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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Megan Thee Stallion is leaving Moulin Rouge! two weeks early. She collapsed in her first week of the run—diagnosed with extreme exhaustion, dehydration, vasoconstriction, and low metabolic levels. Depending on which corner of the internet you’re on, there’s also a breakup.

We don’t know her whole truth. We may never. She hasn’t said much beyond I’ve been pushing myself past my limits, running on empty, and my body finally said enough. Speculation is pointless, so I won’t do it here.

But that sentiment—of pushing past limits and running on empty—is something every performer recognizes in their body-ody-odys.

Whether you slept last night, whether you ate this afternoon, whether the person you love just left, whether you got the call you were dreading on the way to half-hour—you’ve got a show to do. Eight times a week.

The conventional response to all of that is admiration. What stamina! What skill! What a talent! And those words aren’t wrong. But they’re also a kind of cover. They make the toll legible only as virtuosity. They turn the cost into a compliment.

The general public, I think, doesn’t quite believe how much working in theater asks of a body. They might intellectually concede it. But they don’t feel it. And the not-feeling is part of why the conditions of the work don’t change.

That’s what I want to sit with. The illusion. What it asks. What it costs. What we don’t talk about because we are so good, by training, by reflex, by contract, at making hard things look easy.

Shall we?

The 8x

A performer’s body is an instrument doing repetitive precision work for hours, eight times a week. That’s the most boring possible way to say it, and it’s the most useful, because it’s the part people most reliably forget.

Researchers at NYU have started measuring vocal output the way a Fitbit measures steps. They put dosimeters on Broadway-bound singers and watch the data come back—duration of phonation, pitch, intensity, the literal accumulated vibrations of folds against folds. It’s the most rigorous look anyone has taken at what a contemporary theater role actually demands.

And the data, so far, says…drumroll…we don’t know. We can measure the impact. But we cannot tell you where the line is. The researchers have been honest—the threshold of “how much is too much” hasn’t been defined, especially with little to no vocal rest in between eight shows a week.

That admission is more meaningful than it might sound. It means an entire profession is operating without a known threshold of safety. Performers go out there every night doing something that we cannot (in any objective sense) prove the body can sustain. And we’re collecting evidence in real time, on the bodies themselves.

The ultimate toll isn’t an injury. It’s the steady wear of a thousand small things. The big dance number every night for a year. The vocal placement that keeps you from blowing out at the top of act two but slowly tightens something in the back of your jaw. The understudy you don’t trust, so you go on with the cold. The stretch you did before the show that pulled something wrong.

The eight times. The eight times. The eight times.

By the time the body says enough, it’s already been saying it for a while. The call-out is just the part the public sees.

The Score

Here’s where the instrument metaphor breaks down. An instrument can be put away. A cello doesn’t have to keep being a cello between performances. A body does.

A performer’s body is also their emotional body. The same nervous system that has to belt the high note at 8:44pm is the nervous system that absorbed the news from the doctor’s office at 8:44am. The same diaphragm that supports the long phrase is the diaphragm that’s been clenched all afternoon because of that conversation you need to have. There is no offstage version of your body you get to leave in the dressing room. You bring it all.

And theater asks you to do something specific with that: to take whatever the day gave you and metabolize it into the work. Channel it somehow. Let it become the texture of what you’re doing on stage.

This is the part the audience most reliably underestimates because they don’t have to think about it. They paid for the show. They came to see the show. They have no obligation to wonder what the person on stage is carrying.

But the person is carrying something. And the body is the thing carrying it.

And even when the day was too heavy, or the loss was too fresh, or the body just doesn’t have it—you might still go on anyway. You go on, and you do the work as well as you can, and the audience probably never knows.

The clinical version of what this does over time isn’t surprising. Chronic anxiety. Perfectionism. Burnout. A body that stops finding rest restorative. A nervous system that lives, low-grade, in the ready position for so long it forgets what neutral feels like. The mental health research on performers is consistent enough that it’s almost boring to cite. The data confirms what the bodies were already saying.

The body keeps the score. Eventually, the body files the report.

The Reflex

The illusion is the product. The high note sounds inevitable. The choreography looks natural. The grief in the second-act ballad is fresh, even on a Sunday matinee, even when you did it last night, even when you’ve done it 312 times. Performers and directors and creative teams work in concert to make the labor disappear. The seam is the enemy. Hiding it is the job. For some.

For others, like the guys in Mexodus, the visibility of their process is part of the art. They wear the construction proudly. They refuse to hide the making—and it becomes a different kind of magic.

But what nobody mentions about the version that hides it is that the hiding doesn’t stay in the theater. You train yourself, over months and years, to hold your truth at a very specific distance. Far enough away that it doesn’t get in the way of the work. Close enough that it can inform and inspire and ignite something unique every night. That’s the calibration. That’s the craft. And it works—until the calibration becomes a reflex, and the reflex becomes a habit, and the habit follows you home.

The self-concealment that protects the performance starts to govern everything else. The internal barometer that tells you this is too much, this is not okay, I am not okay—it gets drowned out. Not because you’re broken. Because you got very, very good at not letting it interfere with the task at hand.

You lose touch with your own signal. The instrument that was supposed to feel everything has learned, through repetition, to keep feeling things at a precise and managed distance.

That’s the cost the audience never sees. Not just the physical toll. The quiet erosion of the thing underneath the performance—the sense of self that was supposed to be the source of all of it.

The Acknowledgment

I don’t have a fix. I want to say that out loud because I think the absence of a fix is part of why this conversation rarely happens. The economics of Broadway require eight shows a week to break even. Every honest version of the conversation about reducing the schedule ends in the same place: who pays for it. The producers can’t, the unions know it, the audience doesn’t want ticket prices any higher than they already are. The math doesn’t math.

So this isn’t a piece arguing for a six-show week. It’s not even a piece arguing for anything in particular. It’s me trying, mostly, to say a thing out loud.

The precondition for anything ever changing is that the audience—the public, the press, the casual fan, the producer, the politician—actually believes that the work is hard. Not as a compliment. As a fact.

I’m aware that you, reading this, may already know all of this. Many of you live it. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t been carrying yourself.

But maybe a few people who don’t live it will read this, and the next time they see a performer make an impossibly hard thing look easy, they’ll let themselves register that the easy is the achievement, and the hard is the truth.

That’s all this is. Not a solution or a demand or a manifesto. Just a small, stubborn refusal to call the cost a compliment.

For paid subscribers this week: a memory from deep in the BEAU run that got me thinking about bodies, hiding and all that sappy jazz. ($5/month, which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.)

One last thing…

There’s a scene towards the end of (10-time-Drama-Desk-nominated) BEAU that I’d been doing a version of for close to a decade. It involves tears and heaves and hugs and one night in December, between sobs, a thought arrived.

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There’s a conversation I’ve had hundreds of times with friends in this industry. People who’ve left it. People thinking about leaving. It almost always has the same shape.

Someone says they’re done, or close to done, or need a break—but they don’t mean theater.

They mean the business of theater. The auditions. The economics. The politics of who gets in the room and who doesn’t. The particular way the industry can make you feel like a fool for caring as much as you do. That’s what they need distance from.

The form itself—the thing that got them here, that woke something up in them when they were four or fourteen or twenty-four or forty—that’s usually still there. Still working. Still doing the thing it did at the start.

Understandably, we sometimes call both of these things Broadway. And I think that conflation is the source of more quiet grief than we like to stop to acknowledge.

That gap is what I want to sit with here. Not to argue that the business doesn’t matter—it does, enormously—but to try to say something more precise about what we’re actually talking about when we talk about loving this thing. And what we risk losing when we let the two get confused.

Here we go.

Show & Business

The reason show and business get tangled is not complicated.

The form always arrives first. Years before you have any relationship with the industry—before auditions, before contracts, before bank accounts—the form wakes something up in you.

Then the business comes later, slowly, through the form itself. We start to see the mechanics and systems and structures that make up the thing that, at one point, felt like magic.

Over time, you stop being able to sense where one ends and the other begins. The reality of the business starts attaching itself to your experience of the art. The frustrations of one start masking as frustrations with the other. Which is understandable—if not inevitable.

And it is also, I think, a mistake worth naming.

Theater Magic

Theater doesn’t just do one thing to a brain. It stacks.

Think about what’s happening from the moment you walk into a theater. There’s the ritual—waiting in line, scanning the ticket, finding the seat, the program in your hand, the low hum of the room. There’s the gathering—a crowd of strangers, physically together, oriented toward the same thing. There’s the sensory environment—the temperature, the smell, the way a curtain looks under pre-show light.

There’s the music, which does something to the nervous system that language alone cannot. There’s the language, which does something to your nervous system that music alone cannot. There’s the lights, and the sets, and the proscenium. And there’s bodies. Doing something vulnerable—performing, feeling, allowing themselves to be seen.

Any one of these things alone could move you. Stacked on top of each other, they produce something specific. I’ve written about collective effervescence—the charge of being emotionally synchronized with a group.

What I want to name here is simpler: the conditions that produce it are not accidental. They are built into the form. Every single element—the ritual, the gathering, the music, the language, the bodies, the dark before anything begins—is particular to the form of live theater.

Not to the business of it. The form.

The Distance

Sometimes, and I think this is important to say, you do need distance from the form. So that you can expand your taste, your worldview, your experiences. So that you can follow your curiosity instead of feeling boxed in by slime tutorials and cast recordings.

And sometimes you need distance from the business too. Not because you’ve fallen out of love with musicals, but because the business is genuinely hard.

Both of those distances are legitimate. But they are not the same.

Protecting yourself from the machine doesn’t need to cost you the form. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That’s a decision you make internally, whether you know it or not.

Your relationship to the industry can get complicated, can need tending, can require you to walk away for a while. That’s fine. That’s honest.

But the form can still be yours. It can still comfort, or tickle, or ignite something in you like nothing else can—whenever you need it.

You’ve Got a Friend

The nice thing about theater, regardless of what you might’ve heard, is that it’s not going anywhere.

The form is a lifelong friend.

SPIKE has proven it. It’s a daily puzzle game for theater people that’s been played almost 20,000 times since it launched 14 days ago.

People from every side, every “level”, every nook and cranny of the industry—from middle school geeks and stage moms, to college professors and seasoned queens—are playing. Some as a solo daily joy ritual, and some in group texts and high school classes and Broadway casts.

There is a shared affection for the form that has shined through, for me, in a new way in the last two weeks. I can see, from the admin dashboard and the daily SPIKE results texts, that the Love hasn’t faded. Maybe it’s been shaded. Hidden behind worthy frustration and deserved disillusion. But it’s there.

The business will keep being what it is—messy, expensive, worth fighting for. But it was almost never the thing that hooked us. Or held us. Or swept us away. Or saved us.

No matter how far you wander or how long you drift, when you’re ready, you can always come back home.

To the theater.

This week in One Last Thing: on what building SPIKE taught me about why I got into theater in the first place—and a gift for paid subscribers. It’s $5/month (or $50/year), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

I was a math kid.

Not the prodigy kind. The kind who found algebra class more comfortable than English class—where a problem had a right answer, and the process of getting there was creative in its own way.

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Every "professional" theatre person—every understudy, every swing, every dresser, every stage manager, every casting director, every Tony winner—came from a different-kind-of-same place.

A small auditorium on a Saturday night. And that's not a metaphor.

It's a song from All the World's a Stage. And literally your cousin's backyard. Your temple's basement. Your middle school cafetorium with the basketball nets cranked up to the ceiling.

The thing we call the industry—the thing with the Playbill and the reviews and the Tonys and the cast recordings and the TikToks—doesn't exist without those rooms. Not "is harder without them." Doesn't exist.

We talk about Broadway as the apex. Regional as the farm system. Community theater as a hobby. The conversation runs top-down, from marquee back to middle school.

But maybe the river starts in the small auditorium. The marquee is just the mouth—wider, louder, visible from further away. But the water is coming from somewhere else.

This week, let's go there.

Amateur Hour

Broadway isn't, by and large, a room full of amateurs.

But the thing Broadway pays millions of dollars to re-create—the electricity, the ensemble Love, the feeling that the show matters, that something is at stake for everyone in the room—is sitting in a high school auditorium with a broken AC. Unglamorous. Uncommodified. "Amateur."

Turns out, the word amateur comes from the Latin amare. It means one who Loves.

So when someone says "it's just community theater," what they're literally saying is: "it's just a room full of people who Love this."

That's a strange label to use as a downgrade.

Broadway, by contrast, is a room full of professionals—which is its own beautiful, hard-won, worthy thing. But professional means "one who is paid." Which means, necessarily, that some of the Love has to get re-routed through the market. Through the agent. The contract. The rent. Nobody's fault. Just the math of having to eat.

The small auditorium on Saturday night doesn't have a market to route through. Which means what's happening in that room is, technically, the purest version of the thing.

The industry's job, at its best, isn't to transcend that. It's to stay close to it. To remember where the water came from.

Downstream

It's easy, downstream, to step in the water and forget it has an origin.

We tend to do that to ourselves too.

The brain is not an archive. Memories aren't filed away like photographs—they're rebuilt each time you need them. From fragments. Stitched together with whoever you are now.

Neuroscientists call this reconsolidation. Every recall alters the memory. The original fades. What remains is the most recent telling.

Which means the kid who first sat in a theater, breath held, watching something come alive—that kid isn't preserved. That kid is rebuilt, each time, by whoever you've become. Through whatever distance you're willing to travel.

And the distance is the whole thing.

Because if you could remember clearly—if you could get back down into the same body, the same torn fabric seats, the same held breath—you'd realize you were standing in the same water.

The upgrade isn't a fact about your life. It's a feeling produced by the distance between you and the version of your life that you "remember."

The further we edit ourselves from our own origin, the more upgraded we get to feel.

That's what the forgetting is for.

Upstream

Which is why, when we're suddenly reminded what's upstream, it hits different.

Quick story: last week I woke up to an Instagram notification that I'd been tagged in something.

It was a 30-second montage of quiet moments in a small, empty, local theater, moments before the audience arrived. "Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium," the opening number from All the World's a Stage, played underneath.

I wept. Nice tears! Like a door I didn't know was closed had cracked open.

Someone upstream—someone at the source—had picked up their phone and pulled me back in. They didn't know I'd drifted. I'd been downstream. I'd been in it. And what the reel said, unknowingly, was: you're still one of us. Come back whenever you want.

I'd forgotten I could.

Saturday Night

That song—"Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium"—is the opening track on All the World's a Stage, a new cast recording I'm on. It came out in May.

It’s not the first song chronologically (there's an overture that's gorgeously orchestrated by musical theater legend Michael Starobin.) It's the first song structurally.

Which is the same thing this whole essay has been trying to say.

Adam Gwon’s brilliant song, in it’s own way, says: whatever else this show is about, it's downstream of a specific kind of place. A kind of dust. A kind of rickety curtain. A kind of Love.

It's not a step on the ladder. It's a Love letter back to the source.

To every drama teacher who stayed late. Every parent who brought tech-week pizza. Every director mouthing every line from the wings. Every kid in a too-big costume. Every person in every small town running the lights from a folding table at the back of the gym on a Saturday night.

The rest of us didn't get here without you.

We just have a bad habit of forgetting.

This week in One last thing: how a daily puzzle game reunited me with my 13-year-old, theatre-obsessed, self.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

Since Spike launched last week, I've poured more hours into it than into most of the things that actually pay me. Writing clues. Researching trivia. Testing the interface against the smallest possible edge cases. Scheduling puzzles weeks ahead so I don't have to panic-write them at 11:47pm on a Tuesday.

Here's the thing I keep being surprised by:

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On every stage in the world tonight, there's little pieces of tape marking exactly where everything is supposed to go. The furniture, the props, the actor's position under a specific light.

Run over, ripped off, and occasionally ignored completely, it is the true unsung hero of the show part of show business.

It's called spike tape. And I named a game after it. But more on that in a minute.

The Agreement

Theater hides almost everything.

The crew wears black. The wings are dark. The orchestra pit is sunk. Lighting rigs are painted to disappear into the fly space above. Every piece of the apparatus that makes the magic possible is designed to vanish, so that what you experience as an audience member feels pure—effortless, seamless, inevitable.

And yet, spike tape somehow missed that memo. It slipped through. It’s not invisible; audiences can see it if they look. Most don’t. But it’s there—a small, quiet admission that the show is a system. That someone had to figure out where everything goes and mark it, so it can be found again.

Whether we see it or not, there’s spike tape everywhere. Not just on the floor—but in the work itself.

The Details

Shows have their own version of spike tape—small, overlooked details that trace how a show gets from A to Z. Information that’s always been there—we just don’t think to look for it.

Pippin—the original 1972 production—was the first Broadway show to use b-roll footage in a TV commercial. Before Fosse, theater advertising was still images and copy. He put actual performance on camera, cut it like a music video, and Broadway marketing was never the same.

A Chorus Line was the first Broadway show to use an electronic lighting board. Before that, people moved dimmers by hand.

Facts like these make a show feel bigger. Like knowing someone in a show you’re seeing, or understanding how a fly system works—your experience expands. Your appreciation for the work deepens.

And science, as it often does, can prove it.

The Chemistry

At coursed restaurants, chefs will often come to the table and tell you about each dish. Where the fish was from. Why they put those two things on the same plate. And the food, somehow, tastes more delicious. Why?

A 2008 study at Caltech put people in fMRI scanners and gave them identical glasses of wine—same wine, different price on the label. The brains of people who believed the wine cost more showed measurably more activity in the regions associated with pleasure. Same wine. Different experience. The knowledge changed the chemistry.

We have a deep desire to close the gap between what we know and what we want to know. And when we do learn something—when knowledge expands—not only is it satisfying, but our curiosity grows. We want more knowing.

Distance, and the closing of it, makes the heart grow fonder.

The Game

So. The game.

It's called Spike. It lives at theater.games/spike. Every day, a Broadway show is revealed through five clues. The goal is to guess the show before you run out of clues.

The design principle underneath it is earnest: every wrong guess teaches you something. The clues exist to deliver information as much as to test it. The game presents as a quiz. It's really a ploy to teach you something you didn't know about a show you love, or one you've never heard of.

Hopefully, every day, you leave with a little more appreciation for a little piece of our little multiverse.

The Kid

If I'm being honest, I built this for my 13-year-old self who obsessively listened to cast recordings and treated Playbills like Bibles.

His hunger for knowledge about theater was ravenous. The facts in Spike would've been like sharkbait to him. And I think they would've expanded his understanding of all the other people, parts, and pieces that make a show possible.

I love the name Spike and the philosophy behind it—but I also want to be honest that it's a daily puzzle for show people. It's meant to be fun and silly and ours.

Beyond Wordle, there are about 600 daily games floating around. Many of them are about sports, music, or film. It's about time theater staked its claim—so here it is.

Spike is live at theater.games/spike. With a new puzzle every single day.

Play it. And if you love it, tell someone. Games like these travel through TikToks, IG stories, group chats, and word of mouth.

Have fun!

This week in One Last Thing: Spike’s strange origin story and the paperclip that started it all.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thanks for being here.

One Last Thing

About six weeks ago, I had a strange idea—and it was not a daily puzzle game.

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I have a bad habit of over-explaining what I think a show is going to be before I see it.

A year of hearing about Mexodus—from my friends who were producing it, in hallway conversations, in the slow accumulation of buzz that happens when a piece keeps getting extended—meant that by the time I sat down in the Daryl Roth a few weeks ago, I had already written the show in my head. I knew it was two-person. I knew about the live looping. I knew it had something to do with the Underground Railroad running south, into Mexico. I knew it had won Helen Hayes Awards. I knew Lin-Manuel Miranda had said something about it online.

I thought I knew what I was walking into.

And then they knocked on the door.

The Knock

Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson don't begin Mexodus by finding themselves already in a scene. They knock. They come in. And then they explain, directly to us, who they are and why they're here.

It's a disarmingly simple gesture. And it changes everything about what follows.

When a show breaks the fourth wall—when a performer turns and addresses the audience—we usually understand it as a technique. A stylistic choice. The actor briefly steps out of the fiction to acknowledge the room, and then steps back in. It's a wink. A rupture.

What Brian and Nygel do is different. They don't break the fourth wall. They never build it in the first place.

They walk in as themselves—two multi-instrumentalists, a Black man and a Brown man, who found a story they couldn't believe wasn't in any textbook—and they tell us that. Out loud. At the top of the show. Before anyone has been asked to believe anything, they account for their own presence. They say: here's who we are, here's what we found, here's what we're going to do.

The opening call-and-response goes something like this: Did you know this shit? We didn't know this shit. And then: Why? Cuz it wasn't allowed, it wasn't allowed…it wasn't spoken aloud. It's funny and raw and immediate. And in about thirty seconds it puts the audience and the performers on exactly the same footing—equally astonished, equally implicated, equally in on it.

What I felt when that happened—and I've been trying to find the right word for it—was relief.

Theater asks a lot of us. It asks us to believe. To suspend. To accept the terms. Usually those terms aren't stated—we're expected to understand them from context, to slip into the fiction and not ask questions. And most of the time, we do. But there's always a low-grade labor in that. A kind of vigilance.

The moment Brian and Nygel knocked on that door, the vigilance released. Because they were saying, in the clearest possible terms: we see you. We know you're here. We know what this is. We're all in this together.

That's not a technique. That's a consent agreement.

The Veil

When Brian or Nygel picks up an instrument and plays a phrase into the loop pedal, they're not just making music. They're making the process of making music visible. The loop cycles. Another phrase gets laid on top. Then another. The song builds in real time, in front of you, from nothing. You watch it become itself.

In conventional musical theater, this is the opposite of how it works. You hear the finished thing. The orchestra is in a pit, or the tracks are pre-recorded, or at the very least the entire arrangement has been set and rehearsed until every element is invisible. The magic depends on concealment. You can't know how the sausage gets made because the sausage—as far as you're concerned—appears already made.

Mexodus shows you every step.

And what I kept waiting for—the moment where that transparency would break the spell, would make the whole thing feel less rather than more—never came.

Instead, the more I could see the mechanics, the more I trusted the magic. Because the magic wasn't the finished product. The magic was the act of making it. Right there, in the room, with their hands and their voices and their instruments.

This is a genuine argument about what theater can be. Not a gimmick. Not a format innovation. A philosophical claim: that the veil isn't required. That you don't have to hide how something is made for it to move people. That maybe the making is the thing that might move people most.

Director David Mendizábal put it precisely: "Looping was a metaphor for the labor that both characters were doing. The act of looping and creating music together was a metaphor for these two men working together, building trust, building solidarity." The form isn't separate from the story. It is the story. Every loop Brian lays down, every phrase Nygel records and builds on—it's Henry and Carlos, learning to trust each other across a border, piece by piece.

South

The story Brian and Nygel tell is one that most of us—including me—were never taught.

Between five and ten thousand enslaved people escaped bondage not by going north, but by going south. Across Texas. Across the Rio Grande. Into Mexico, where in 1829, Vicente Guerrero—who was himself of African descent—had abolished slavery. Thirty-four years before Lincoln. Mexico refused to sign a fugitive slave treaty with the United States. The law was simple: any enslaved person who set foot on Mexican soil was legally free.

This is the Underground Railroad that Mexodus is about.

The show they built around it is extraordinary in the way it holds two narratives at once. There's the story of Henry, an escaped enslaved man, and Carlos, a Mexican war veteran and farmer—a Black man and a Brown man finding each other across a border and saving each other's lives. And then there's the story of Brian and Nygel: two guys who found this history and couldn't let it go, who used every skill and instrument and tool they had to make sure you heard it too.

The show never lets you forget that both stories are happening. The history and the telling of it are equally present. And that doubleness is part of what makes Mexodus unlike anything I've seen on a stage.

The Impossible

At one point, Nygel says: I don't think I'm their wildest dreams. Because where we're from, you don't get to dream like this.

Take a second with that.

The wildest dream is still a dream—still tethered to what's imaginable, what the mind can reach for from inside a particular life. What Nygel is describing is something past that. A life that couldn't have been dreamed. A stage, a story, a loop pedal, sold-out houses, Lortel nominations—none of it inside the frame of what was possible to hope for. And what he's saying—as himself, as a Black man on a stage in New York City, telling a story about the Underground Railroad through instruments he plays with his own hands—is that he’s in a space his ancestors couldn't have imagined.

It's one of the most precise articulations of intergenerational possibility I've ever heard.

And it's also, somehow, a description of the show itself.

The Argument

Theater is a conservative art form in a lot of ways—attached to its conventions, its hierarchies, its traditions. The proscenium arch isn't going anywhere. Orchestras in pits aren't going anywhere. The implicit agreement to maintain the fiction, to not look at the lights, to not acknowledge that there's a human being two rows in front of you staring at the same stage—that's not going anywhere.

But Mexodus makes an argument that I think will be hard to ignore for anyone who experiences it. Not that all shows need to be like this—they shouldn't. That concealment isn't a prerequisite for transcendence. That a show can tell you exactly what it is, every step of the way, and still take you somewhere you've never been.

The veil, it turns out, was optional.

What Brian and Nygel have built is a piece of theater that trusts its audience completely. Trusts them to hold complexity. Trusts them to be moved by what's real. Trusts them to find the magic not in the illusion but in the witnessing.

That trust is rare. And when you feel it—sitting in a room where two people knocked on a door and told you exactly what they were going to do, and then did something so much bigger than they promised—it feels a little like what Nygel was describing.

It feels impossible. Made possible.

This week in One Last Thing: what it means to watch a show about crossing a border when you’ve just crossed one yourself.

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…

We (my husband and I) just moved to Los Angeles.

I’ve been sitting with that, trying to figure out what it means. Not logistically—logistically it means boxes and forwarding addresses and learning which freeways to avoid. I mean what it means about who I am now. What you leave behind when you leave a place. What you carry.

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Today I turn thirty-four. One week ago, I left New York.

I moved to the city at twenty-two. A one-way train from Boston. I landed at 53rd and 2nd—my first apartment, my first intersection, the first point on a map I didn’t know I was drawing.

Twelve years. That’s the distance between twenty-two and thirty-four. That’s also, it turns out, the distance between arriving somewhere and realizing it became part of you.

Sam and I are moving to Los Angeles. The reason is simple: Sam needs to be there for work. I’m his husband. We’re in this together. I want to say that plainly, because I think there’s a temptation to turn the move into something grander than it is. A reinvention. A statement. It’s not. It’s a marriage. It’s someone I love needing to be somewhere, and me going with him.

But the leaving part. The leaving part is something else entirely. Because it turns out that twelve years in a city doesn't just pass through you. It gets in.

This week, I wanted to understand why.

As I traipsed around the city over the past few weeks, knowing that we were on our way out, something strange started happening.

Block by block, it felt like a map was unfolding. That’s the bar where I kissed that boy. That’s the subway station staircase I cried under. That’s the pizza place on the east side where I ate dollar slices at 22 because it was all I could afford and I thought that was the dream—and I was right.

Every block has a timestamp. Every intersection holds something. And I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that living somewhere for twelve years could turn the streets into a kind of autobiography you don’t realize you’ve been writing.

In 1971, a neuroscientist named John O'Keefe discovered something in the hippocampus—the memory bank of the brain. He found neurons that fire only when you enter a specific location. He called them place cells. One neuron for the corner by your apartment. Another for the route to work. Another for the coffee shop. Your brain builds a spatial map of the places you inhabit. Not figuratively. Literally. Neuron by neuron, your brain draws the city inside itself.

There’s a famous study of longtime London taxi drivers. Brain scans showed their posterior hippocampus had physically grown over time. The city reshaped their brains. And the more years they drove, the bigger it got.

I am not a London taxi driver. But for twelve years, my brain has been drawing a map without asking permission. Every opening night. Every 3rd glass of wine. Every hug. Every heartbreak. Every subway ride home from every audition.

There’s another layer—harder to name—that has to do with how a place stops being where you are and starts being who you are. Psychologists call it place identity: the physical environments we inhabit become part of our self-concept. Not as backdrops. As structure. The place tells you: you are the person who lives here. It becomes evidence of your own existence.

And wherever we go, we pick up people the way roots pick up water—not by design, but by reaching toward whatever sustains us. We talk about “putting down roots” like it’s deliberate, like you plant yourself and grow. But roots don’t work that way. They’re opportunistic. They grow toward moisture. They find cracks and fill them. They tangle around whatever is solid enough to hold.

And New York accelerates this. Eight million people in three hundred square miles. You’re stacked on top of each other in apartments and subway cars and theater lobbies. You can’t avoid collision here. The density won’t let you. You meet your future collaborator because you were both waiting for the same bathroom at the same bar. Your friend of a friend of a friend becomes the friend who reshapes your thirties.

My people—the ones I had to hug goodbye—I knew almost none of them twelve years ago. They arrived through side doors. Through accidents. Through introductions that seemed meaningless at the time. That’s not a plan. That’s a root system. That’s what happens when you stay somewhere long enough.

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

Joni Mitchell was singing about parking lots. But the feeling she named—that something becomes most visible at the moment it disappears—turns out to be more than a lyric.

A psychiatrist named Mindy Fullilove studies what happens when people leave the places that shaped them. She found that when those bonds are disrupted—even voluntarily, even for the right reasons—the attachment doesn’t fade. It intensifies. The unfamiliarity of the new place makes the old one more vivid.

And if that’s true—the real weight of twelve years in this city will arrive after I’ve left it, when I’m three thousand miles away and some song comes on or some smell drifts past and my hippocampus fires up a block I haven’t walked in months and suddenly I’m back on 53rd and 2nd and it’s 2014 and I’m twenty-two and I don’t know anyone and everything is still starting.

The grief and the gratitude might be the same thing. The ache of leaving might be the first clear evidence that the place actually became part of you. You couldn’t feel the weight of the wall while you were leaning on it. You had to step away.

My impulse—my deep, almost cellular impulse—is to control what happens next. To arrive in LA with a framework. A plan for what the new chapter looks like, how I’ll stay connected, what I’ll build, where I’ll put my roots.

But I don’t think roots take instructions. They never did.

I’ve been asking myself all week why this birthday feels different. And I think the answer is that thirty-four, for me, isn’t a milestone. It’s a vantage point. It’s the first time I’ve been high enough to see the whole drawing—every line, every intersection, every mess that turned out to be a miracle.

Maybe that’s the thing about places and times. They become part of you so slowly that you don’t notice. And then you leave, and you notice all at once. And from that distance—from LA, from thirty-four, from the other side of a chapter you can finally read—you realize the question was never whether the city shaped you.

The question is what you do with the shape.

This week in One Last Thing: the thing I didn’t want to write about in this piece—what it means to leave the gravitational center of the thing I write about, and what I’m actually afraid of.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

There’s a version of this piece I didn’t write. The version where I talk about what it means to write a newsletter about theater—from inside the theater capital of the world—and then leave.

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Since then, the scope of this newsletter has expanded far beyond screens and feeds. But theater marketing remains one of the places my curiosity keeps returning to. Especially because, for all the attention social media gets, the industry still seems unsure how much power it’s actually willing to cede to it.

So when Katharine Quinn announced she was formally splitting her company into two distinct offerings—And That’s Showbiz, a Broadway media outlet, and And That’s Strategy, a boutique social media agency—my antennas went up.

It’s an unusual combination. One speaks directly to fans. The other advises producers. Taken together, it creates a vantage point that’s rare in this industry—one foot in the conversation shaping Broadway online, and one foot inside the rooms deciding how shows are sold.

I wanted to understand what drove the split. But more than that, I wanted to understand what the last few years of Broadway internet culture have actually changed about how shows are built, marketed, and sustained.

Let’s get into it.

The Accident

Matt: From the outside, the split felt very intentional. When did you realize this needed to become two separate companies?

Katharine: Honestly, none of it was planned.

And That’s Showbiz was always meant to be a Broadway digital media outlet. That was the original idea—red carpets, insider access, prestige content for Broadway. It wasn’t meant to be an agency.

Then Gatsby happened. I used And That’s Showbiz to start posting content for the show, and it became the strategy arm almost by accident.

At a certain point, two years in, I looked around and realized I had two different businesses living under one brand. Strategy is B2B—it’s advising producers and creative teams. Showbiz is B2C—it’s speaking directly to fans. Formalizing that felt necessary.

But it wasn’t just structural. I also wanted to make it very clear that And That’s Strategy is a team of brilliant minds. I wasn’t interested in this being the Katharine Quinn Show. These companies are made up of incredible people. So many times I get complimented on content that wasn’t my idea. The brilliant ideas and execution are being handled with great care by other people. I have a team of genuinely sharp talent, and I wanted the company structure to reflect that.

The Gap

Matt: On the Showbiz side—what gap were you seeing?

Katharine: I love prestige content. I grew up watching director’s cuts. I compulsively watch every Hollywood Reporter roundtable. Every Variety Actors on Actors.

And it felt like Broadway didn’t have much of that. We have news. We had ticketing sites. But not a lot of curatorial voice. Not a lot of opinion and editorial. Not a lot of deeper, long-form conversation about process.

There’s more of it now, and that’s exciting. The climate has shifted dramatically in the last two years. But at the time, it felt like there was space for something that wasn’t just transactional.

And part of that comes from how deeply I believe Broadway fandom is underestimated.

Broadway fandoms are essential to the core of our business. Even if you’re going to be a capitalist about it—it benefits everyone to listen to fans. They are online, telling you exactly what they’re responding to. They’re literally a focus group.

That belief—that fans are not peripheral to the business but central to it—kept surfacing throughout our conversation. It informs how Katharine thinks about both sides of her company. And it’s still, she told me, a harder sell than you’d think.

Matt: I feel like that belief informs both sides of what you do.

Katharine: It does. And it’s still a hard sell sometimes.

There’s a perception that fans aren’t average ticket price buyers and therefore somehow less valuable. I just don’t believe that. They are deeply invested. They come back. They bring people. They evangelize.

For example, people knew the New Money dance before they even came to see Gatsby. There is so much opportunity to build these brands online—and so much of it is still untapped.

If you don’t invest in community, your marketing is built on a house of cards. Fans are the core. They’re the magma, the core. Everything else builds out from there—influencers, press, celebrity, audience. But if you’re hollow at the center, the rest collapses.

That image stayed with me—fans as the molten core, the thing everything else builds out from, not the afterthought at the end of a marketing plan. In most rooms I’ve been in, the conversation starts with press, moves to celebrity, then to advertising. Community, if it comes up at all, is last. Katharine is arguing it should be the foundation.

But that only works if the data backs it up. So I asked her about the numbers.

The Funnel

Matt: What metrics is your team focused on—and is that different than what gets shared with producers?

Katharine: A huge part of our job now is education.

I have learned how to explain to producers of a certain age what a meme is. I’ve learned how to explain why it matters. I’ve learned how to explain that social isn’t just one person sitting in a corner on their phone.

When people ask if social sells tickets, I typically ask: how do you track billboard impressions? It’s an awareness tool. It’s part of a funnel. Social is the same—except it actually hits every part of the funnel. Awareness, reach, consideration, conversion. Organic social amplifies paid. You can click the link and purchase. Organic social creates press beats and highlights the ones that already exist. Social is quite literally the whole funnel.

On Gatsby, we’d see unexplained spikes in web traffic. And then we’d look at Instagram and see that a video had gone viral that day. Post-show surveys listed social as one of the top reasons people came.

Nobody questions a billboard buy, or a Times Square placement, despite the fact that measurement is essentially impossible. A full page Times ad in 2026 is a vanity buy. The impact of that forty thousand dollars would look very different coming from social.

Matt: When you talk about social hitting every part of the funnel—are you thinking more about brand building than selling tickets?

Katharine: The primary objective is to build the brand. Build the world of the show. Find the community and foster it. Let them know they are valued, that you’re listening.

Sometimes other parts of the marketing team need us to post something that looks like a paid ad on the feed, and that’s part of the job. But the primary work is world-building.

And I think if your marketing is only awareness and not community building, you’re ignoring 62% of your audience who don’t even live in the tri-state area. You’ve ignored everyone who isn’t physically walking past your billboard every day.

The Proof

Matt: If you zoom out—what feels structurally different about Broadway marketing now compared to even two years ago?

Katharine: When we started posting at volume on Gatsby, Broadway cadence was around two posts a week. Maybe. We were posting twice a day, six days a week, across six platforms. Seventy-two touch points a week. I did that for two years straight without missing a beat. And that doesn’t begin to touch the dozens of long-form videos we put on YouTube.

Nobody was doing that. I had an opportunity to demonstrate something—do a proof of concept, especially at Paper Mill. We got 75,000 followers during our out of town, which at that point was unheard of. Paper Mill gained 10,000 followers. Eva and Jeremy both gained thousands.

I had to make big swings like that because—who the hell was I? They literally called me “that TikTok girl.” And now we’ve built a reputation, which is incredibly fortunate. But so much of it was educating and explaining and proof of concept and gently taking people who aren’t familiar with these platforms by the hand and showing how powerful they can be.

Matt: And now? Has the rest of the industry caught up?

Katharine: Everyone understands social has to move faster now. But platforms are moving faster too. Producers are just now warming up to TikTok—as the platform is imploding. In a meeting last week, someone said investing in paid on TikTok is a great idea. We were having that conversation two and a half years ago. The industry is catching up, but platforms don’t wait.

What’s changed structurally is that social is no longer optional. It’s not experimental. At some point, every team realizes how important it is to their word of mouth, digital worldbuilding, reach, and longevity as a brand.

The Loop

One of the things that makes Katharine’s model unusual is that her two companies aren’t just separated—they can also work together. A strategy client might debut a piece of content through the Showbiz platform. And Strategy has taken a more content-forward, long-form approach than almost any other agency in the space—on Gatsby, they produced a creative team roundtable that runs an hour and a half. On Maybe Happy Ending, they took the writers back to NYU where they first met. It’s the kind of work that usually lives on the media side, not the agency side.

But the more interesting question is what flows the other direction.

Matt: Does running Showbiz actually change how you advise Strategy clients?

Katharine: Constantly. We’re watching fan sentiment in real time—what’s landing, what’s being ignored, what’s building organically. That intelligence feeds directly into how we build content strategy for shows. It’s a feedback loop.

Which brings up a question about positioning. Broadway marketing is increasingly being piecemealed out—influencer marketing here, organic social there, digital advertising somewhere else. Where does a boutique agency fit in that landscape?

Matt: What do you see as the value of a boutique agency versus a larger firm?

Katharine: I think there’s a place for everything. And the good news is, it’s now not uncommon for other agencies to welcome us in alongside them. They know our organic content performs, that it gets press pickup, that it feeds the rest of the funnel. The collaboration can truly be net positive for all parties partnering.

And I think there’s room for multiple agencies on a show. More creativity, more perspectives.

But I also think sometimes you want to go to the farmer’s market instead of Whole Foods. Everything we do is curated. We’re building a company culture around what we believe in and what differentiates us. And we’re selective because the work requires it.

Through talking to Katharine, it became clear to me that the split between Showbiz and Strategy wasn’t just a business decision. It’s a reflection of something that’s been changing in Broadway for a while now—the distance between the people who understand the audience and the people making decisions about how to reach them is shrinking.

For a long time, those were separate worlds. The conversation happening online among fans lived in one place. The rooms where marketing budgets were set and creative campaigns were built lived in another. And rarely did information flow cleanly between the two.

What Katharine has built—whether by design or by accident—is a company that sits at the intersection. And that intersection is, I think, where the most interesting questions about Broadway marketing live right now.

Not “does social sell tickets?”—but what happens to a show’s identity when the people shaping its online presence actually understand the audience they’re speaking to? What happens when fan intelligence isn’t an afterthought but a starting point? What changes when the person advising producers on strategy is also the person watching, in real time, what fans care about?

I don’t think we have full answers yet. But Katharine does have a sense of where things are headed:

The next phase is building the infrastructure to scale what we’ve proven works—without losing the quality that made it work in the first place.

She’s been right before.

This week in One Last Thing: intersections, Frankenstein's monster, and what it means to own the way you see the world.

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…

For most of my life, I wanted people to know what I could do. My voice. My set of skills. The question in every audition room or job interview was always some version of: how well can he do the thing?

There’s a clarity in that. And for a long time, I didn’t know I could want anything else.

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By now you’ve probably seen the clip. Timothée Chalamet, sitting across from Matthew McConaughey at UT Austin, making a case for why movies still matter—and in doing so, throwing ballet and opera under the bus. “I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore.”

The internet did what the internet does. The ballet world clapped back. The opera world posted discount codes. Misty Copeland noted, with pointed calm, that Chalamet had personally asked her to help promote his film. SNL made a joke. A British opera singer called him “immature.” The cycle completed itself in about four days.

And all of it left me feeling icky. Not outrage. Something more like recognition.

The Shape of It

Here’s the thing nobody’s really saying about what Chalamet said: it wasn’t just careless. It was structural. He was doing what everyone in the performing arts does, constantly, automatically, often without realizing it. He found something below him on the ladder and used it to prop himself up.

There’s a ladder. We all know it. We just don’t talk about it out loud.

Film is at the top—or it was, until prestige television arrived and complicated things. Now it’s more like: an A24 film above an HBO drama above a network drama above a streaming procedural above the thing your uncle watches on Peacock. And below all of that, somewhere, is the franchise blockbuster, which makes a billion dollars and gets treated by “serious” film people as barely worth acknowledging.

Below film: theater. But not all theater equally. Drama at the top. The Pulitzer winner, the Sondheim revival, the new work from an important voice at a respected institution. Then musicals—but again, not equally. Original cast, the celebrity vehicle, the jukebox, the IP grab. And below that, somewhere: opera. Ballet. The forms Chalamet was dismissing.

Except the ladder doesn’t stop there.

How Low Can You Go?

Keep going and you find: regional theater. Community theater. The theater company operating out of a church basement. Theater for Young Audiences. Hairspray on Royal Caribbean. The performer doing eight shows a week in a theme park, in a costume, in August, in Orlando.

I have heard theater people—people I respect enormously, people who care deeply about this work—say things about these spaces that are functionally identical to what Timothée Chalamet said about opera. It’s not really professional. Nobody serious works there. It’s just for kids. It’s just for tourists.

No one cares about that anymore.

We say it all the time. We just don’t say it on a press tour for an Oscars contender, so nobody clips it.

The Mechanism

The ladder exists because it has to, I think. When you’ve given your life to something—when you’ve taken the financial hit, made the sacrifices—you need to believe it matters. You need to believe it matters more than some other thing. The hierarchy is a coping mechanism. A story we tell ourselves about why the hard choice was worth it.

This is one of the most human things there is. Watch it happen anywhere people choose conviction over comfort. The academic who spent a decade on a dissertation has opinions about the full time fanfic writer. The marathon runner has complicated feelings about the person doing a 5K who calls themselves a runner. The indie filmmaker has thoughts about Netflix. The mechanism is always the same: I gave up something real to be here. So here has to matter. And if here has to matter, then somewhere has to matter less.

For artists, the stakes feel especially high—because the sacrifice usually was. Nobody accidentally ends up doing eight shows a week in a regional theater. Nobody stumbles into a decade of dance training. These are choices made early, often at real cost. The hierarchy becomes the retroactive justification. It’s the story that makes the choice make sense. Which is why threatening it—even just by naming it—can feel like threatening the choice itself.

What We’re Actually Measuring

What are we measuring when we rank art forms? Ticket prices? Mass audience size? Cultural longevity? Critical prestige? Awards eligibility? The answer keeps changing depending on who’s doing the ranking and what they need to protect.

Film wants to be taken as seriously as theater. Theater wants to be taken as seriously as film. Opera wants to be taken as seriously as both. Musical theater wants to stop being the punchline. And everyone—quietly, constantly—is looking down.

Chalamet’s comment was clumsy and reductive. It revealed something about how he thinks about art that’s probably worth sitting with. But if the performing arts community’s response is just to say we matter too—and then go back to quietly dismissing the cruise ship performers and the TYA writers and the theme park dancers—then we haven’t learned anything.

We’ve just rearranged the ladder.

This week in One Last Thing: how this piece actually came together—what I kept saying when people asked me what I thought (aka why I couldn’t answer.)

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Regardless, thanks for being here.

One Last Thing

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Last Friday, I published a piece about a thirty-four-second rehearsal room clip from a community theatre in Witham, England. A guy singing “The Last Supper” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Filmed on an iPhone under fluorescent lights.

The next day, the video (which had crossed a million views in 48hrs) was gone.

No statement. No explanation. Maybe it was licensing. Maybe it was caution. Maybe it was something as simple as a clause that reads, somewhere in fine print, “no recording or distribution.” But the removal raised a bigger question for me:

What happens when the new geography of attention collides with the old architecture of rights?

Part of what made that clip feel so electric was how uncomplicated it was. A moment, captured and shared, traveling farther than anyone in that room probably predicted. The distance between a small Essex town and a million strangers shrinking in real time.

Then—poof.

Licensing has always been a form of care. It’s how writers and composers get paid. It’s how work stays intact. It’s how theatre—an art form built to disappear—maintains some kind of stability and structure.

That logic still makes sense.

The friction comes from the fact that distribution looks very different now. Anyone can post almost anything, anywhere, at any time. A rehearsal room isn’t as sealed as it once was. The lines between process and product are blurrier than they used to be.

This week, I want to sit in that friction.

Licensing in the age of virality.

Let’s get into it.

The Container

For most of theatre’s modern life, licensing functioned as a kind of container.

It protected the work from drifting too far from the people who created it. It ensured writers and composers were compensated. It created a framework for a show to exist in hundreds of different rooms across the world while still remaining recognizably itself—same story, same music, same bones.

Licensing is one of the few systems in theatre that says: this came from someone, and it deserves both credit and care.

Underneath the legal jargon lived an assumption so basic it never needed to be said out loud: what happens in the theatre stays in the theatre.

Not in the abstract sense. Literally. A performance is a live event, bounded by a place and a time. The audience for that event is the people who were there. The ticket is the threshold.

That contained-ness is part of theatre’s magic. It’s also part of its economics. When the work stays in the room, it stays intact. It builds intrigue. It creates exclusivity. Each performance is unique unto to the people making it and the people witnessing it.

So the clauses about recording and redistribution aren’t just fine print. They’re an extension of that worldview. A way of protecting the boundary. A way of keeping the work both sacred and sustainable.

That boundary is just harder to hold now.

The Environment

Bootlegs aren’t new.

For a long time, doing it required real effort—sneaking in a camera, keeping it hidden, getting the footage off the device, cleaning up the audio, uploading it somewhere, hoping it didn’t get flagged. There was friction at every step. The difficulty acted like a kind of natural limiter.

Now: the limit does not exist.

Phones are already in the room. Recording takes one tap. Posting takes another. And the cultural posture around documentation has shifted, too. Shows post curtain calls and clips filmed on iPhones. Cast members share rehearsal photos on their stories. Marketing teams treat behind-the-scenes footage as part of the life of a production. None of that is inherently wrong. A lot of it is beautiful. It makes theatre feel closer, more human, more porous.

It also blurs the line.

Not just between “private” and “public,” but between process and product. Between a proud rehearsal moment and a piece of material the licensing agreement might treat as redistribution. Between what feels like communal sharing and what counts as reproduction.

Bootlegs used to live in the shadows. Now documentation lives in daylight. The boundary didn’t disappear. It just started getting crossed in more directions, by more people, for more reasons—often without anyone acknowledging it.

And that’s the environment the Witham clip landed in.

The Friction

The Witham clip didn’t need context or a caption explaining what was happening. It carried its own proof. A big voice, a small moment, a simple room. The kind of thing people share because it feels like access—because it offers a small hit of the thing theatre does best: aliveness.

And then it disappeared.

The removal forced a question that feels uncomfortably modern: what exactly was that clip?

In a rehearsal room, it’s process. A proud glimpse. A communal “look at what we’re making.” On a platform, it reads as a piece of media—detached from the room it came from, detached from the boundaries that normally contain it. In a licensing agreement, it may read as something else entirely: a recording of copyrighted material distributed publicly.

Those interpretations aren’t just semantic. They sit on top of real stakes.

Writers and composers deserve to be paid. Rights holders have a responsibility to protect work from being freely distributed in ways that undercut its value. There are also brand and quality concerns that aren’t frivolous.

At the same time, theatre has entered an era where cultural relevance is often born out of exactly these moments. A rehearsal clip can make a person in another country feel the electricity of a show they’ve never heard of. In this case, it can turn a “community theatre” into a global attraction.

And all those things can be true.

Which is why the friction isn’t really between creators and audiences. It’s between a set of rules designed for a contained world and a culture that’s built on circulation.

The Question

The question facing theatre right now isn’t whether the work should be protected.

It’s what protection looks like when distribution is effortless.

Maybe the future includes clearer distinctions—between rehearsal documentation and performance capture, between process and product. Maybe licensing language evolves to reflect the fact that behind-the-scenes isn’t necessarily a threat. Maybe rights holders build new pathways for sanctioned proximity—because proximity is now part of how culture forms.

Or maybe the current lag continues: artists and institutions improvising in real time, trying to honor the sacredness of the room while living in a world where the room is no longer private by default.

If nothing else, the Witham clip reminded me of something simple: people want theatre. People want to be cracked open by the voice of a stranger. People want to be close to the work.

The container still matters. A lot.

The environment has changed. A lot.

And somewhere in that tension is the next version of how this art form travels.

One Last Thing is my little coda each week—the behind-the-scenes layer, the personal note after the main essay.

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This week: something I couldn’t fit in the essay, but feels central to the licensing conversation. (And also a picture of my dog.)

One Last Thing

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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.

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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.

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Long before there are butts in theater seats, there are butts in folding chairs.

A group of actors is handed a working draft of something new—a musical, a play, an idea that hasn’t quite found its shape yet—and asked to fully commit to it for a short chunk of time. Sometimes it’s 29 hours. Sometimes it’s two or four weeks.

The arrangement is a little strange: the thing isn’t done. The writers are still finding the voice, the tone, the tempo, the heart. There’s rarely a guarantee that there will be a next step—or that you, as the actor, will be part of it if there is.

And yet, despite knowing none of this might last, something happens in that room. Actors and creatives find themselves genuinely, almost helplessly invested. Not just in the work they’re doing, but in the piece itself. Its future. Its potential. The ideas they’d bring to it if given the chance.

That’s the dirt I want to dig into this week: why we care about something we don’t own—and why the work we do in those rooms matters, even if we’re not there when the curtain rises.

Let’s get into it.

The Takeover

The ask is pretty straightforward: show up, get familiar with the material, make a few choices, ask some questions, tell the story. Execute. There is no line in any contract about emotional investment.

Then it’s day three and you’re caring in a way that goes well beyond professional. You have opinions about the show—its arc, its ending, its characters. You’ve had at least one conversation with a castmate that was less about the work and more about the potential of the work—what it could be, what it’s reaching for, whether it’s going to get there.

You’re doing creative labor nobody asked for. You’re a temporary resident acting like a legacy tenant.

Part of it is certainly the nature of the form. A reading is specifically designed to activate imagination—there are no sets or costumes. Your job is to fill the gaps. What floods in is a mysterious combination of instinct, curiosity, and (if you can believe it) feelings.

Which raises an obvious question: why? What is actually happening to us? And is it as irrational as it looks?

The Loop

There’s a psychological principle worth knowing here: the brain hates an unfinished thing.

Completed tasks get filed and forgotten. Open loops stay active, running quietly in the background. It’s why you can’t stop thinking about an unanswered text. Why you replay the last five minutes of a conversation in the shower. Why cliffhangers work.

A reading is one giant open loop.

The show isn’t finished. The future is uncertain. Nobody knows what happens next. So your brain does what it always does with something unresolved: it keeps working. On the subway. In the shower. At two in the morning when you should absolutely be asleep.

Then layer in the craft itself. When an actor commits fully to imaginary circumstances, the brain responds as if they’re real. Same pathways. Same chemicals. Belief, at a neurological level, produces genuine investment. You can’t activate one without the other. The caring is proof the commitment worked.

But here’s what makes a reading specifically strange: you’re committing to two fictions at once. There’s the fiction of the story—the characters, the world, the stakes. And then there’s the fiction of your own membership in the project. That you are a real stakeholder in something that technically isn’t yours at all. That you might be part of its future.

You have to commit to that fiction completely. Because the work suffers otherwise.

And when you commit that deeply, the fingerprints don’t wash off.

The Fingerprints

The reading ends. The actors disperse. The writers go back to the draft with fresh eyes and new questions. And the show continues—maybe without you.

But not exactly without you.

A character found more clarity because of a choice you made. A moment shifted because of something you brought that nobody wrote down. A line lands differently because you tried it five ways in a folding chair.

Your name might not be in the program. You might not be in the next workshop. You might one day watch the show open somewhere, shaped in part by conversations you remember having. And that can sting.

But your fingerprints are on the thing. Invisibly. Permanently.

It doesn’t erase the grief that comes up when a project moves on from you. But there’s something steadying about knowing that productions carry the fingerprints of everyone who ever touched them. The contribution doesn’t need credit to count.

That’s quietly radical.

We live in a culture obsessed with ownership—who made this, whose name is on it, who gets the credit, who holds the IP. A reading runs on a completely different logic. You give something with no claim on the outcome. You invest without control. You contribute without possession. And the work is better for it.

Maybe that’s the real gift of the form. Not just that it develops new musicals. But that it trains us in a rarer skill: caring about something we don’t own, shaping something we may never see finished, leaving fingerprints that may never get noticed.

Long before there are butts in theater seats, there are butts in folding chairs. And what happens in those folding chairs matters way more than we sometimes realize.

This week’s One Last Thing is a personal reflection from inside a recent reading and what it taught me about showing up in development rooms. It’s available to paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this work going.

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One last thing…

I have been sitting with a Dirty Little Secret.

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the advice: just be authentic.

It sounds generous. Encouraging, even. But I’m not sure we know what that word is asking of us anymore.

A few weeks ago, I hosted a panel at BroadwayCon that was organized by my pals at And That’s Showbiz, with six other performers who also post content online. We talked about algorithms and pressure and boundaries. But we kept circling something more subtle.

Each person, in different words, described the same strange pattern: the posts that connected were rarely the ones they labored over. They were the ones made without too much thinking. Without calculating. Without trying to win.

That stuck with me.

Because in theater (and most creative work) managing perception is a big part of the gig. You learn to read the room. You learn to adjust in real time. You learn how to stay in it.

So what happens when that instinct follows us offstage? When the same reflex starts shaping how we present ourselves online?

That’s what I want to untangle this week.

Geronimo!

The Reflex

There’s a habit theater gives you that’s hard to unlearn.

You learn to sense reception in real time: the temperature of a room, the micro-shifts in attention, the moment a moment lands (or doesn’t). It’s not manipulation. It’s how you survive auditions, rehearsals, long runs, interviews, talkbacks.

Over time, that fluency turns into reflex. You start adjusting before anyone asks you to. You smooth the edge. You offer the version of yourself that feels most legible, most like it will keep you in the room, or get you the job. And because the room is always changing, you get good at changing with it.

The internet rewards that same reflex. Not just for performers—for everyone. It quietly trains us to edit. To anticipate the comments. To curate the caption. Sincerity gets caked in strategy. You learn to manage first, express second.

And the strange part is how normal it starts to feel. Like this is simply what “showing up” requires. Like the cost of being seen is staying a step ahead of how you’ll be perceived. Until one day you realize you’re not just sharing—you’re steering.

And you don’t steer unless there’s something you’re trying to avoid.

The Risk

Rejection is sneaky.

That small drop in your stomach when you hit post. The heat-flush after you rewatch a video and suddenly hate the sound of your voice.

You’re not crazy. Being liked isn’t some shallow modern craving. It’s old hardware. Your lizard brain can’t distinguish between “this didn’t land” and “I don’t belong.” It just registers threat.

So yes—of course we steer.

We steer toward being palatable. Likable. Toward what we think people want because the alternative is sitting in the raw uncertainty of not knowing whether we’ll be chosen, or misunderstood, or quietly dismissed.

Steering lowers the odds of embarrassment.

The problem is what happens when that protective reflex becomes the default setting. When you start performing your honesty the way you’d perform a song.

And that’s the moment the steering stops protecting you and starts costing you something.

The Split

There’s a specific feeling you can clock in a performer—on stage, in a meeting, on a date, in a TikTok—when their attention splits. Part of them is in the moment, and part of them is hovering six inches above it, monitoring. Tracking. Adjusting. Watching the room watch them. It’s subtle. It can still be impressive. Still “good.” But it’s no longer fully alive.

And people can feel it. Humans are absurdly sensitive to effort that’s trying to hide itself. The second a moment starts auditioning for approval, the air changes. You don’t think, this person is calculating, but your body registers a kind of distance. Like you’re being guided toward a reaction instead of being invited into an experience.

Online, steering does the same thing. It introduces a faint layer of defensiveness. The post is technically honest. The caption says what it means. But there’s a pressure behind it—a desire for it to land. And that pressure flattens something. It keeps the moment from surprising even you.

This is why the panel kept circling the same strange reality: the content that connected wasn’t necessarily “better.” It just felt less managed. Less concerned with outcome. It had that clarity that shows up when someone stops trying to win and simply shares.

And once you notice that difference, it gets uncomfortable—because steering is the thing that’s kept you safe. But it’s also the thing that keeps you disconnected, slightly outside the moment.

Which raises an annoying question: if surrender is what makes the work land, why does it feel so impossible to access on command?

The Release

“Let go” is, unfortunately, not a technique.

On stage, you don’t surrender by deciding to surrender. You surrender because you’ve rehearsed enough that your body stops negotiating every beat. Because you’ve run it enough times that your attention can stay in the moment instead of hovering above it. Preparation makes presence feel safe.

That’s why “just be authentic” feels slippery. It skips the only part that matters: the conditions. You don’t stop trying to win because someone told you to. You stop gripping so tightly because you’ve done the work. Because you’ve failed enough times to survive it. Because you know you’ll be okay either way.

So what does loosening your grip actually look like?

Less confession. More commitment. Make the thing. Shape it. Craft it. Care about it. Then release it without fixating on the reaction.

The irony is that that willingness reads as confidence. Not performance confidence. Actual confidence. Everyone can feel the difference between a person offering something and a person begging for it.

By the end of that panel, no one had uncovered a secret formula—and no one seemed particularly interested in one. There was no hack. No posting schedule revelation. Just story after story about repetition. About flops. About hitting “post” again anyway. About stepping onstage (or online) enough times that the fear lost some of its volume.

The moments that landed weren’t engineered to win. They were the ones where someone trusted the work enough to stop steering.

So I think the biggest thing I’m carrying with me from our panel is this:

Make the thing with care.
Then give it away like you mean it.

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One last thing…

Momentum has a strange side effect.

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Sports metaphors get a bad rap in creative spaces. They’re usually deployed to sell grit and hustle, or some vague promise of eventual victory. Winning.

But I think “shots on goal” deserves a recontextualization.

In a creative life, ‘shots’ are acts of participation. An audition. A TikTok. A first draft of a pilot. A messy pitch deck. A voice note you record instead of just thinking about recording. All the big swings and the small attempts.

The ‘goal’ is more elusive. It moves and changes depending on where we are in our careers. It can be dictated by what we think will be perceived as a win. It’s unstable and unsustainable as a north star.

But what if ‘scoring a goal’ wasn’t the whole goal? Do the shots themselves have inherent value?

Spoiler alert: very much yes.

There’s a quiet accumulation of skills and stamina. There are internal shifts that come from simply staying in motion—whether or not we book the job, go viral, or get the yes.

So that’s what I want to sit with this week. What all these ‘shots’ are doing to (and for) us, independent of outcomes.

Ready set here we go.

We are surrounded by scoreboards.

Some of them are explicit: callbacks, bookings, views, likes, offers, opens, closes, and whatever else our younger selves decided counted as a “win.” Others are more ambient—who’s always working, who’s been quiet, who seems to be “having a moment.” Together, they create a sense that progress needs to be legible, provable, trackable.

It makes sense that we internalize all of this. Most creative ecosystems are organized around outcomes—attention, appreciation, awards. Over time, we’re trained to look outward for confirmation that we’re ‘in the game’ at all.

The problem is that outcomes are volatile. They’re shaped by timing, taste, budgets, algorithms, gatekeepers—variables that are real, powerful, and largely outside our control. Two identical efforts can produce wildly different results depending on when and where they land. And even then, “success” remains subjective.

Still the scoreboard blinks.

Slowly, it becomes the primary driver of whether we move at all. Sometimes disguised as patience. Or discernment. Or “waiting for the right moment.” We start to wonder whether the effort is even worth it. Action becomes conditional—taken only if the outcome feels promising enough.

The question shifts from what do I want to make? to what’s most likely to work?

And in that shift, it becomes easy to miss what’s actually happening underneath—the part of the work that was never meant to be counted by a scoreboard in the first place.

Every shot functions as a rep.

Not metaphorically. Literally. In the body. In the nervous system.

Each audition, each tape, each draft, each thing you make that asks you to make a move without certainty. Organize your energy. Tolerate the exposure. Recover afterward. Return to baseline. Try again.

You get faster at beginning. At moving from idea to action. The gap between thinking about making something and actually making it shortens.

Your tolerance for uncertainty widens. Rejection still stings, but it stops feeling catastrophic.

And you start learning things you can only learn through experience. What energizes you. What drains you. Your instincts sharpen. Your taste clarifies. Your natural voice emerges.

None of that shows up on a scoreboard.

But it does accumulate internally. Each rep subtly lowers the stakes of the next one. Each attempt makes the next attempt feel less precious, less loaded, less like a referendum on your entire worth. The work starts to feel more familiar, more ordinary. Something you do, rather than something you beg or brace for.

What repetition actually produces is far more than just a consolation for the ‘shots’ that don’t ‘score’. It changes the story we end up telling ourselves about our own effort.

The question shifts from will this work? to what is this building? And underneath ambition, something steadier and more sustainable takes shape.

Wanting to score isn’t the problem.

If we’re talking about shots on goal, then scoring is part of the game. It’s why you take the shot in the first place. No one lines up, shoots, and genuinely hopes it doesn’t go in. The goal matters. It gives the effort direction.

The trouble starts when shots only count if they score.

When that’s the rule—spoken or unspoken—every attempt carries too much weight. Misses don’t just miss, they completely disappear. They stop registering as part of the work at all. Which, understandably, makes it harder to stay in the game.

But when we can see what shots are doing even when they don’t go in—how they build timing, confidence, familiarity, trust in our instincts—the effort stops feeling so fragile.

We’re still aiming. We still want the goal. That desire doesn’t go away. But our attention shifts back to the shot itself. The mechanics. The feel of taking it. We stay in the rhythm of the game instead of constantly checking the scoreboard.

And paradoxically, scoring becomes more likely. Not because we stopped caring, but because we stayed with the process long enough to actually get better at it.

The goal is still there. It just isn’t the only thing that makes the effort count.

Most creative lives aren’t decided by a single shot. They’re shaped by the willingness to keep taking them.

Some will go in. More probably won’t. And most of the time that part is out of our control.

What we can control is whether we keep shooting.

So if you’re filming self-tapes, or writing drafts, or pitching wild ideas to friends, or doing anything that requires you to take the risk of trying—it counts.

Not because it racks up your metaphorical ‘score’, but because it means you’re still in the game. Still playing. Still growing.

Which, honestly, feels worthy of at least a few mildly obnoxious airhorn toots.

Starting this week, One last thing will be available exclusively to paid subscribers. It’s the most personal part of the newsletter—the place where I reflect on how the ideas above are showing up in my own life—and paid support is what keeps The Fourth Wall sustainable. If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter, I hope you’ll consider joining. Either way, I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

One last thing…

I took a shot and missed this week.

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This week’s been heavy.

Watching what’s been unfolding in Minneapolis, and in cities across the country, has been horrifying. For me, and maybe for you, there’s been a constant internal negotiation. How much to read. When to step away. How to stay informed without becoming numb. How to care without turning other people’s suffering into something I passively consume.

There are concrete things to do: calling representatives, donating, protesting, checking in on friends and family. Those actions matter. And yet, even after we’ve done them, there’s a kind of residue. Feelings that linger.

In moments like this, showing up to the theater, listening to music, watching a movie or TV show, even writing a newsletter can feel strange. Out of step. Indulgent. Inappropriate. When harm is happening this visibly, it’s hard not to question whether creating things—or art as a whole—actually matters at all.

I don’t know if there’s a simple or clean answer.

So this week, I don’t have an argument or a conclusion. What I have instead is an offering: some unpolished, unfinished thoughts about the relationship between art and suffering—and why sitting with that question feels necessary right now.

Here we go.

Part of what makes moments like this so difficult is the sheer volume of exposure.

We’re living in an age of constant information—headlines, stories, “real-time” updates—where suffering is served to us on an endless loop. There’s almost no space to process what we’re taking in before the next notification pops up.

Psychologists have said for years that as the scale of suffering grows, our emotional response often shrinks. Not because we don’t care, but because the human nervous system isn’t built to sustain this much empathy for this long.

So the mind does what it has to do to survive. It creates distance. It flattens feeling. It turns pain into something we can register without having to fully metabolize it.

We find ourselves caught in a quiet tension: the desire to stay informed and the need to protect our hearts. To see enough of what’s happening to stay awake, while also carving out enough internal space to hold the rage, sadness, and confusion.

What we’re craving isn’t total clarity, just a way to stay present with what we’re already carrying.

Enter: art.

A song turns feeling into melody. A play compresses years into a couple of hours. A painting isolates a moment or a color. Choreography translates energy into gestures and shapes.

Art gives emotion edges. When so much of what we consume sands down suffering into something we can scroll past, art concentrates feeling instead. It gives it form and duration.

Rather than absorbing the whole world’s pain at once, we’re invited to sit with one human experience, one emotional truth, one story—and stay long enough for something to move through us rather than pile up inside.

This is why rituals exist across cultures. Why mourning has ceremonies. Why grief has songs. Why anger has drums. Why prayer has structure. Why storytelling has arcs.

In a quiet, essential way, art organizes pain. It makes it holdable. It gives feeling a place to enter, and a way to exit.

Art is not an antidote to suffering. But it may be what keeps suffering from becoming infinite. What keeps despair from hardening us.

For the person making the work, art becomes a way of moving feeling into form. For the person encountering it, the work becomes a place to move through feeling in response. The labor is different, but the exchange is real. The work carries the imprint of someone else having already gone through something human—and invites us to do the same.

This is part of why people often describe art as an escape.

After moments of collective trauma, people need somewhere to go. Somewhere to sit together. Somewhere time can move forward. Somewhere attention can rest, even briefly, without going numb.

Broadway reopening on September 13th, 2001.
Communal singing at vigils after countless school shootings.
Streets turning into galleries after George Floyd’s murder.

That kind of escape isn’t about forgetting what’s happening. It’s about relief. About stepping out of constant vigilance and into a space where feeling can flow without overwhelming us.

Art asks for participation, not avoidance. Sometimes that participation looks like effort: staying with discomfort, emotion, complexity. Sometimes it looks like rest. Both are part of the same practice. Both restore the capacity we need to remain open, responsive, and ready for what comes next.

Which brings me back to Minneapolis.

None of this resolves what’s happening there—or anywhere else. It’s infuriating. And confusing. And deeply saddening. And in moments like this, when suffering feels endless and helplessness sets in easily, staying present matters more than ever.

History shows us that harm accelerates when people are encouraged to look away. To disengage. To harden. To accept what’s happening by slowly withdrawing from it.

The work ahead will require the opposite: attention, connection, and a commitment to seeing the humanity in one another.

Art is a place we can practice all of that. Not instead of action—but alongside it.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

If you've ever heard a song from Hamilton, RENT, The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Les Misérables—or any of the other 10,000+ musicals that have been captured and released—you've listened to an original cast recording.

Welcome to the club!

This month, a new revival of Ragtime joined that list, and the response has been visceral. I remember that feeling. Saving up gift cards. Buying the CD. Sitting on the floor with the booklet insert. Replaying tracks on my Walkman so I could follow every lyric.

It wasn't the same as being in the theater, but it was the closest I could get. For years, that's how I experienced Broadway: through headphones, imagining what it must have felt like to be there.

This week, for the first time, I’m on the other side.

The first single from All the World's a Stage—the first original cast recording I’m singing on—is streaming. And the album is available to pre-save. It’s surreal.

My life as a fan of OCRs—listening to Legally Blonde, Spring Awakening, Ordinary Days on endless loop—and my life as an artist—standing in front of a microphone, hoping what comes out is enough—are colliding in real time.

So this week, I want to look at what happens when a moment gets preserved. What it means to become listenable. And the strange, kind of magical bridge between the person on the recording and the person hearing it.

Here (pun intended) we go.

The Relationship

It’s hard to overstate how important cast recordings are to theater kids of every age. For many, they’re the only tangible tie to what’s happening in a theater hundreds of miles away.

So we listen. And as we do, the recordings knot themselves into our lives. A first kiss. Coming out. Getting through a breakup. A specific semester in college. A particular subway ride. The summer you worked that job. The music becomes a timestamp—a bookmark in our own story.

Over time, we form relationships with the songs themselves. Not just the lyrics or melodies, but the details. The orchestrations. The breaths. The vibrato on a vowel. The curve of a consonant. The exact moment the strings enter. The pause before a line. The bend of a phrase.

All of it adds up. A constellation of tiny choices we come to know by heart.

For young performers especially, these recordings don’t just hold memories—they become manuals. A kind of bible. They teach us not only what to sing, but how. What sounds “right.” What sounds “best.” Which versions are “definitive.”

And it makes sense. When you’re learning a role—or imagining a show you’ve never seen—the recording feels like the closest thing to truth. The most reliable source available.

But there’s a quiet danger in that attachment.

Because hidden inside it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cast recording actually is.

The Room

The studio is a beautiful mess of cables and mics and headphones and water bottles. There’s coffee and bagels in the lobby. And the big red clock is ticking.

Recording a cast album is expensive—studio time, engineers, musicians, mixing, mastering. For producers, it isn’t just about preservation. It’s an investment. A tool to make the show more licensable, to reach more people, to extend the life of the work beyond its run.

The cast feels the pressure too. They’re tired—body and mind. There’s excitement, of course. But underneath it is a quiet knowing: this is it.

It’s all very practical, almost without ceremony. There’s a call time. There’s a schedule. And there are limits—on time, on takes, on voices. A union break. A budget. A producer tracking minutes because there are three more songs to get through. You learn quickly that this moment—the one that will feel eternal to a listener—has edges.

What gets captured isn’t some pristine, ideal version of the show. It’s a document of a specific day, in a specific room, with specific people doing their best under very real constraints.

And then it travels. Into headphones, into bedrooms, into long walks and late nights. Frozen in time. The breaths, the choices, the things that felt unfinished in the room begin to mean something else entirely.

The Paradox

As listeners, we don’t hear cast recordings as compromised or incomplete. We don’t experience them as drafts. What reaches us feels alive in a way we might not have words for.

For the artist, the experience is almost the opposite.

The recording captures everything you’re most aware of. The breath you wish you’d supported differently. The vowel you didn’t quite place right. The choice you would absolutely change if you had one more take.

But this is the paradox: the very things the artist feels most vulnerable about are often the things the listener responds to most deeply. What feels unfinished from the inside lands as honesty on the outside.

We sense when something was captured rather than polished. When it happened once, under real conditions, and didn’t get sanded down into something safer.

The imperfections aren’t distractions. They’re proof of humanness.

What the artist experiences as risk, the listener experiences as connection.

The Magic

Theater is beautiful because it only happens once. One night. One room. One particular arrangement of bodies, breath, and attention that will never happen again in quite the same way.

A cast recording is, in many ways, the opposite of that. It’s fixed. Repeatable. It can (and will) be played again and again.

And yet, because it captures a single day, a single room, a single version of the work, it doesn’t erase that singularity. It carries it forward.

The recording doesn’t recreate the original moment. It releases it.

Like blowing on a dandelion, that one performance drifts outward. It meets people in their own singular moments, under entirely different conditions, and becomes part of their story.

That is the quiet magic of cast recordings. It’s a moment meeting a moment. A crossroads of contexts. Presence via preservation.

We meet halfway. Just by pressing play.

One last thing…

Hearing the first single from All The World’s a Stage has been surreal, to say the least.

I heard all the things performers hear—the notes I wish I’d placed differently, the tone of a vowel I might shape another way now, the tiny choices that feel enormous now that they’re frozen.

What writing this piece has given me—unexpectedly—is acceptance.

Not because I suddenly think the recording is perfect. But because I understand it more clearly. It isn’t a final version of me. It’s a timestamp. A document of who I was in that room, on that day, under those conditions.

I’m already different than the person on that recording—and that doesn’t diminish it. It actually gives it more meaning.

That’s the gift of preservation. It lets us look back and see where we were. To feel proud. To feel tenderness. To notice the growth.

So if you’re curious what inspired all this, you can listen. That’s me, on October 7th and 8th, 2025. A moment, preserved.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

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It feels impossible to talk about Broadway right now without talking about stunt casting.

Not as a scandal or some kind of moral failure. Just as a fact of the landscape.

You don’t even need me to name an example. I’m sure there’s already someone (or several someones) that come to mind.

This isn’t new. Broadway has always flirted with fame. But something about the volume of it now—the frequency, the reliance, the way it feels increasingly baked into the business model—suggests a shift.

And then, last week, on CBS Sunday Morning, Carrie Coon said the quiet part out loud: that five years ago, this path wouldn’t have existed for her. That talent alone is no longer enough. That now, in order to do a play on Broadway, you need to arrive with heat already attached.

What struck me wasn’t the critique itself, but that it came from inside the system. From a position that, on paper, looks like success. Prestige television. Cultural visibility. The very currency Broadway now openly courts.

Because every time stunt casting comes up, the conversation collapses into binaries: good or bad, fair or unfair, cynical or necessary.

But listening to Carrie, it became clear that those frames don’t quite hold. That this isn’t really a story about individual casting choices at all. It’s about an ecosystem responding to pressure.

That’s the part I want to sit with here. Not to assign blame or offer an easy fix—but to look more closely at why casting works the way it does now, and what that pressure asks of artists on both sides of the equation.

Let’s get into it.

The Pressure

Most of the forces shaping Broadway right now live in budgets and spreadsheets. In capitalization meetings and pitch decks. In the quiet math that happens long before a casting notice ever goes out.

Rising production costs. Shorter runways. A business model almost entirely dependent on private capital, in a country that offers basically zero public support for the arts.

Plus, we’re in an economy with higher costs. Of living. Of labor. Of everything. Regardless of what the current administration would have us believe, prices are on the rise and tolerance for risk is down.

And when risk tolerance shrinks, everything downstream tightens with it.

In our business, casting is one of the few places we can clearly see that pressure.

It’s easy to frame stunt casting as a creative choice, but more often it functions as a form of risk management. Familiarity becomes insurance. A known “name” doesn’t just sell tickets—it steadies investors, guarantees press, justifies the scale of the bet.

That’s the shift Carrie was pointing to. Not that Broadway creatives or producers stopped caring about talent—but that talent, or a groundbreaking original piece, or even strong brand IP alone no longer offsets uncertainty.

And this pressure—from a fragile system trying to keep itself upright—never stays abstract. It moves. Quietly. Unevenly. Until it lands on people.

Which is where the real story starts.

On The Inside

For a lot of theater actors, this pressure looks like a recalibration of what feels possible.

Opportunities narrow. The ladder gets steeper, then thinner. Not because the work isn’t good enough—but because “good enough” no longer answers the question everyone is actually asking: will this sell?

Theater has historically been a place where careers were built through craft. Where presence mattered more than profile. Where momentum came from doing the work, night after night, in front of a live audience.

But when casting becomes a primary tool for managing risk, unfamiliarity starts to read as liability. Discovery feels expensive. Taking a chance feels indulgent.

The burden on artists grows. It changes the relationship to the work. Comparison creeps in. Strategy replaces skill-building. Visibility starts to matter more than ability.

For many, the shift has been painful and disorienting. The alignment of luck, timing, and talent feels less and less likely.

Some actors adapt. Others opt out—not because they stopped loving theater, but because the math stopped math-ing.

But this is only one side of the coin.

For actors whose names fall above the title, there’s a different flavor of pressure.

Especially for artists who actually care about craft. About rehearsal. About being in the room for the right reasons. Theater, for many of them, is the place they come to strip away the machinery of fame and get back in the habit of truth-telling in front of an audience.

But stunt casting collapses that distinction.

You’re not just an actor. You’re a metric. A strategy. A stabilizer. A risk buffer. The business isn’t separate from the work—it sits on your shoulders while you’re trying to make it.

This doesn’t erase the privilege. It doesn’t flatten the power imbalance. But it does complicate the story.

Because being wanted for your draw is not the same as being wanted for your work. And knowing the difference—feeling it, night after night—changes the experience in ways that aren’t always obvious.

And when both of these things are true at the same time—when theater actors are squeezed out by unfamiliarity, and celebrities are pulled in under the weight of expectation—a pattern starts to take shape.

Add ‘Em Up

Here’s what we know: a system under pressure looks for stability. Casting becomes one of the few levers available. Celebrities are asked to carry expectation. Theater actors feel forced to find visibility (and stability) elsewhere.

Everyone is compensating for uncertainty in their own way. Not because they want to—but because the conditions demand it.

This is where tthe shorthand diagnosis of a ‘broken system’ starts to fall apart.

Because what’s happening here isn’t collapse or failure. It’s reaction and restriction.

The Hard Truth

The system isn’t broken. It’s constricted. And that distinction matters.

A broken system stops functioning completely. It’s dead. A constricted one keeps breathing—but through a narrowing passage. Less air. Less room to maneuver. Less tolerance for what hasn’t already proven it can survive the squeeze.

There is still good work getting made. Sometimes even great work. But it’s being made inside a tighter channel. Smaller margins for error. Fewer risks feel worth taking. Fewer unknowns feel worth the bet. Newness isn’t impossible—but it often requires momentum from somewhere else.

Over time, that pressure reshapes behavior.

Craft doesn’t disappear—but it’s no longer sufficient on its own. Careers feel less cumulative and more conditional, shaped as much by optics as by the work itself. Certainty starts to feel safer than curiosity. Familiarity more responsible than experimentation.

And maybe that’s what’s actually broken. Not the system itself—but our tolerance for uncertainty inside it.

Our willingness to sit with not-knowing. To make room for work that hasn’t fully found itself yet. To give artist opportunities to grow into themselves. To trust process over proof.

So no, I don’t think there’s a simple fix or that we need to “make Broadway great again.”

But if stunt casting has become one of the clearest signals of where the system feels tightest, maybe it can also point us toward what we need for whatever comes next.

More uncertainty. More unknowns. More up-and-comers. More risk. More trust. More time. More space. More nuance. More questions. More fun. More faith. More magic. And yes—more Love.

One last thing…

Clearly, that Carrie Coon clip stirred something in me.

And I wasn’t the only one. The comments and shares from artists at every stage of their careers was overwhelming. But not shocking.

Here’s the thing: she didn’t mythologize her career. She didn’t pretend it was inevitable. She didn’t wrap it in language about destiny or worthiness or “earning it.”

She just said the truth: if I hadn’t been given those opportunities, I wouldn’t be here.

That’s it.

And I think that landed so hard because so many artists are living inside that sentence right now.

Every audition can sort-of feel like a Hail Mary. Which is a football reference for throwing the ball deep, and hoping someone catches it.

It’s not that the work doesn’t matter. It’s that the relationship between the work and what comes next has grown much harder to trace.

We’re asked to keeping showing up, keep making, keep offering, keep risking, keep taping, keep learning, keep going, even when the feedback loop has gone quiet.

And maybe that’s what Carrie gave people in those thirty seconds.

Not a roadmap. Not reassurance. Just permission to tell the truth about how contingent this all is.

About how much of a career is shaped not just by talent, but by timing. Access. Visibility. Luck. And the fragile chain of events that lets someone be seen at all.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. But I do know it made a lot of artists feel less alone. And right now, that feels like something.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

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On New Years Eve, Brandi Carlile proclaimed that Heated Rivalry was all she could think about. I was relieved to hear I was not alone.

By that point, the show had already saturated the zeitgeist. From clips, edits, and memes to magazine covers and late-night appearances. Watching that kind of momentum build has been fun—and if I’m honest, genuinely fascinating.

It’s not just that a “gay hockey show” cut through. It’s that people seem deeply obsessed with this story: two people positioned as opponents, a system that needs them to stay that way, a culture that insists competition is natural, inevitable—even erotic?

As the conversation swelled, I couldn’t shake the sense that all of this felt familiar. Not because of hockey—I retired somewhere around eighth grade—but because I’ve seen this logic before.

The quiet comparison. The constant measuring. The binary of winners and losers. It’s a dynamic creative people have gotten very good at internalizing—especially in theater.

So that’s what I want to sit with this week: why opposition has become such a dominant organizing principle in our industry—and the companionship we might be missing out on.

On Thin Ice

One of the smartest things Heated Rivalry does is treat rivalry like a device.

Not an accident. Not a personality trait. Not even a misunderstanding. A mechanism.

The show understands something basic about audience psychology: we don’t just like stories—we like scoreboards. We like tracking a relationship the way you watch a game. Clear sides. Clear stakes. Rivalry gives us all of that.

And their rivalry isn’t just between them—it’s upheld by the context around them. Teams. Careers. Reputations. Public perception. It’s as if the entire ecosystem is constantly whispering: don’t cross the line.

These two men are positioned as natural enemies long before they ever get the chance to decide what they actually are to each other. The rivalry is arranged to make closeness feel forbidden and conflict feel inevitable.

Which, I think, is part of what makes Shane Hollander’s internal battle so compelling. Yes—he’s grappling with feeling deeply drawn to another man for the first time in his life. But that man is supposed to be his enemy.

As their careers accelerate, the ice gets thinner. The contradiction becomes harder to carry. The person he’s supposed to hate is the one who understands him best.

That’s the real mechanism on display. Rivalry not as drama, conflict, or opposition, but as a system that creates a split—between who we are and who we’re told we should be.

Theater’s Heated Rivalry

Theater has its own version of this, it’s just wearing a different costume.

We don’t call it rivalry most of the time. We call it the business. The hustle. Paying dues. Having thick skin. Being “in the mix.” Competition becomes a fact of nature—like gravity—rather than a story we’ve been trained to accept.

And to be fair: there is competition. There are limited seats, limited stages, limited jobs. There is scarcity. There are real stakes.

But most of the time, getting a role isn’t about beating someone else. It’s about a weird, hyper-specific alignment of timing and chemistry and taste and budget and height and vocal color and how you look next to the other person and what the director dreamed about on the subway that morning. It’s about a thousand variables, most of which have nothing to do with talent and almost none of which can be controlled.

And yet, the lived experience of it can still feel like a contest.

Once we’re in the rehearsal room, the stakes rise. Ideas start to feel precious. What should be a shared goal can quietly turn competitive—ego reframes collaboration as something to win instead of build.

Zoom out further, and shows behave the same way. We start treating attention like a finite substance, as if one show’s success has to come at another’s expense. Awards seasons amplify it. The Tonys start to feel like The Hunger Games. Even the language turns athletic: who’s “winning” or “losing” at the box office. Which show is “the one to beat.”

Add all of this up and you get the Shane Hollander fracture: the moment when the thing that makes you singular starts to feel like a liability.

You’re drawn toward honesty. Softness. Specificity. Some strange, unrepeatable essence that is actually yours. And then—explicitly or implicitly—you’re told to sand it down. To be more digestible. To be more legible. To be more appealing to more people.

Eventually, the mechanism stops being theoretical and starts being something you carry.

Alone, Together

More than anything, rivalry wears and weighs on our relationships.

It turns someone else’s success into evidence of our failure. A constant low-grade monitoring: am I doing it right, am I enough, am I falling behind?

It’s exhausting. Not in a dramatic way. More in a drip-drip way. Like a slow leak.

You can hear it in how artists talk about themselves. How quickly we default to self-deprecation. How often we speak about our work like it’s on trial. How hard it is to say I’m proud without immediately qualifying it, shrinking it, joking it away.

When peers become mirrors we can’t stop checking, colleagues and friends turn into benchmarks. Even though we’re surrounded by people who understand this life better than anyone else, we’re quietly taught—like Shane and Ilya—to see them as the ones we should be trying to “beat.”

That’s the hidden cost.

Not just exhaustion, but isolation. Not just pressure, but the erosion of companionship. The longer we live inside opposition, the harder it becomes to remember why we wanted to do this at all: to make things and experience something together. To understand ourselves and one another more deeply.

Rivalry works against all of that.

The Cottage

Heated Rivalry’s final episode is more than just a change in location.

The Cottage is a place where competition loses its utility. Where performance relaxes. Where the need to win dissolves into the relief of being understood. Where the very person they were taught to oppose becomes the one who makes real rest possible.

What’s striking isn’t just that Shane and Ilya choose each other—it’s that choosing each other allows them to choose themselves more honestly. Outside the machinery of rivalry, they don’t become less ambitious. They become more aligned. Less split. Less at war with their own instincts.

That’s the part that makes me teary.

When we stop organizing our lives around opposition—when we grant one another the grace of Love, generosity, curiosity—we don’t just change how we relate to others. We soften how we relate to ourselves.

The Cottage isn’t escapism. It’s not withdrawal. It’s a reminder that another structure is possible. One built on companionship instead of comparison. On shared meaning instead of metrics.

Turns out, rivalry isn’t the only thing capable of motivating or moving us. Love—of the work, of each other, of ourselves—can be just as inspiring, just as galvanizing, without requiring us to fracture in the process.

That’s what’s waiting for us at The Cottage.

So—see you there?

One last thing…

If you don’t mind, I want to stay at The Cottage just a second longer.

I’ve been thinking about what it might mean as a practice. What it looks like to focus less on scoreboards and more on making room to breathe.

This was my first week after closing BEAU, and it’s been…interesting. I’ve had to give myself permission to move slowly. To be quiet. To reacclimate to real life.

There’s always a kind of withdrawal after a show ends. The dopamine fades. The structure disappears. The silence can feel disorienting at best—and heavy at worst. I’m closer to the former, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean I’m totally settled yet.

When you suddenly wear the label “unemployed actor,” it’s easy for old narratives to creep in: failure, falling behind, losing—despite the fact that the label only arrives after you’ve been working.

The truth feels simpler than the stories we tell ourselves. This quiet is earned. This breath is earned. The waves need to settle before they swell again.

At some point, we all need to go to The Cottage—and the moment after closing a show feels like as good a time as any.

So I’m going to keep things slow and steady for a bit. Sit by the metaphorical fire. Listen to the loons on the lake. And trust that when it’s time to step back onto the ice, I’ll be rested and ready.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

P.S. If this essay resonated and you want to support this kind of work, the paid tier helps keep The Fourth Wall going. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

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If you’ve spent any time in a rehearsal room, or have seen A Chorus Line, you’ve likely heard someone shout, “let’s take it from the top.”

It’s what gets said when a scene stalls out, or the run of a number gets tangled, or something almost works. We don’t forget what just happened. We don’t pretend it didn’t count. The data doesn’t get erased. The notes, the muscle memory, the tiny fumbles, the massive mistakes, the small discoveries, the big “aha’s”—they all inform the next go-around.

Proof that practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes progress.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot this week, mostly because of the timing. January has a way of showing up with instructions—new habits, new goals, new versions of ourselves—as if the calendar flips and everything is politely cleared out. But that’s never really how it feels.

One day rolls into the next, and we draw a line between them because it helps us keep track, not because anything actually resets. Which might be why the beginning of the year can feel strange instead of energizing.

That tension has been especially present for me because this week marks the end of not just the year, but another major chapter in my life.

This weekend, we’ll close the second run of BEAU Off-Broadway—a project that, in many ways, has exceeded my wildest dreams. A new musical. An original story. A “star vehicle” role shaped slowly and collaboratively. The kind of work you don’t even really let yourself imagine, because it feels almost impossible.

And it was also hard.

The demand on my body, especially my voice, meant my world got very small. My social life nearly disappeared. The emotional lift was heavier than I expected, too. There were moments—honestly—where I came close to throwing in the towel. Not because I wasn’t grateful. Not because I didn’t love being onstage. But because I didn’t yet know how to hold everything the experience was asking me to carry at once.

That’s why this particular ending feels…strange. Because I don’t have a clear takeaway.

We’re taught to expect endings to explain things—to clarify what it was all for, to hand us some neat emotional summary we can carry forward, a sense of resolution we can point to and say, there—that’s what it meant. But some experiences (projects, relationships, years) don’t offer that. They leave you with more texture instead of more certainty. More information, but fewer answers.

And maybe that’s the mistake: assuming that resolution is the point. That an ending owes us clarity. That meaning is something we’re supposed to be able to extract immediately, and package neatly. Especially right now, at the start of a new year, when everything around us is nudging us toward conclusions, decisions, and declarations. But I’m not sure that’s how learning, or life, actually works.

In rehearsal we don’t stop the moment something interesting happens. We keep going. We do it again. We take it from the top. Not to resolve it. Not to pin it down. But to see what else can emerge when we stay with it a little longer.

And when I recognize that truth, the absence of resolution starts to feel different.

What’s left in its place isn’t confusion. It’s capacity.

There’s more space to hold mixed feelings without needing to sort them. To let deep pride and complete exhaustion and holy joy and profound sadness all coexist. To stay present with something that feels unresolved.

Every part of theater trains us for this. We pour ourselves into something knowing it won’t last. We rehearse a thing for months that evaporates the second it’s over. Again and again, we practice committing fully to things that are designed to end.

Over time, that teaches us how to let meaning stay porous. How to hold a moment, a melody, a line, or a lyric lightly enough that it can change and grow as we change and grow. How to accept that not every experience—every pass—will give us a neat or tangible takeaway.

And strangely enough, as our grip softens, our north star brightens. Our ability to orient sharpens. We get better at noticing what’s drawing us in and what’s pushing us away. What lights us up. What turns us off. What we’re no longer willing to fight against. What we deem worth fighting for.

In that way, every experience—onstage or off—widens us. We go through something and then step back out into the world changed in ways we may never fully understand.

That’s the real gift of “taking it from the top”—not a reset or a resolution, but a chance to continue with more information. With a little more depth. With a sharper sense of what we’re orienting toward, and what we’re ready to let of of this time around.

Which feels like a humane—and very human—place to start the new year.

A little less resolved.
A little more awake.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

This week, The New York Times ran a piece about the rise of “theatre kid” as a political insult.

To be fair, we’ve never exactly been confused about our reputation. “Theatre kid” has always carried a little baggage. Loud. Earnest. Cringe. A bit much.

But the timing of all this feels…interesting.

In a lot of ways, this year has been powered by theatre kid energy. And I don’t just mean Jonathan Bailey being named People’s Sexiest Man Alive or Taylor Swift releasing The Life of a Showgirl. There were deeper currents—carefully curated public performances like Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show. Camp crossing into the mainstream, like Parker Posey’s “Piper noooo.” A culture with a seemingly growing hunger for shared moments—for witnessing and feeling something together.

So this week, I want to get clear on what we’re actually talking about when we say “theatre kid.” To separate the stereotype from the skillset. The punchline from the practice.

And to understand what the reflex to label us publicly reveals about how attention, performance, and care are operating in our culture right now.

Let’s get into it.

The Misread

When “theatre kid” gets used as an insult, it usually means the same handful of things.

Performative. Fake. Loud. Dramatic. Over-eager. Overzealous. Over-rehearsed. Someone who plays to the room. Someone who needs attention.

It’s an old suspicion—the idea that sincerity and performance can’t coexist. That if something is staged, it must be dishonest. That awareness of the audience somehow cancels truth.

But the truth is that being seen is inevitable. Rooms have energy whether we acknowledge it or not. Tone, timing, posture, silence—all of it contributes to communication. Performance is happening everywhere, all the time. And it’s something we either fumble or learn to do with care.

That presentation you’re giving at work? That story you’re telling your family at the dinner table? That breakup text you’re drafting and redrafting? That’s performing.

You’re navigating the relationship between what you’re doing and who’s receiving it. You’re channeling your inner theatre kid.

So no—we’re not just Broadway super-fans, or crazy cast parties, or loud for the sake of being loud. I mean…sometimes we are, but not exclusively.

We’re the ones who understand that all the world is a stage.

The Reality

Being a theatre kid, at its heart, is an attunement to attention.

It’s understanding how rooms work. How energy shifts. How timing changes the way something lands. How to listen for what isn’t being said. How to read an audience without pandering to it. How to hold attention without squeezing the life out of it. How to show up prepared, then stay flexible. How to recover when something goes wrong—because something always does.

That fluency is easy to mistake for confidence or charisma. But it’s closer to literacy.

A sensitivity to tone. An understanding of the relationship between intention and impact. A comfort carrying emotion without flattening it. A knack for making something, someone, some part of the human experience legible to others.

Yes, we’re often emotionally available, solid storytellers, and quick to analyze the meaning of any given moment. But all of that is an expression of our innate grasp of attention. Not like hog-the-spotlight attention. Like attention to breath, gaze, and our inner worlds.

The reality is that attention was always baked into reality. We just learned what to do with it.

Which is probably why, this year, it felt like we were everywhere.

The Reveal

Culturally, this year, theatre kids have dominated the headlines: Late Night with Stephen Colbert (theatre kid) getting canceled, David Corenswet (theatre kid) taking flight as Superman, Sabrina Carpenter (theatre kid) selling out stadiums.

Musicals took over screens and feeds: Wicked and its press tour, Evita’s balcony sequence, Death Becomes Her and Hamilton sounds becoming massive TikTok lip-sync trends, K-Pop freakin Demon Hunters.

Theatrical camp perforated the mainstream: “Nothing Beats a JET2 Holiday”, KJ Apa’s Mr. Fantasy alter ego, Katy Perry in space.

One could even argue that the year-end obsession with earnest yearning—from Heated Rivalry to Hamnet—carries unmistakable drama-club undertones.

And yet, all of these feel less like causes than symptoms.

Theatre kids aren’t just shaping culture from the top down—we’ve been building it from the inside out.

Theatre kids are teachers who know when a classroom is slipping, and how to bring it back without humiliation. Doctors who understand that bedside manner matters as much as diagnosis. Waiters and bartenders who can read a table before the first drink order. Managers who sense morale before it shows up in a spreadsheet.

They’re parents who know how to narrate a moment, soften a transition, make space for big feelings without rushing to fix them. Partners who know which sweet treat will turn your day around. Friends who know when to speak, when to listen, and when to let the silence do the work.

When you look at all this from 10,000 feet, this year doesn’t really look like a takeover as much as a reveal.

The instincts we associate with theatre—attention, timing, emotional fluency—didn’t suddenly appear in culture. They’ve been circulating quietly for decades, centuries even, carried by people who learned how rooms work and how moments land.

What’s changed isn’t the presence of theatre kids—it’s the visibility of the skills we’ve always had.

A culture that needs, maybe more than ever, what we know how to do.

The Reclamation

It’s true that the world has always been, and may always be, in some degree of a tailspin. I’m not here to litigate whether or not right now is the worst of times.

What feels present in a different way is the desire—or the clear demand—for what theatre kids have in spades.

A willingness to listen.
A default to empathy.
A focus on process.
An eye on narratives.

The instincts instilled in theatre kids don’t expire. We don’t grow out of them, regardless of whether our life’s path leads us to the stage.

Maybe we deserve a kind of reclamation of that age-old “theatre kid” label.

To let it be a source of warm pride. To trust it as a simple truth. To carry it confidently as we navigate whatever next year has in store for us—as individuals, as a culture, as a species.

So, not to be dramatic, but: long live the theatre kids.

One last thing…

If I’m honest, I’ve had a complicated relationship with my inner “theatre kid.”

For a long time, it felt like something I needed to keep at arm’s length—not because it wasn’t true, but because I worried it made me sound unserious. Like something I was supposed to outgrow.

Writing The Fourth Wall this year helped change that.

Week by week, this became a place where I didn’t have to sand that part of myself down. Where caring about how things land wasn’t a liability. Where attention, timing, and feeling deeply could be the point—not something to apologize for or translate into something cooler.

In the process, I remembered why I loved that part of myself in the first place. Not the volume or the performance of it—but the care. The curiosity. The belief that the meaning of a moment matters.

Reclaiming that has felt grounding. Steadying. Like coming home.

But that shift didn’t happen alone.

Knowing the words had somewhere to land each week—being read, held, carried by people willing to sit with long thoughts in a loud year—made it possible to keep showing up honestly.

So thank you for being here this year. For staying with it. For letting me take my time.

See you next year ♥️
—Matt

P.S. A few people have asked how they can support The Fourth Wall beyond reading and sharing. If it’s been meaningful to you this year, I’ve opened a paid tier that includes one extra monthly letter focused on process, practice, and what I’m working through in real time. Thank you for considering it.

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