Broadway has always lived with bootlegs — grainy camcorder captures traded like contraband — but TikTok has turned that old black market into a full-blown algorithmic side hustle. Entire showstoppers now pop up in 60-second clips, jumping from the Great White Way straight onto the For You page.
Take Bria Celest, a 30-year-old Angeleno who has seen plenty of Hadestown — just not at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Instead, her TikTok feed delivers illicit snippets of Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera. “I don’t live in New York, so I really enjoy that there are people who risk recording in the theater,” she admits.
She’s hardly alone. Clips from Hamilton, Wicked and Death Becomes Her have flooded the app, creating a bite-sized bootleg economy that’s harder to police than YouTube. One Broadway producer says TikTok’s algorithm makes it especially tricky to control.
Here’s the twist: Not everyone thinks that’s a bad thing.
In some cases, the bootlegs function as marketing. Hunter Plummer, an assistant teaching professor, was on the fence about seeing Audra McDonald in Gypsy last year. A few TikTok clips pushed him to make the trip from New Haven to Manhattan — even though he ultimately saw McDonald’s understudy. “I still went, in part, because of having seen these bootlegs,” he says.
That upside helps explain why some shows are leaning in — and why others are not. Productions like Six actively encourage audiences to record certain moments, while other shows now use phone pouches to lock devices away during performances. “There is definitely a fear of cannibalizing the live performance and the sale of a ticket,” says Broadway producer Rachel Sussman. “We get mixed messages in these live entertainment spaces,” she adds. “It isn’t one-size-fits-all.”
In the TikTok era, Broadway may be discovering that a little piracy — just enough to spark FOMO — can sometimes help sell the thing it’s technically stealing.
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Also in Rambling Reporter:
Olivia Nuzzi is denying rumors that she’s adapting her just-released memoir for the screen — but THR casts it anyway; Dick Van Dyke also reveals in his new book that he very nearly played Damien’s dad in the original Omen.
This story appeared in the Dec. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
