Not since Barbie has a movie been hyped more than Wicked. It’s inescapable on the algorithm; you cannot scroll without being assaulted by trailers, endless behind-the-scenes clips, and most entertaining of all, snippets of interviews with the co-stars of the movie, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, during their bizarre press junket that has seen the duo break out in song and break down in tears. A lot.
Perhaps offline you’ve noticed one of the film’s more than 400 brand partnerships, including Bloomingdale’s, Starbucks, and Lexus, or the Today show’s Wicked week. The movie has a hefty two hour, 40-minute runtime and a heftier $350 million budget for both films—Part II comes out next year—and it seems that the campaign will not cease until everyone with eyeballs turns into a raging theater kid.
The movie made $163 million in its opening weekend, making it the highest grossing adaptation of a Broadway musical ever. But that’s not the main way to measure its impact. Wicked’s success is not just a blockbuster; it marks the cultural triumph of the theater kid.
In middle and high school, theater kids were easy to pick out of the crowd—and just as easy to pick on. They were a brownnosing, passionate, well-groomed bunch. They were loud and flashy, and we rolled our eyes at them. The cool kids were all irony, distance, apathy, and tousled hair.
No more. The theater-kid ethos—try hard, be professional and polished, go big and loud, embrace earnestness—is in vogue. There’s even a new crop of Gen Z pop stars showing up who embody the trope.
There’s Grande, most obviously, whose recent album Eternal Sunshine debuted at number one in March, and who got her start on Broadway at age 15 in the musical 13. Olivia Rodrigo, the queen of teenage punk-pop, took off after her feature in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Then there’s Sabrina Carpenter, the “Espresso” singer who has touched the top of the charts twice this year, and who played the lead role in Broadway’s Mean Girls opposite Reneé Rapp, another rising pop star.
For Lulu Cavicchi, a member of the board of Brown University's Production Workshop, the oldest theater group on campus, the cultural moment Wicked has ushered in is personal. “Theater kids are kind of running the world, which is so fun,” she said. “They’re everywhere.” Rhayna Poulin, a college senior who serves as president of the Yale Dramatic Association, said of theater kids: “Theater is on a bigger stage right now, which I think is great.”
Theater kids aren’t just people who participated in a musical or two in middle school. Theater kids make the fact that they perform their whole personality. Contra the diaristic songs of Taylor Swift, or the high art–inflected albums of Beyoncé, or the sexier stylings of Rihanna and Megan Thee Stallion, theater kid pop stars are proudly dorky and far from bashful. Carpenter told Vogue, “I keep my Harry Potter wand on display just in case I need to cast some spells real fast,” before showing off her baby grand piano. Even the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics kicked off with a campy reenactment of Marie Antoinette’s beheading, and only got more theatrical, if not athletic, from there. It was directed by the French thespian Thomas Jolly.
How did the theater kids take over the world? Blame Glee, and its creator Ryan Murphy, for mainlining theater kids to the masses. Fifteen years ago, the show saw jocks and cheerleaders transform into card-carrying musical geeks who broke into song in the hallways of their high school. Before long we all wanted to be Finn Hudson: quarterback by day, star of Rocky Horror Picture Show by night. Around the same time, Nick Jonas forged a path from Broadway—he played Gavroche in Les Miz and Chip in Beauty and the Beast among other roles—to boy band, while Zac Efron started his own journey from High School Musical, which came out in 2006, to Sexiest Man Alive. Musical theater just kept getting hotter.
“We’ve had exponential growth around the country,” Rachel Reiner, executive director of the Jimmy Awards, a national high school musical theater prize, told me. “We started with 16 regional awards programs, and this year, we had 51.” Rapp, before she started acting and putting out pop albums, won the Jimmy competition in 2018 with the song “All Falls Down” from the show Chaplin. Reiner estimates that there are over 140,000 students participating in Jimmy Award–affiliated musical programs across the country today.
Why do theater kids keep winning? Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote on X that the group excels because acting gives them gravitas and confidence. “Learning the embarrassment of forgetting a line or your notes as a kid—and moving on from it—is a valuable skill,” she wrote. “Sports won’t teach a kid this.” Theater shows you how to hold a gaze, and endows the bravado—or maybe it’s the overconfidence—to keep a pathologically bored generation watching.
Just take a look at some of our most powerful figures: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did improv in college; Ted Cruz was in Oliver!; and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau started his career as a high school drama teacher (a Will Schuester of the North, you could say).
Reiner counts public speaking as a skill that’s honed in theater, and ticks off a few more: “Your ability to work as a team, to take direction, to see moves ahead of the current situation, like in chess.” Josh Groban hosted the Jimmy Awards this year, and he sang the praises of the type. “If you want to get something done,” he told the crowd, “hire a theater kid.”
Now, theater lovers have Wicked to do that promotional work for them. “I see all the Wicked commercials, and I’m like, Ariana Grande was in 13! Do you know that? It’s very fun. I’ll see them everywhere, and I’ll be like, this is a theater person!” said Cavicchi.
“It’s really cool that a studio is putting all that money toward making something that resonates most with theater nerds like myself,” she added. “I think that is really powerful.”
Evan Gardner is a Fellow at The Free Press; read his piece “Taylor Swift Unites America.”
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