There's an email from a Broadway show sitting in your inbox right now. It probably has a discount code in it.
Fifteen new shows open this fall, and every one of them is about to get louder. Billboards in Times Square. Ads on the subway. B-roll montages. Emails, emails, and more emails.
And theatre, of all things, knows better. It's the art form that can hold a room full of strangers for two and a half hours, phones off, all paying attention to the same thing at once. Then the house lights come up, and the marketing goes right back to interrupting us.
So for the new season, I made a wish list. Three places where a show could trade the interruption for something we'd actually choose to watch, listen to, or read.
Here we go.
The Show
A record store on Bleecker Street has a reality show.
It's called Revival of the Fittest. Two-minute episodes, shot on one iPhone, posted from Village Revival Records. The owner, Jamal, has been selling records for thirty years. The regulars are the cast. One storyline followed a couch all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge in a blizzard. People now visit the store the way you'd visit a filming location, because to them, that's what it is.
I wrote about Revival back in February. Since then I keep finding more of them. Over in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a scripted comedy about a café where the milks are made in-house, shot inside a real one, Larry's Cafe. It's passed 95 million views.
One is unscripted. One is written. Both work for the same reason: they come back. You end up following a place, episode after episode.
Rachel Karten, who writes the powerhouse social media newsletter Link in Bio, put it this way: "Social media is replacing television. And just like in television, there's the shows you tune-in to watch and there's the commercials you suffer through."
Her advice is three words. Be the show.
Every production already has what a record store has to go looking for. A cast of characters. A set. A backstage nobody gets to see. A built-in season arc—first preview, opening, the understudy's first night, the closing. The show for the show lives in the hallway, the dressing room, the line at the stage door.
And it doesn't need a crew. A high school production with a phone and one funny stage manager has everything Revival started with.
The Guest
If you're not an avid podcast listener, you surely know someone who is. More than half of Americans—about 167 million people—listened to one in the last month. Podcasts have steadily become a stalwart of the media landscape and Broadway has, unsurprisingly, not caught up with the times.
My wish is not, however, for every show or regional house to launch their own podcast. The market is well-saturated and the effort it requires to consistently produce a quality podcast is not worth the limited listenership that it would return.
The untapped goldmine lies in the piles of podcasts that are already hungry for guests. That's because podcasts are clip machines. At a time when consumption of short-form video is at an all-time high, marketing teams are under immense pressure to churn out content at an unprecedented rate.
Podcasts, if leveraged correctly, can provide a plethora of potentially viral moments from conversations with company members. To be clear: I don't think appearances should be limited to cast members. Costume designers, composers, choreographers, stage managers, swings, associate directors, and producers themselves all have fascinating stories and interesting perspectives.
My wish, simply, is for shows to be seeking out podcasts of every size and scale and insisting on obtaining a copy of the full video recordings. There's no need to rely on the podcasters to be the sole generator of clips. Marketing teams have the skills and tools to be pulling and publishing their own soundbites.
Theatre people love yapping, so let them yap and use it!
The Letter
I have a wild belief that I think is finally worth saying out loud: theatre email is broken.
We've been treating people's inboxes like infomercials, crossing our fingers that the subject line will entice them enough to click and see an exclusive discount code or rave review pull quote.
Mostly, they don't. A recent study of more than a billion arts and culture marketing emails found an average click rate of 1.9%. That's fewer than two clicks for every hundred inboxes.
Subscriber lists are warm leads at best, and oftentimes primarily made up of patrons who've already bought tickets. We're selling to an audience that's already been sold.
The alternative already exists and big brands like Madewell, Tory Burch, and Shopify have caught wind: they're using email and platforms (like Substack) to publish mini-magazines. Essays, recommendations, a point of view. A real reason for someone to open the next email.
Theatre is chock-full of talented writers, we could be using that to our advantage! The costume designer on the one fabric she fought for. The dramaturg on the strange lineage of this play. A rehearsal journal from an ensemble member.
My wish is for a show or regional theatre to go all-in on an idea or concept and see what happens when they start treating people's inboxes with respect.
Curtain
And now, a truth: all of this is much easier said than done.
As someone actively working in the theatre marketing space, I understand that marketing teams rarely get the final say. They answer to producers, and producers answer to a lot of people. There are many cooks in that kitchen, and most of them have been burned before. A billboard is a known quantity. A two-minute reality show starring the stage manager is a leap.
So if I get a fourth wish (genie rules be damned), it's for the producers.
Trust the people you hired. You brought on a marketing team for their taste and their instincts. Let them use both. Let the marketing be made with the same care, nerve, and imagination as the show itself.
What that builds is the thing every theatre person desires: the opportunity to contribute to and collaborate on something bigger than themselves. As a result, the work is more alive, innovative, and engaging. And we, as consumers, can feel it.
I'm excited to see what this next Broadway season has in store, and I hope how shows show up online every day is as inspiring as what's happening onstage 8x a week.
Break a leg!
This week in One Last Thing: what three years of podcasts in the guest chair taught me, and the three things I think a theatre podcast needs to finally break through.
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