Tweet Charity

 How Next to Normal twittered to triumph and revolutionized the business of Broadway

When Next to Normal won three Tony Awards this June, the triumph was so utterly unexpected that City Arts was the only magazine in the country with a feature story about it. How in the name of George M. Cohan did an Issaquah-spawned musical about manic depression, hallucinations and electroshock hit the Broadway jackpot?

A crucial part of N2N’s success was its brilliantly innovative marketing campaign. Theatres reeling from economic blows and audience attrition should study this shining example of how to succeed in showbiz by really, really trying — not in the old, tired, crank-out-a-press-release-and-hope-for-the-best ways, but by exploiting today’s technology to jolt audiences back to life and to the edge of their seats.

Illustrations by Andrew Saeger

What was the star of the show, marketing-wise? Twitter, making its stage debut. N2N’s team decided to make it the first Broadway musical ever “performed” on the social networking site. “Our online marketing agency, Situation Interactive, and the show’s producers brought the idea to me,” says N2N coauthor Brian Yorkey, whose career began at Issaquah’s Village Theatre (as did N2N). “At first I had no idea how one might Twitter a whole show; I have to confess to not being totally up on Twitter at that time. It seemed like fun — so unlikely that it just might work.”

But it only works if the Twitterer attracts lots of “followers.” The champion Twitterer is Ashton Kutcher, with three million. Billy Elliot, the feel-good musical that swept this year’s Tonys with ten awards, has 2,012 followers. It’s playing right across the street from N2N, which is so much darker you’d expect it would have fewer followers. In fact, it has 471,882, ranking #208 out of hundreds of thousands of sites — more followers than Newsweek or Paris Hilton or Hugh Jackman, the Broadway and Hollywood star.

N2N trounced Billy because Twitter, interested by what N2N was doing, began recommending it to new signups. And publicist Aaron Coleman broke the script down into hundreds of two-to-three-sentence “tweets.” “Then I went through and tweaked the character ‘voices’ and added a few things,” says Yorkey. In May, just before Tony time, they opened accounts for each of the six main characters in the story, and began sending a continuous feed of bipolar heroine Diana, her husband, Dan, kids Gabe and Natalie, and Natalie’s boyfriend Henry tweeting back and forth.

One plot point at a time, the story unfolded over several weeks, exactly as it plays out onstage each night. The feed even posted music links every time the story reached the next song.

DAN – Bright day, perfect for yardwork.  Diana’s new pills are working . . . it’s gonna be good good good!
6:27 AM May 9th from TwitterBerry

DIANA – is feeling charged up & fantastic.  Disinfected the entire house, rewired the computer, and has a yen for roof retiling.
7:15 AM May 9th from TwitterBerry

GABE – Mom’s been bustling recently.  Go mom! :-)
8:55 AM May 9th from TwitterBerry

The tweets actually extended the story beyond what was onstage. “One of the exciting parts about it was that we could get into what characters were thinking in ways we don’t actually hear in the show,” says Yorkey. “We learned a lot more about Henry and his love for Natalie, for instance.” Yorkey and company asked Twitterers where they thought the characters might go from there — and the audience began, in effect, to write the next chapters of the story. Yorkey’s query, “Do you think Diana is still seeing Dr. Madden?” netted dozens of earnest responses:

Yes, therapy is a continual process. It takes a lot of time [and money] but I hope she is healing.

I think the comfort of knowing Dr. Madden is there is enough for her to try and move on without therapy.

The play’s message of hope for people facing persistent troubles attracted a vast community of young fans using online tools to plug themselves right into the story.

N2Ns Twitter site is only one digital avenue into the world of the show. The play has a fan Web site, nexttonormal.org, which is separate from the official Broadway site, nexttonormal.com. A key feature is a message board where legions of devotees talk directly to each other about their viewings of the show (many go more than once, one of the best examples yet of turning an online presence into sales), debate favorite songs and describe autograph encounters at the stage door (“After I told Alice it was my second time, she said, ‘I thought I’d seen you before!’ and I said I’m one of her five thousand Facebook friends”). The chat forum has begun running informal contests, stirring up the beehive even further.

Lisa Kasamoto, who runs the fan site, says these groupies feel they know each cast member personally. “The show gives them a place to go, to take this passion they’ve found — that their mom or their friends who aren’t into theatre might not understand — and talk about it endlessly.” The cast members spend half an hour after each performance signing autographs like rock stars. Alice Ripley, whose portrayal of Diana won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, then goes home to put in another hour answering e-mails from her Facebook and MySpace pages. “She’s just got a huge heart, and wants to write back to everybody,” says Kasamoto.

Many of these eager fans are under twenty-five. N2N’s director, Michael Greif, who triggered the twelve-year theatrical youthquake Rent, added his own marketing moxie to the mix. He reserved the first three rows of the house for twenty-five-dollar student rush seats. This ensures a line of enthusiastic repeat viewers at the box office each day, advertising its hit status to passersby. They wind up stationed at the edge of the stage (undesirable seats to wealthier patrons anyway), conspicuously applauding each song wildly, like cheerleaders rousing the rest of the audience.

The emo crowd, the bipolar community, post-adolescents looking for a new place to bond — they’ve all adopted Next to Normal as their own. The show is averaging 90 percent of capacity, and many of those theatregoers are the ones selling their friends on seeing it too. Arts marketers should heed this and change their old-school mindset. Theatre is no longer about opening nights and all-powerful newspaper reviews. Now it’s about building communities. Welcome to the Twitter Age.