audition actually asks of a person.

You walk into a room, stand in front of strangers who hold all the power, and ask them to choose you. Then you go home and wait. There's no more exposed thing a person can do with their clothes on.

Your body treats it as exactly what it is: a threat. Being judged by people who can change your life triggers the same cortisol, the same adrenaline, the same bracing a body does when something's chasing it. You're on a tightrope, and your nervous system can feel the drop.

The uncertainty is the worst part. Researchers at UCL once ran a game where people might get a mild electric shock. The ones told they'd definitely be shocked stayed calmer than the ones told they only might be. A fifty-fifty maybe spiked more stress—and more cortisol—than a guaranteed yes or a guaranteed no. The hardest thing a nervous system can sit in is a maybe.

Which is the whole architecture of an audition: total exposure and total uncertainty, at the same time. Of course the body wants down. Of course it wants a clean landing—an answer, solid ground that ends the not-knowing.

So when the internet demands to know what the open call really was, it's grabbing for the exact thing every person in that line wanted too. Something to hold onto. A story that resolves. The relief of one settled answer.

The Maybe

And still, thousands of them showed up anyway.

Everyone was equally at the mercy of that room, which might be why the line was so generous. Strangers hyped each other up. Someone held your spot so you could find a bathroom. You got a "break a leg" from a face you'd never see again.

That warmth was real, and it's also what made the campaign work. The clip that sells the show is the same clip of people being unbelievably brave together, and there's no honest way to pull the two apart.

What those thousands actually did was harder than it looks. They stood in the most uncertain place there is—raw, waiting, no answer coming for who knows how long—and didn't demand it turn simple. They held the maybe. The least we can do, from the safety of our feeds, is hold it too.

Can something be sacred and strategic at the same time? Can we let a thing stay messy without crushing it into a binary choice? Can we take a breath and find the beauty in the in-between?

Maybe.

This week in One Last Thing: what twelve years of maybe actually does to a person—the resentment it can breed, and what I'm still learning six months after BEAU closed.

One Last Thing is for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm glad you're here.

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On Monday, our app (theater.games) went live in the App Store.

I've wanted to make an app since the first time I held an iPhone—and never once believed I actually could. When the day finally came, I told no one. I closed the laptop and took the dog out.

I posted about it online the next day, a little sheepishly. That was the celebration. No champagne, no balloons—just the quiet click of a thing I'd wanted since I was a teenager becoming real, and me, wondering why it didn't feel like anything.

That's what I want to sit with this week: the strange hollow of crossing a finish line. What it actually feels like from the inside, versus the version we all play in our heads.

Here we go.

The View From Inside

My parents found out from the internet.

They saw the post the next day, and the text came fast: this is amazing—why didn't you tell us? I didn't have a good answer. From where I was standing, it didn't feel like news. We'd been building it for months, and it had quietly been live for a beat before the "official" launch, so the morning it became "real" felt like any other morning at the laptop.

But the question did something. It made me step back far enough to see it—and from that distance, the distance a parent has, or a stranger, or your own self ten years ago, it looked like what it was. I helped build an app from scratch. It landed. It lives in the same store as everything else on your phone. Which is, objectively, sort of wild.

You just can't always feel that from up close. It's hard—maybe impossible—to see the scale of something from inside it.

Referee

The truth is, I've been building games since I was seventeen.

I was a ComedySportz referee in high school—the guy with the whistle, turning theater into a competitive sport for a room full of strangers. I spent six summers running the improv program at a boys' camp in Wisconsin, whose whole purpose was getting kids to be silly in front of each other. For five years I hosted red carpets for Broadway.com—a hundred and twenty-five opening nights—where the bit I ran was a new game for every show that opened.

In that way, theater.games is less of a pivot than even I initially thought. It's kind of the exact thing I've always done—hand a stranger a game and dare them to play. This time, however, it's in a form that finally outgrows the room. I didn't leave theater for tech. I found a bigger room.

My co-founder, Ian, has been a close friend of mine for almost a decade. Fun fact: I met my husband in his apartment. Neither of us has a computer science degree, but what we did have was a new set of tools that let you build software in something close to plain English, and a willingness to be beginners at something enormous. And that willingness—to be visibly, cluelessly new at a hard thing—turns out to be its own kind of theater game. Same muscle. You have to be okay looking foolish long enough to get good.

The Long Road

I've started maybe a hundred things in the last twelve years.

I'm a hobby picker-upper. I get an idea, go all in, push and push and push—then burn out and drift to the next one. Classic creative-brain wiring. Most of those hundred things are in a drawer or closet somewhere.

This is the first one that's felt less like a sprint and more like a road.

I think the Fourth Wall taught me that. I've been writing this thing for a year and a half, and the quiet shock of it is that it just kept going. People kept reading. It grew. Nothing about it was a lightning strike—it was showing up, week after week, until showing up week after week became the whole thing. That's the lesson I carried into theater.games. I can't see where the road ends, but I can finally see that it is one, and that it runs as long as I want it to.

Which means the work is just the next small step. And then the next one. We have enormous dreams for this—directions that light me up at 2am—and the healthiest thing I do all week is set them down and ask what actually has to happen today. Usually the answer is gloriously boring: schedule tomorrow's puzzle. Make sure there's a new one waiting when someone opens the app with their coffee.

And someone does. People play every day. Thousands actually. A few have told me it's become part of their morning, or that it put them back in touch with a high school theater friend they'd lost contact with. That's the part that feels aligned—the small daily proof that the thing does what I hoped it would, which matters more than any badge in a store.

On Monday, nobody brought me balloons. And that's okay.

I've gotten to do a handful of things I used to only daydream about—stood on a stage I'd only ever seen from the audience, made a cast album with my own voice inside it, opened a show I helped build. And every time, the moment was quieter than the daydream of it. The daydream comes with a swell of music underneath. The real thing just kind of...happens.

Adding "made an app" to that list this week felt exactly the same—smaller in the moment than it ever was in my head, and no less real for it. You don't get the swell. You just get the thing.

So whatever you're dreaming of, or working on: keep at it. Because when you cross the finish line, there'll be another one waiting.

And you bet your butt I'll be cheering you on from the grandstand.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

This is a piece about AI. And it's not what you think.

Most of what you'll read or watch will tell you that AI is one of two things: a miracle or a menace. The future, or the end of it. And theater people mostly reach for the same bin, because we've watched what "disruption" did to every art form it walked into. The fear is earned.

I'm not going to negate any of that.

The truth is, deciding that AI is just plain "bad" is easy, coherent, and comfortable. So it makes sense there's a whole other crowd who've decided that it's the greatest innovation in recorded history.

That's a stark contrast. All or nothing. Heaven or hell. Good or bad.

This week, I want to break open that binary and try to understand what we mean when we say AI—and if it's truly the overture of theater's final bow.

5, 6, 7, 8.

The Bucket

The name "AI" has taken on an enormous identity.

In some ways, it's stopped meaning anything. Suno swallowing 61,000 songs without consent so it can spit out a soundalike—that's a real harm, and the artists suing are right to be furious.

But "AI" also covers the predictive text that finished this sen—see, you knew where that was going, and so did your phone, and it's been doing that since 2014. It covers the dynamic pricing that decides what your Schmigadoon ticket costs tonight. It covers the lighting board that's been taking real-time cues and firing them back with inhuman precision since the Strand Memory console shipped in 1976. We lived alongside every bit of it for years and called it necessary innovation.

"AI is bad" is a mood wearing the costume of an argument. And the mood swallows the only question worth asking: what the thing is being used for, and by whom, and in place of what.

Now that's a harder question.

Open Draft

You might use Microsoft Word or Google Docs to write a document. Screenwriters often use a different program called Final Draft. It's the industry standard, it's been the industry standard for thirty years, and it costs $249.99. For a lot of people who want to write a movie, that number is a door, and the door is closed.

Two weeks ago, someone released a free version.

It's called OpenDraft. It does the formatting, the collaboration, the beat boards, the version control—the whole professional apparatus—and it's free, forever, open source, sitting on the internet for anyone to download tonight. And here's the part that matters: the person who built it almost certainly could not have built it five years ago. They built it with AI.

A machine helped a human build the room other humans write their screenplays in—and then that human gave the room away.

That's not AI making the art. That's AI helping make the tools, and handing them to people who were priced out of the building. For thirty years the gate was money—$249.99, or a computer science degree, or knowing the right engineer, or being stuck fighting with formatting in Microsoft Word. Talent was never what stood in the way.

That gate is quietly coming off its hinges all over the place, in every industry, for anyone with an idea and enough stubbornness to believe they can build it.

The Gold Rush

And now I have to complicate my own point, because I'm not here to just hand you a shinier bucket labeled good.

The same power that built OpenDraft is building ten thousand things that shouldn't exist. When anyone can conjure an app by describing it, you get a landscape full of tools that look finished—they have an interface, fetch your data, demo beautifully—and are quietly held together with tape and prayer. They work until they're asked to actually work, and then they fold, and there's no one on the team who understands what's underneath because no one on the team built what's underneath.

The rush to embrace is its own kind of blindness. "Anyone can build it" is thrilling and true. "Anyone should ship it" is how you drown. The friction that AI removes was sometimes just friction—but sometimes it was the thing making you slow down and get it right.

Sprinting in with both hands is the same mistake in reverse—the old binary flipped over, menace become miracle, the same lazy reflex in a different shirt.

The more honest position is the uncomfortable one: hold both.

This tool can open a locked door and flood the room. Both are true. The work is learning to tell which one is happening in front of you, every single time, instead of deciding once and calling it a worldview.

The Room

Which brings me to the thing I actually believe.

The more a machine can reproduce, the more the un-reproducible is worth. Every time the copy gets cheaper, the original gets rarer. That is basic supply and demand.

And there is nothing on earth less reproducible than a room of humans watching humans do something human.

The goosebumps from being part of a worthy standing ovation. The tears from hearing the person next to you crying on the first two "BUM BUM"s in the overture of Les Mis. The holding hands in the dark while characters on stage are falling in love.

You cannot prompt that. You cannot train on it. You cannot download it, stream it, or generate a second one—the bootleg is always a photograph of a meal. The whole art form is built on the one thing the technology can never touch: presence. Bodies in a room, breathing the same air, agreeing to be somewhere together while it's still happening.

We keep asking whether theater can survive the technology. I think we've had it backwards.

Technology, and AI, is quietly making theater the most valuable thing we've got.

This week in One Last Thing: the title I almost gave this piece—and what it says about a bias I fight every single week.

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This past Monday, 116 high school students walked onto the stage of the Minskoff Theatre for the Jimmy Awards. Two of them left with twenty-five thousand dollars and a head start on the rest of their lives.

If you love theater, the Jimmys do something strange to you.

Last year I wrote about the Jimmys from the outside in—how a small digital team turned a niche ceremony into a forty-million-view phenomenon. This year I want to talk about what the night does to the rest of us, the ones watching from the couch with a lump in our throats we can't quite explain.

Geronimo.

The Stage

In case you've never seen them: the Jimmy Awards—officially the National High School Musical Theatre Awards—are something like a national championship for teenage musical-theater performers. All year, regional programs around the country crown their own winners. Those winners get flown to New York, where for 10 days every June they rehearse together, get coached by Broadway professionals, and then perform on an actual Broadway stage in front of a packed house and a livestream that reaches millions.

And what comes through the screen isn't polish. It's love. These are seventeen-year-olds from Tucson and Atlanta and towns you've never heard of, singing their hearts out—for a lot of them, the first time they've ever stood on a stage like that. Undiluted, un-self-conscious, not-yet-bruised-by-the-industry love for this thing we all do.

It's contagious. You watch it and something in your own chest answers back. Oh, right. I love this too. I have loved it exactly like that.

It's the feeling the Tonys give you on a good year—the plain joy of watching the thing you've devoted your life to get held up in the light, celebrated, taken seriously, wanted. After a decade in the trenches of this business, it's easy to lose contact with whatever it was that pulled you in to begin with. The Jimmys hand it right back.

The Stakes

The Jimmys have also become a launchpad.

In 2018, Reneé Rapp and Andrew Barth Feldman won the top prizes. Within a year, Feldman was starring in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway—at sixteen. Rapp went on to Mean Girls on Broadway, then the movie, then an ever-growing pop career. Eva Noblezada didn't even win—she was a finalist back in 2013—and she's since earned two Tony nominations. And that's really only the tip of the iceberg: the list is long.

The pattern is real, and everyone in that building knows it. You don't have to win. You just have to be seen—in that room, on that stage, on a livestream or TikTok or Instagram reel that reaches tens of millions. The Jimmys have quietly become one of the most visible on-ramps to a life in this industry that has ever existed.

Which means the stakes are higher than they've ever been—and not in some abstract, industry way. Picture being seventeen and carrying that. The most pressure-soaked season of a young life already, and now add a Broadway stage, a national broadcast, and the unspoken sense that this could be the thing. The break. The before-and-after.

It isn't an unfounded belief. That's what makes it so heavy. The dream these performers are chasing is genuinely, provably within reach.

The Second Sensation

Those stakes can also spark something in the viewers that's hard to name.

It's not quite envy—that wanting of what someone else has. It isn't jealousy or sadness either. The closest word for it might be grief.

We talk about grief like it's reserved for the dead. But you can grieve a living thing—a path that forked the other way, a door that closed before you reached it, a version of yourself who never got the chance to walk through it.

The therapist Francis Weller has a name for this. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, he counts five gates of grief, and the fourth is the hardest to recognize: what we expected and did not receive. It mourns something that never arrived—a loss you can't quite point to, because nothing was taken. It simply never came.

For some, the door was never even a door. The chance came a year too late, or a town too far, or simply never came at all—so there's nothing that was held and then lost, only a threshold you never got to stand at. And watching these performers step through theirs, you can find yourself quietly mourning the one that never opened for you.

That ache, however, is the clearest measure of how much you love: you only grieve what you love. The pride and the grief come from the exact same place—a love for this art form so deep that watching someone else get to live it can crack you wide open. They're the same feeling, seen from two sides.

That's why you can sit there with wet eyes and not know which feeling they belong to. They belong to both.

The Strange Magic

The Jimmys do in one night what this whole business does over a lifetime.

The love, the longing, the dream held close enough to touch, the watching someone else get the thing you wanted—that's the entire arc of a life in theater, played at ten times the speed. Most of us live it across decades. Auditions we don't book. Roles we watch a friend originate. The slow, ongoing negotiation between how much we love this and what it costs to keep loving it.

The Jimmys take all of it and pour it into three hours on a Monday in June. That is the strange magic of the Jimmys.

Pride, grief, love, and showtunes: who could ask for anything more?

This week in One Last Thing: the feeling I almost mislabeled this year—and the word that finally let me off the hook.

One Last Thing is for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm really glad you're here.

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The first week after the Tonys, the buzz held.

Winners trending, speeches recirculating, everyone still posting their dresses and their gratitude. A whole industry riding the high.

Then, sometime this week, it started to wear off.

Reality slowly returns. The eight-show week. The Wednesday matinee. The grosses report. The quiet, constant math of what will stay open and what might close, who's selling and who isn't, whether the thing you poured your year into will still be running come fall.

This happens every June. The season crescendos on one Sunday night, the whole industry exhales at once, and we slide into the strangeness of summer. We tend to treat that slide like weather—something to push through, white-knuckle, outlast.

And I think we might have it backwards.

We treat the coming-down like dead air, the empty stretch between the parts that matter. I've started to suspect it's one of the most important things we do—and one of the only things nobody ever taught us how to do well.

Let's get into it.

The Loans

A high is expensive. We just tend to put it on credit.

Dopamine is commonly understood as the feel-good hit—the chemical of the win. It isn't, really. Dopamine is the chemical of the chase: the lean-forward, the almost, the wanting. It spikes on the way toward the thing, not at it. It's the fuel of the climb.

So a long build runs you hot for months. Opening night on the horizon. The review that might land. The nomination you might get. Every day there's a next rung, and your brain doses it. You get used to operating at that altitude. It starts to feel like your normal.

Then you summit. The envelope opens, the run ends, the thing you were working toward is finally, simply, past—and the wanting has nothing left to want. The dopamine drip runs dry. And because you'd recalibrated to running high, the new baseline reads as a deficit. As gray. As is that it? As now what?

Then the other shoe. To do hard things on a schedule—eight shows a week, a body that performs whether or not it slept, whether or not it's sad—you run on stress hormones. Adrenaline and cortisol are what let you rise to the occasion. They're also a loan. They sharpen you now by borrowing against later: holding back the exhaustion, muting the cold you should have caught, postponing the feelings that never had the time to process.

The day the push ends, the loan comes due. All at once. It's why people get sick on the first morning of vacation. It's why Olympic athletes report higher rates of depression after winning medals. Why the cry finally arrives. The body senses it's safe, stops holding the line, and everything it was holding back walks through the door.

That flat, gray, tearful Tuesday is a receipt—the bill for having cared that much, paid in the currency you'd been quietly borrowing all along.

The Loops

Our whole industry is a comedown machine.

We don't get one peak. They're on a loop. A show opens and closes. A contract starts and ends. A season builds for months, crests on a single Sunday, and then—dark. We pour everything into things that are designed, from the first day of rehearsal, to end. Coming down is literally half the job. We're just not very good at it.

Think about how an athlete treats the off-season. It's part of the sport. It's where the body repairs. It's where the foundation for the next season gets built. Nobody tells a marathoner the recovery weeks are dead time. Recovery is the discipline. It gets coached, scheduled, respected.

Artists, typically, don't have that. We have a summer we're supposed to fight through to keep the lights on—which is real, and a livelihood, and I'm not waving it away. But the lulls show up in all shapes and sizes. The long stretch between jobs. The deafening silence after a project you loved ends. The plain, physical downslope of a wave that went up and now, inevitably, has to come back down.

And our instinct, every single time, is to fight it. Fill it. Fix it. Book the next thing fast enough that we never have to feel the floor.

But the comedown isn't a problem to be solved. It's a real, true, heavy loss.

Grace

If the comedown is a small grief, then we already know exactly what it needs.

We don't tell a grieving friend to hustle through it. We don't ask them why they aren't more grateful for the good times. We don't hand them a five-year plan on day three. We make them tea (or bowls of ice cream). We sit with them. We let it take the time it takes, and we treat the sadness as evidence that something mattered.

The comedown deserves that same grace.

It's letting the trough run as long as the crest was high. It's resisting the urge to stuff every quiet week with proof that you're still going.

I don't have a method for this. I'm suspicious of anyone selling one. But there's a better question than how do I get out of this faster. It's the one we ask the people we love, turned inward for once: what do you need, right now?

The wave is going to do what waves do. Rise and then fall. The only part we get to choose is how we ride it.

With some practice, I think we're more than capable of taking a cue from nature. Letting the wave carry us, arms open, shoulders relaxed, breathing deep and giving over to all of it.

Every last gray, gorgeous, extraordinary, ordinary minute of it.

Surfs up.

This week in One Last Thing: the comedown I didn't see coming after two months in LA.

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

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Last Sunday, Broadway handed out its Tonys at Radio City. This week, a mile downtown at the Garden, the Knicks were fighting for their first title in fifty-three years. Two cathedrals, one city. The drama!

I am, admittedly, not a major sports-follower. I am, however, fascinated by the theatricality of professional sports.

Regardless of how they appear on the surface, the Tonys and NBA Finals' DNA isn't far apart. Strip away the scoreboard and the stage, and you're looking at the same animal.

Let's get ready to rumble.

Two Temples

Walk past any bar in the country this week and you'll see strangers with their nervous systems wired to one screen, holding the same breath, rising as a single body when the shot drops.

The oldest theater trick there is, running in sports bars everywhere—a roomful of people who may have never met, agreeing to feel one enormous thing together, in real time.

Radio City did it with P!nk in a Peter Pan costume; the Garden does it with a tip-off.

Live performance is one of the last places in American life where we still gather, face the same direction, and let something happen to all of us at once.

Nobody Knows the Ending

The reason both rooms still fill seats in 2026: nobody knows how it ends.

Not the performers, not the crowd, not the producers who spent a fortune getting everyone in the building. The envelope is the buzzer. You can't stream the result early, can't skip to the good part, can't get spoiled if you're already there.

In a culture engineered to let us consume everything alone and on demand, the Tonys and the playoffs hold the old line: we're all here, right now, and we find out together.

The not-knowing is the thing.

Clutch

Down two, ten seconds left, the whole arena on its feet—and someone has to take the shot.

Theater people understand that moment completely. We send people out to live it eight times a week. A Tony performance is a similar dare: your four minutes, live on CBS, no second takes.

The athlete and the performer are the same under the lights—both have trained for years to make it look, for a few minutes, like it's easy. And you better nail it.

The Diehards

The Knicks superfan and the theater kid are twins.

Both know the numbers and teams backwards and forwards. Both hold strong, unsolicited opinions about casting decisions made by people they'll never meet. Both will defend their wounded, beloved, perpetually-rebuilding institution to anyone who dares call it dead.

Each one found, somewhere young, a thing bigger than themselves to belong to and built a whole identity around it. Spike Lee at courtside and the Rent-head who saw the original production 50+ times are running the exact same devotion.

They just worship in different temples.

The Long Wait

The Knicks have gone fifty-three years without a title—but the city never gave up. This weekend that streak could be broken.

At the Tonys on Sunday, another long wait ended: the first American woman to win Best Play in thirty-seven years and the first openly trans winner in the Tonys' seventy-nine-year history.

It's easy to think that fandom and commitment-to-craft run on hope. The hope that this will be the year it changes. The hope that the effort you're pouring in will come back around in some way, eventually. But hope can feel rootless.

Faith is a stronger fuel. Deeper than believing, faith is a knowing that your devotion and commitment are inherently worth it. Because at the heart of your heartbreaking team or infuriating industry is the real possibility of transcendence.

Let's not kid ourselves, that holy potential is not always easy to see. It's hazy up in here. But the shared pilot light of these fans and fems is a true, messy, unconditional Love.

Strip the costumes (or jerseys?) off and it's the same impulse underneath: what we're like when we love something out loud, together, with no promise it will love us back.

It looks the same in both rooms. Strangers breathing as one body. An ending nobody can spoil. Four minutes under the lights to get it exactly right. A lifetime of memorized stats and cast albums. A wait so long it outlives the people who started it. Whether the scoreboard is keeping time or the orchestra is, everyone in those seats is doing the same brave, slightly irrational thing: giving everything to something that owes them nothing.

And every so often, it gives back. The buzzer gets beaten. The curtain rises on a night you'll retell for the rest of your life. The thing you poured yourself into cracks open, and for one impossible minute the whole building feels it at once. That's the transcendence the faithful are betting on—possible, never promised, and worth the showing-up either way. Maybe this weekend, fifty-three years finally gives way. Maybe not. Either way, the faithful will be in their seats. They always were.

Down here, every week, the newsletter gets quieter and more honest — a personal note, just for paid subscribers, from the backstage of my life. This week it's the two screens I had going on Tony night, and what they did to me.

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This Sunday, someone wins.

A handful of names get called in a room full of people who—on some level—wanted to hear their own. And the rest of us watch. From couches, from bar stools, from dressing rooms in cities that are not New York, doing a kind of subconscious math.

Where am I in all this? Am I where I should be? Am I falling behind?

It's the most natural question in the world this time of year. And I want to take it seriously—not dismiss it, not spiritual-bypass it, not wrap it in a bow. Because the question is real. The feeling is real.

But I think we've been measuring ourselves on the wrong axis entirely.

Let's get into it.

Caissie Levy is currently starring (and slaying) in Ragtime—deep in the arena where, if there was a race, you'd say she was winning it.

In an interview with Paul Wontorek, she talked about her Broadway debut. Back when she was, in her words, "just trying to hang." Trying to be "a version of a Broadway actor, whatever that was."

She described spending a lot of that time—her phrase—"looking left and right." At the women "ahead" of her. Wanting to be like them.

We all do this. The involuntary audit of everyone in our peripheral vision. Who booked what. Who's in what room. Who got the thing you wanted. Caissie was generous about it, actually—she didn't call it a flaw. She called it what young artists do: you model your career off the people you want to become, because you don't yet have your own shape to go on, so you borrow theirs.

Which is true. And probably has been amplified by about a thousand orders of magnitude.

The glance used to be occasional.

Social media is the sideways glance rebuilt as infrastructure—a machine whose entire job is to turn your head for you, all day, toward the workshop you didn't get, the reading you're not in, the regional contract, the callback, the carousel of someone else's great month. Scroll is just a fancy word for look again. And again. And again.

All of it running on the same axis: ahead and behind. Left and right. Where am I relative to them.

And then once a year, the whole thing gets a broadcast.

The Tonys make the race look real.

The Tony Awards, ostensibly, are a prize for singularity—for the voice that sounded like no other voice, the choice no one else would have made. The thing that was so specific, so unrepeatable, that a room full of voters had no choice but to stop and say: that.

But the way the entire ecosystem chases it is by becoming more alike. Sanding toward the recognizable shape of the "Broadway voice," the "Broadway body," the "Broadway whatever." Everyone scanning the people who got "the thing", trying to move in their direction.

It's an award for being unrepeatable, pursued by imitation.

And that's not a flaw in the system. That's what happens when everyone is running on the same horizontal axis (ahead and behind, left and right). Horizontal motion moves you toward other people. It crowds you together. It erases the specific.

But the thing the award is actually trying to honor? That lives somewhere else entirely.

Think about what made the performances you remember. The ones that made you hold your breath.

It wasn't proximity to a type. It wasn't successful imitation of what came before. It was depth. It was someone who had gone so far into themselves—into their training, their questions, their specific and irreplaceable inner life—that they arrived somewhere no one else could have reached, because no one else was them.

That motion isn't horizontal. It's vertical.

Below: the training, the teachers, the failures and sacrifies absorbed and metabolized—all the shoulders you're standing on.

Above: the thing this was always supposed to be in service of. Something bigger than applause. Older than attention. Faith, maybe, or the particular shape of your own devotion to the work.

Inside: the knot of your experiences and memories and skills and quirks—immeasurable, intangible, impossible to fully see. You spend a life untangling it. And what you tend to find, and forget, and find again, is that the thing at the center isn't talent or technique. It's something inherently whole. Something that connects you to everyone else who has ever stood in front of an audience and tried to tell the truth.

That's the vertical axis. And here's what makes it structurally different from the horizontal one:

You cannot race on it.

There's no ahead or behind on a vertical axis. There's only deeper or shallower, more connected or less. And the distance between you and your deepest self has nothing—nothing—to do with who's standing to your left or your right.

Which brings me to the strange trap at the center of all this.

The Tonys are designed for the horizontal axis. Campaigns, comparisons, competitive seasons. That's the structure. And then the award goes to the person who most fully escaped it. Who went so deep on the vertical axis that they became unrepeatable.

We are running horizontally in pursuit of a prize that only goes to people who stopped running horizontally.

That's not meant to be a cynical observation. The pursuit of the thing the Tonys are actually trying to name has very little to do with Tony season. It happens in rehearsal rooms and late-night journals and the years of small unglamorous work that build the specific person you are. It happens when you ask harder questions instead of looking for easier answers. It happens on the vertical axis.

The horizontal race will keep running. The Feed will keep feeding. The nominations will keep dropping and the math will probably keep happening in your head.

But you can absolutely opt out of treating the horizontal axis as the one that measures your worth.

So if you're nominated on Sunday: congratulations, genuinely. What a remarkable achievement. And also—the thing you actually have walks back out of that room with you, exactly as intact as it walked in. No statue adds to it. Nothing taken away if it doesn't come.

And if you're watching from the couch with that familiar low hum of will I ever be there—hear me when I say: you cannot fall behind on the vertical axis. You can only be further from yourself or closer to yourself. That's the whole thing.

The industry will keep running its race. Let it.

You've got vertical work to do.

This week in One Last Thing: why I needed to write this.

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

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When I was a teenager and into my early twenties, I spent my summers at an all-boys overnight camp in northern Wisconsin with limited access to technology. No cellphones. No video iPods. No TVs in the cabins.

But the Culver's in town? They had a few TVs.

That's where I'd go on Tony Sunday. I'd sit at a corner table by myself and stare at the tiny screen with the sound off. With cheese curds. Obviously.

I couldn't hear the speeches. I didn't always know who was who. I'd nurse a custard and squint at the silent screen and try to read lips. Try to imagine what the performances sounded like.

And I felt part of something.

Even from that table, the broadcast worked on me. What was actually on the screen barely mattered. What mattered was the knowledge that in other places—other corners, other couches—my people were watching too.

Here's the thing I understand now that I didn't then: that wasn't really knowledge. I had no proof. I'd never met most of those people. I couldn’t see them. I just believed they were out there.

Which, it turns out, is most of what loving theater is.

Especially if you don't live in New York, or Chicago, or one of the handful of cities where the thing you love has a physical address. You love it from a distance. You give three months of your life to a show that closes in a weekend. You weep at eight bars of music on a cast recording, and you trust—without evidence—that somewhere out there are people who weep at the same eight bars. You can't see them. You take them on faith.

Loving theater is an act of faith.

The Form

Faith needs rooms.

Live theater runs on a mechanism most of the rest of culture has stopped requiring. People in the same place at the same time, paying attention to the same thing, knowing they're in it together.

When a show works, the room does as much of the work as the stage. The audience gets its nervous systems entrained to a single point. Laughter cascades because other people are laughing. You hold your breath because everyone else is holding theirs. The cry at the end gets louder because the person next to you is crying too. (Sometimes sobbing, actually.)

I've written at length about collective effervescence—what happens when a group's attention locks onto one thing, together, until the individual experience fades away and a sense of belonging or Loving Awareness emerges. Émile Durkheim, who coined the term, didn't find it on a stage. He found it in religion. In ritual. In congregations facing the same direction, saying the same words, until something larger than any single person in the room seemed to fill it.

Which is the quiet thing theater has always been. A roomful of strangers, facing the same direction, agreeing to believe the same impossible thing for two hours. Take the room away and theater stops being theater. The faith has nowhere to land.

The Country

Most other consumption runs on the opposite premise. The internet is built for asynchrony—watch what you want, when you want, alone if you want. Theater insists on the older bargain: we are all right here, right now.

The catch is you have to be there. And most of us, most of the time, aren't. We love this thing from our own shores, catching glimpses of each other's lighthouses, never quite able to see the others sailing out there. We're not unique in this. Every fandom, every devotion, is reaching for the same thing—some way to feel less alone in what it loves. We just happen to love the one art form that is built on being in a room together, and then spend most of our time apart.

Except one Sunday in June.

I was a post-producer for the 2022 Tony Awards, and I can tell you Radio City runs on the exact same mechanism as any black box with forty folding chairs. Same entrainment. Same held breath. The only difference is what's around it.

The performers know they're being watched by millions of other rooms. The audience in the seats knows their experience is being shared, in real time, by every theater person who tuned in. And the reverse holds: from the apartments and the watch parties and the dorm rooms and the silent TVs, you know there's a room full of your people at Radio City. You're watching what your high school theater teacher is watching. What the casting director who passed on you last week is watching. What your Mom (or at least my Mom) is watching.

For three hours, the room that normally fits in a building grows to the size of the country. The faith gets its room.

The winners and gowns and cameras and tuxes are decorations. The thing underneath—the reason it makes a kid at a Culver's cry—is that for one night, the whole scattered congregation is in one place, facing the same direction.

The Church

Here's the problem: that Church of Radio City doesn't have enough pews for everyone.

So this year, we built some.

It's called Antoinette—an unofficial Tony pool on theater.games. You pick the winners. You do it with your people: a pool you start, or one you join. Next Sunday when the big show starts, the picks lock, and as each envelope opens you watch your guesses come true or not—together, in real time. If you've ever filled out a March Madness bracket (which I have not), you know the shape of it. Except the categories are Best Lighting Design in a Play and Best Original Score. And the people you're up against cry at key changes. (My people!!)

And somewhere out there, a stranger you'll never meet is doing the exact same thing with other people you'll never meet. You can't see them. But you know they're there. Picking too.

It is, I'll admit, a strange little act of faith. A scorecard is not a sacrament. But it does the one thing the silent TV never could: it gives the night a shape you can hold in your hand. A reason to gather. A direction to face. The same sacred texts—Best Whatever in a Whatever by a Whatever—read aloud at the same hour, in living rooms that will never know what's hanging on each other's walls.

The pool was never about being right. It's about not being alone in front of the screen.

One Sunday in June

The kid at the corner table took the whole thing on faith. He believed his people were out there, squinting at their own screens, even though he couldn't actually see a single one of them.

Once a year, he's proven right.

So pull up a chair. Start a pool, or join one. Fill in your picks. Get them gloriously wrong. It doesn't matter, really. But it does mean that next Sunday, when the Church doors open and the room becomes the country, you'll have a seat in it.

The faithful have always needed somewhere to gather. Next Sunday, mine's a silly little scorecard.

There's a chair next to me, if you want it.

This week in One Last Thing: Where my faith that "my people are out there" actually came from. Turns out it wasn't theater.

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

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Here's a not-hot take: part of what makes theater magical is that each performance only happens once.

I've written about it (a lot) but I'd be lying if I said I always felt it.

Yet there are some shows, some pieces, that make that feeling almost inevitable. Unavoidable.

Enter The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. A twenty-year-old musical that's been done in almost every high school in America. It would be sane to think that a show that's been produced that much would feel dusty or stale or just plain predictable.

But sitting in the audience in New World Stages, where the latest revival of Spelling Bee is currently running, I felt that good-good theater magic.

So what is it about this quirky little musical that triggered it? That's what I want to sit with this week—what happens to a room of strangers when a show makes its own unrepeatability impossible to ignore.

O-n-w-a-r-d.

The Beginning

This isn't my first Bee.

I had the cast album of Spelling Bee before I ever saw the show. I knew every word back and forth. I loved it the way you love a thing you've only heard. Completely, and from a distance.

Then the sit-down production came to the Drury Lane in downtown Chicago, and I finally saw it on its feet. I was thirteen. I had never experienced anything like it—I loved it instantly, helplessly, and I had no idea how to say why.

I bought a red ringer tee in the lobby and wore it for years, through high school and most of college. It is still one of the only pieces of show merch I have ever actually worn.

And the thing I wanted, more than almost anything? To be one of the three people pulled out of the audience to spell.

The Bystanders

The premise, if you've never seen it: Spelling Bee is a musical about a middle school spelling bee—and three of the spellers are real people, pulled from the audience. Not actors. Not plants. Three strangers who, a few minutes earlier, were looking for their seats. Bystanders turned spellers.

They go up onstage, they're given real words, and they have to spell them. For real. Nobody knows exactly what will happen—not you, not the three of them, not even the cast.

Yes—the company has its bits ready. But the raw material is new every night—they're improvising around three people who have never done this and never will again.

It would be easy to file that under "audience participation." But that misses what's unusual. Plenty of shows acknowledge they're live—an ad-lib about the weather, a performer naming the city.

In Spelling Bee: the unpredictability is baked into the foundation of the show. Take the three strangers out and it's not (really) Spelling Bee.

The Body

Your brain, more than anything, is a prediction machine—every moment guessing what comes next, spending its attention on how wrong each guess turns out to be. Neuroscientists call that gap prediction error. It's the currency of attention.

A locked show is a low-error environment. Not an insult—it can still wreck you. But it does what it was built to do, the way it was built to do it. Your brain, sensing no surprises, settles slightly. And the once-ness drifts back into the abstract. You know it. But you don't necessarily feel it.

The three strangers make settling impossible. They flood the room with real prediction error—three people whose next syllable or step can't be guessed by anyone, themselves included. Your brain fires. You lean forward. You have no choice.

That's the conversion. The once-ness was always true. The strangers are what make your body believe it.

The Break

Now I have to be honest, because there's an obvious objection and it's a good one.

The audience spellers are, mostly, a comedy bit—funny and loose and human, and then, fairly quickly, gone. The part of Spelling Bee that breaks you isn't them. For me, it's "The I Love You Song." Every single time. That's the thing that breaks me. And that song happens (and hits) in the same spot every night.

So if I told you the strangers are THE reason the show lands, I'd be overselling them. They aren't the heart. The heart was written and rehearsed and locked.

But they do something the scripted heart can't do for itself. They calibrate the room—they spend the first stretch teaching your nervous system that tonight is unsettled, genuinely unrepeatable. And once your body believes that, it doesn't stop believing it when the volunteers sit back down.

You carry that alertness into every moment after. By the time Olive sings, you're watching a locked, word-for-word number with the attention three amateurs installed in you an hour earlier. That's how a show that's ninety percent fixed can still feel, all the way through, like it's happening just once.

Because it is.

The Bee-ing

Spelling Bee is one of the most-produced musicals in America—running in high schools and community theaters probably within twenty miles of wherever you're reading this. By any measure, the opposite of rare.

And it's also one of the least repeatable things ever built for a stage. No two performances can be the same—not at New World Stages, not in any cafeteria in Ohio—because three of the people in every one have never done it before and (probably) never will again.

So the preciousness I felt was never about scarcity. It's something else: the instance can't be duplicated. This room. These three strangers. This night, this arrangement of people who will never be gathered again.

To be clear: that was always true. Of Spelling Bee, and of the longest-running show on Broadway grinding out on a Tuesday night. The once-ness was never Spelling Bee's invention. The show just built a room where I couldn't look away from it.

So I don't know what to do with the obvious next question—whether every show should reach for this. Maybe not. Maybe the feeling depends on being rare—maybe you only get a handful of nights, ever, where the wallpaper peels and you feel the thing you always technically knew.

Maybe that's the deal. You don't get to feel it all the time.

You just have to be there. Or, in this case, bee there.

This week in One Last Thing: what happened when I went to the Drama Desk Awards on Sunday—and why this whole piece felt different to write afterward.

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…

Sunday night, I officially became a Drama Desk Loser—a phrase I have gotten an unreasonable amount of joy out of saying this week.

But if I'm honest: it genuinely did not matter. What happened, for me, on Sunday had nothing to do with what was in that envelope.

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On a Tuesday in April, I found out that our show, BEAU, had been nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Ten nominations in total—tied for the most of any production this season.

I know what that sentence is supposed to do. I know the gracious-losing language that follows it: it’s an honor just to be nominated. I’ve heard it and quietly filed it under polite nothings. We all decided, somewhere along the way, that it’s what you say before the real winner gets announced.

But something about that Tuesday morning made me want to sit with the phrase instead of letting it pass. Because I think it’s pointing at something real—something most of us experience but don’t have great language for. And I think it has everything to do with a distinction we almost never make.

We are, collectively, pretty suspicious of external validation.

The self-help canon is unanimous: don’t need it. Build your interior. Know your worth independent of outcome, recognition, or applause. We’ve turned “I don’t need external validation” into a kind of emotional maturity badge. And there’s real wisdom in that. There’s a version of external validation that functions like addiction—the reach for proof that you’re enough, the relief that arrives and almost immediately dissolves, leaving you searching for the next hit. Anyone who’s refreshed their phone after posting something knows exactly what that feels like.

But here’s what the conventional wisdom misses: it treats external validation as a single thing. One experience with one function.

It isn’t.

There are two fundamentally different things that can happen when the outside world responds to your work. The first is the one we’re warned about—validation that fills a hole. You weren’t sure the work was good. You weren’t sure you were good. The recognition arrives and answers the question, at least temporarily. It tells you something you didn’t already know.

The second is different. It’s validation that confirms something already true. The belief was already there. The pride was solid before anyone else weighed in. The recognition doesn’t fill anything—it meets something. Agrees with something. Reflects back something you were already carrying.

These feel nothing alike in the body. The first feels like relief. The second feels like something I’ve been trying to find the right word for since nominations were announced—somewhere between overwhelming and surreal. Not because you’re surprised by the confirmation. Because you’ve been holding the belief alone long enough that anyone agreeing feels like you’ve suddenly got company.

This doesn’t happen automatically. You don’t arrive at the confirmation kind of validation without first doing something harder: holding belief in your work privately, without evidence, through the stretches when the evidence isn’t coming and the world isn’t paying attention.

BEAU closed for the second time in January. Two runs off-Broadway, each demanding in ways I didn’t fully anticipate—physically, emotionally, in every direction. When it ended, I didn’t have a clean takeaway. Some experiences leave you with more texture than certainty. The world moved on quickly, the way it does. The conversations stopped. Nobody was talking about the show anymore.

But the belief didn’t close with it. We kept carrying the pride in what we made, the conviction that it was worth making, the knowledge of what every single person in that building gave to a little show that many people still have never heard of. That kind of faith doesn’t ask for evidence. It doesn’t negotiate. It just holds.

That private period—the stretch of carrying belief without confirmation—is exactly what makes the second kind of validation possible. You can’t have the alignment without first having the interior. The outside can only meet something that’s already there.

But even when the belief is solid—independent, not in need of anyone’s agreement—something still shifts when the outside finally confirms it. Not your conviction. Not your confidence in the work. Something subtler.

Maybe it’s that we can’t fully hold something true in total isolation. Maybe belief, at some level, wants to be witnessed. Not to exist. Not to be real. But to become fully inhabitable. To be something you can stand inside of, rather than just carry.

When the nominations came out and the names of the people who made our show got called—the lighting and the sound and the direction and the words and the music—I didn’t feel vindicated. I didn’t feel like I’d finally been proven right. I felt, strangely, less alone in something I’d already known.

That’s the thing the conventional wisdom about external validation can’t account for. The version it warns you about is real. But so is this other version—the one that doesn’t create belief, only meets it.

Maybe that’s what makes the phrase worth saving. Not “it’s an honor to be nominated” as consolation prize language. But honor in the older sense—acknowledgment that arrives not as charity but as recognition. The difference between being seen and being noticed. Between a handshake and a pat on the head.

So yes. I do think it is, in fact, truly (and literally) an honor just to be nominated.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

Tony nominations were announced on Tuesday morning.

By afternoon, the feeds had been hurricaned.

Reaction videos. Graphics. FaceTime clips. Snub recaps. Nominee spotlights. Congratulations carousels. All of it arriving in a flood so dense and fast that by noon, if you’d been following even a handful of Broadway accounts, you’d have consumed more theater content in three hours than most people encounter in six months.

Let’s call all of it Turnaround: content that requires prep—pre-design, scheduling, coordination—and is speedily dispatched to be as timely as possible and maximize reach. In theory.

Turnaround has become the new benchmark for “doing social media right” in the Broadway-sphere. And I don’t say that dismissively. It might actually be right.

But something about this year’s nomination morning made me want to pull on the thread. To look at not just what the machine is doing, but what it’s doing *to us*.

Let’s get into it.

The Flood

First: this isn’t a Broadway thing. It’s an everything thing.

In every corner of entertainment—sports, film, television, music—there is a brand or a channel or an outlet or a person hoping to be the first to take a bite out of whatever cultural cake is being served that hour. The machinery of timely content is not our invention. We are, after all, an industry that still measures success in part by what critics write in newspapers, which is...charming.

But this year confirmed something: most shows, outlets, and agencies have figured out how to get the content machine up and running.

And the machine has specific goals. Producers want attention. Relevance. Heat. The perception that their show is the thing everyone is talking about right now. That desire—especially in awards season, especially on nomination morning—manifests as a need for speed. And so agencies and social teams and graphic designers and video editors go vroom vroom.

Toot toot beep beep.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I want to be clear about that. Speed serves a real purpose. The wave when a nomination is new news is short-lived. You catch it or you don’t. The reality is that the campaign starts the moment nominations are announced—voters need to be reached. The case for your show needs to be made while people are listening. I get the logic entirely.

But also, those nominees are real, human, people.

The Morning

This year’s nominees, some of whom are dear friends, were fielding calls as soon as the nomination livestream ended. From outlets wanting quotes. From social teams wanting video. From publicists coordinating next steps. All of it real, all of it legitimate, all of it part of the machinery that exists to amplify this kind of news while it’s still news.

And as I scrolled, I just kept thinking: *I wonder if they’ve had a chance to call their people yet.*

Not their team. Their people. The ones who knew them before any of this. The parent who drove them to rehearsal until they could drive themselves. The friend who talked them out of quitting when it felt like “what’s the point?” The person they went home to after they bombed that callback.

Because what I was watching—and what I think Turnaround, at its most compressed, actually does—is collapse the distance between the moment and the performance of the moment. Between finding out and telling everyone you found out. Between the feeling and the feed.

The Distance

That distance is the space where something metabolizes and becomes yours. The subway ride home after the show. The quiet morning after an opening. The cab ride where you sit in silence (and mute the TV in the taxi). Those pauses, those gaps, are where meaning starts to assemble itself.

When you hand the moment to the machine before it’s had time to become yours, something gets lost. Not the joy. The joy is still real. But the private ownership of the joy. The experience of *knowing* something before it becomes a story about knowing it.

I’m not making a case for logging off. I don’t believe in that as a prescription, and I’m suspicious of anyone who offers it as one. Sharing is not inherently corrosive. Connection is the whole point.

The case I’m making is smaller than that. Just: protect the gap. Even a small one.

The Reach

The machine is optimizing for reach. That’s its job. Reach the voters. Reach the press. Reach the ticket buyers. Do it fast, strike while the iron is hot.

Admittedly, it’s very good at its job. The content that went out on nomination morning was slick, warm, fast, human. Some of it was genuinely smart and beautiful! You can feel the real care that went into it.

But reach and resonance are not the same thing. And the speed that maximizes one can quietly undermine the other.

When everything arrives at once—every show, every nominee, every reaction, every graphic—the sheer volume starts to flatten it. Individual moments blur into a stream of content. The specific person at the center of each of those nominated projects—the one who has been working toward this for years, whose life is genuinely different today than it was yesterday—gets a little harder to see.

But it doesn’t stop with awards season. This is what happens when the distance collapses everywhere, for everyone, all the time. When the instinct to share a moment arrives before the moment itself has had time to register. When the proof of the experience starts to feel more urgent than experiencing the experience.

That’s not a Broadway problem. It’s just where we are.

Turn Around

The people at the center of those nomination-morning graphics—the ones the machine is amplifying—didn’t just wake up that Tuesday and have a thing happen to them. They got there. Years of it. Callbacks they didn’t book. Contracts that were a mess. Roles that went to someone else. Late nights in rehearsal rooms, early mornings at day jobs, the long slow accumulation of trying and trying and trying until one Tuesday morning, a livestream says your name.

That road is the whole story. And nobody sees it in the graphic.

Which is why I think what the moment actually deserves—before the quote, before the video, before the notification hits—is for you to *turn around*. Literally, almost. To face the direction you came from. To see the road that got you there, and all the people who were on it with you, before you start thinking about what comes next or how to share it or what the caption should be.

The machine is already pointed forward. It’s already thinking about reach and timing and what this does for the campaign. That’s its job and it does it well.

But you don’t have to be pointed forward yet. You’ve been pointing forward for years. Just—for a minute—turn around.

That moment, the private one, the one where you actually see and feel what happened to you before it becomes a story about what happened to you—that one only comes once.

And it belongs to you. First.

This week in One last thing: the Tuesday morning I found out I’d been nominated for a Drama Desk Award—and the graphic that was already live before I’d talked to my parents. It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Regardless, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

I found out about the Drama Desk nomination when I opened my eyes last Tuesday morning and Sam said, “you got nominated for a Drama Desk.”

Unbeknownst to sleeping me, my phone had been blowing up with texts from friends and family. And on Instagram—there was a graphic. A few, actually. And when I saw them for the first time, my stomach dropped.

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