Let Us In
What a community theatre in England and a Staples employee taught me about attention.
Earlier this week, mid-doomscroll, I stumbled upon a thirty-four-second video that made my jaw drop.
A community theatre in Witham, England—about a thousand followers on TikTok, no budget, no campaign—posted an iPhone video of their Judas (Michael Bardot) rehearsing a moment from The Last Supper in Jesus Christ Superstar.
By the time you’re reading this, it will probably have crossed a million views.
I keep thinking about that number. About the distance between a rehearsal room in a small English town and a million strangers. About how little stood between those two things.
I’m thinking about the 22-year-old Staples baddie who filmed herself at work. In uniform, on her phone, on the clock—showing the mug she printed in-store. And millions of people watched. A legacy brand found cultural relevance it couldn’t have bought.
I’m thinking about the record store in New York City that created a micro “reality show” called Revival of the Fittest. Two-minute episodes, iPhone footage, no script, no crew. Just the store, the people in it, whatever happens when the camera rolls. And now, a devoted audience.
Three completely different worlds. Three completely different scales. One thing in common: none of them had a campaign. They had a phone and a willingness to hit record.
This week, I want to understand that pattern—and what it might mean for the rest of us making things in small rooms.
Let’s get into it.
For most of recent history, reach was a resource problem.
You needed a campaign, a publicist, a media relationship, a platform. The size of your audience was roughly proportional to the size of your budget. Which meant small organizations (like community theaters, local record stores, independent retail) operated under a permanent ceiling. You could make something extraordinary and it might never travel beyond the people who already knew you.
That ceiling hasn’t disappeared entirely. But it has lifted.
What’s changed isn’t the algorithm, exactly—though the algorithm certainly matters. What’s changed is that a moment captured in a small, specific, unglamorous place can now travel as far as something made with a full production team behind it. Sometimes further. Not because of how it was made, but because of what it feels like to encounter it.
The physics of how things spread is different today than it was even 24 months ago.
The content that travels isn’t always the most produced—it’s the most proximate. The thing that feels closest to real.
What those three examples share isn’t aesthetic. It’s not that they were lo-fi, or scrappy, or accidental—though they were all of those things. It’s something more specific than that.
Each one felt like you were being let in somewhere before someone tried to make it presentable. Before the PR layer. Before the strategizing. You weren’t watching content—you were watching a person, in a place, doing something real. And that distinction, as subtle as it sounds, is everything.
In theater we talk about showing versus telling. This is the internet version of that. Discovery feels different from delivery. When content is engineered for you, some part of your brain registers the transaction. When it feels caught rather than made, something else happens—you lean in. You share it not as promotion but as a kind of gift. I found this. You should see it.
Which is interesting, because there's an entire industry built around exactly this kind of realness—but it’s only just starting to figure out how to let the internet in.
The rehearsal room. The table read. The moment an actor cracks something open for the first time and everyone in the room feels it simultaneously. The Wednesday matinee where something wild happens and the cast has to find their way through it live. The first time everyone walks through the set and it’s all suddenly very real.
These moments happen constantly. In every production, at every level. Community theatre in the suburbs. Regional theatre in a mid-size city. Off-Off-Broadway in a black box that seats forty-seven people.
And almost none of it gets documented.
Not because it isn’t worth seeing. Because there’s a deeply ingrained assumption in this industry that the show is the product. That what happens before opening night is internal—private, protected, not fully baked. That audiences should only encounter the work in its finished state, through the front door, at full price, on the advertised dates.
That logic made sense at one point. But it doesn’t hold the same way anymore.
The formal campaign—the poster, the press release, the carefully timed social posts —reaches people who are already paying attention. People who already have some relationship to theatre, who already know where to look. But it doesn’t travel far beyond that circle.
In 2026, people want access. Not advertising.
There’s a quiet, unexamined belief that what happens in the room isn’t ready to be seen. That it needs to be finished, polished, contextualized before it earns an audience. That showing the process is somehow a betrayal of the product.
It’s also a fear that’s hard to name directly: what if people see it and aren’t impressed? What if the unguarded version of the work reflects poorly on the finished one? What if we let people in and they don’t care?
Those are all real fears. But they’re based on an old model of how attention works—one where you controlled the first impression, managed the reveal, and tried to ensure the campaign landed. Now, the question isn’t whether people will see behind the curtain. It’s whether you’re the one holding it open.
Underneath all of this is something more personal than strategy. The Staples baddie wasn’t trying to build a brand. The Witham theatre wasn’t executing a beautiful content shoot. The record store wasn’t trying to fake something. They were just present. Unguarded. Willing to be seen doing the thing they actually do, without sanding it down.
That’s what traveled. Not the content. The willingness to be seen as you actually are—in process, in uniform, in rehearsal, in the middle of figuring it out.
So please, let us in. Hit record. Post the video.
You don’t have to be Witham. But you could be.
This week's One last thing is a personal reflection on my own complicated relationship to the camera, consent, and what access actually looks like when you're one of the people in the room. Plus, a picture of my dog.
It's available to paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this work going.
One last thing…
I’ll be honest—my relationship to these platforms is never static. It shifts. Sometimes weekly. And if I’m being really honest, a lot of it tracks with whether I’m in a show.
