TikTok Broadway

"How has musical theatre been revolutionized by TikTok? How are fans expanding, creating, and canonizing musical theatre? Welcome to the Great Digital Way. TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age explores musical theatre fandom as it materializes on TikTok, a social media app that, despite only being available to US audiences since August 2018, has become one of the dominant social media platforms. Given the critical mass of TikTok and the app's cultural influence across nearly every industry, it is time to unpack different TikTok subcultures -- such as its thriving musical theatre community. This book argues that TikTok democratizes musical theatre fan cultures and spaces, creating a new canon of musical theatre thanks to the way virality works on the app. TikTok expands musical theatre into a purely digital realm that spills into other, non-digital aspects of US popular culture. TikTok Broadway has energized fan practices, leading to innovative digital fandom aesthetics and a democratized approach to fan community formation. In this democratized mode of creation, fans and audiences dictate trending content and, subsequently, canon formation. On TikTok, fans can make shows popular (Six, Heathers: The Musical), make them commercially successful (Beetlejuice), and develop new shows (Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, Bridgerton: The Musical). The power lies in the fans, who have a far greater reach than on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. From Beetlejuice and Six to Wicked and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, this book tells the story of TikTok Broadway, the Great Digital Way that has transformed musical theatre fandom in the digital age. TikTok Broadway intervenes into our collective understanding of how social media reimagines musical theatre fan practices." --