The Life (and Death) of a Showgirl Trend

Why standing out matters more than keeping up.

Aug 15, 2025

Happy Friday 👋🏼 It’s been 48 hours since Taylor Swift announced The Life of a Showgirl, and Broadway social media has been doing it’s thing. That immediate, synchronized pivot where every show suddenly becomes a “showgirl” show.

And I’m feeling two things at once: impressed by how quickly these teams moved, and also a kind of algorithmic déjà vu.

The speed is new. A few years ago, approval chains and overthinking would’ve killed the moment before it started. Now, it’s clear that social teams are being trusted to move fast and play in real time. That’s great news.

But it leaves me wondering: now that the bottlenecks are gone, what are we doing with that freedom? Are we adding something only we could make—or just keeping up for the sake of keeping up?

So this week, I want to dig into that feeling. Because I think it reveals something bigger about where we are as an industry—and as a culture.

The Rush to Relevance

We’re not living in the old monoculture anymore—where one story dominated for weeks. What we have now is something faster and stranger: flash monoculture.

These are moments that flare up, take over, and burn out faster. One day it’s ‘I’m a mommy, mamacita.’ The next, it’s Labubu. This week, it’s The Life of a Showgirl. They’re intense, they’re everywhere, and then they’re gone.

Social media has trained us to think in memes. When something happens in the zeitgeist, there's now an immediate, almost Pavlovian response: How can we make this about us? How quickly can we turn this around? What's our angle?

The result is a kind of creative homogenization.

In marketing terms, it’s part FOMO, part social proof. If the whole world is in on the joke, your audience expects you to be there too. But when the same idea floods every account, the shelf life of surprise is gone. The delight of discovery disappears—replaced by a wall of sameness.

The Execution Gap

One thing is clear: not all trend participation is created equal. Some posts feel inevitable. The kind of thing you see and think, yup, of course they did that. It’s tidy, on-brand, and gets a polite chuckle. It’s checking the box.

But what about breaking outside the box? Making people gasp a little. Really surprising us. Taking the shared joke and twisting it just enough so that it couldn’t possibly have come from anyone else.

Audiences are sharper now. We’ve all been scrolling for over a decade, and we can spot the difference between showing up and having something to say.

I’m not naive. Those are harder to sell internally, no question. Approvers are more likely to greenlight a safe, simple trend-jump than something weird, specific, or risky. And I understand the appeal of just getting a post up rather than “fighting” that battle.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled that shows can even move this quickly now. But I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t asking how we can use that speed to go deeper—to be braver—and to actually make something worth remembering.

A Few Examples

When I talk about breaking the box, here’s what I mean—posts that made me pause, laugh, or want to send them to a friend:

John Proctor is the Villain: a short reel that nods to the trend, steps just outside it, and slips in a non-action CTA (closing date).

& Juliet: a meme sequence so niche it almost defies logic — and that’s exactly why it works.

Hadestown: a simple, clever parody of The Summer I Turned Pretty that became their most-liked post of the year. (Proof not every hit needs to be about Taylor!!)

The Notebook National Tour: embracing a truly insane trending Hamilton sound with pure chaos courtesy of Ingrid Michaelson.

To be fair, I’ve been blown away by the creativity coming from most show accounts over the past few months. Which is why this piece, and so many others I’ve written, is less a critique and more an invitation: keep going, keep pushing, and keep surprising us!!

Short Game, Long Game

Flash monoculture has absolutely changed the way we make things. When trends burn out as fast they do now, we adapt—we get faster, scrappier, more responsive. That’s a skill worth celebrating. But it’s also changing our creative reflexes in ways we don’t always notice.

In theater, we’re used to building slowly. A show takes years to write, months to stage, weeks to tech. Now, a big part of our cultural presence exists in a space where the half-life of an idea is shorter than a Golden Age overture. We’re training our brains to think in punchlines and templates, to grab the first workable idea and run with it before the moment’s gone.

When the immediate response to a trend is “How do we get in on this?”, we risk narrowing our range to reactive thinking. That’s why, if you’re going to jump in, it’s worth keeping prompts nearby that force you to sidestep the obvious:

What’s the wrong way to interpret this trend—and could that be a starting point?
How could we parody this so it only makes sense to people who’ve actually seen the show?
Which character in our show would have the most unhinged response to this trend?

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what I consider to be the holy grail of social media newsletters: Rachel Karten’s LINK IN BIO. Especially this piece with 26 ways to approach the creative process in social media.

In the end, I think the real challenge is remembering that we can play the short game without forgetting the long one—that the same brains we use to crank out a meme in half an hour are also capable of building something that lasts.

Every trend has an expiration date. Your creative instincts don’t have to.

One Last Thing…

This week has been my first real pause since February—no rehearsals, no tech, no performances.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with all this space and time. After months of constant momentum, stopping felt like losing my balance. I’d open my laptop out of habit, looking for something to make or post.

It’s funny — so much of what I write here is about sharing, building, connecting. But in a culture and industry that rewards visibility above almost everything else, there’s something quietly rebellious about making things no one will ever see.

So I’ve been letting myself do that. Writing outside of the newsletter. Practicing guitar just to get better. Following ideas that have no deadline and maybe no audience. It’s a different kind of creativity—one that’s more about curiosity than completion.

This next week I’ll be in Arizona with my family, and I’m setting a quiet challenge for myself: slow down. Get lost in a book. Soak in vitamin D. Let my mind wander without the constant hum of “what could this be?”

If you’ve been running at full speed for a while, maybe you need this reminder too: not everything we make has to be for the feed. And sometimes, the most radical way to care for your creativity is to let it rest.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt