Annie, her ginger wig glistening beneath a flurry, sneaked a hit off her vaping pen. She shivered and leaped in place to stay warm. It was, this frigid Midwest evening, a hard-knock life. It was 11 degrees and the snowy ground was frozen. The line outside the club stretched from the entrance to the sidewalk. The Phantom of the Opera drew his cape around himself. Evan Hansen reached into the cast on his left arm and eased out a nip of whiskey. A Heather sized up a Mean Girl. Sally Bowles smoked extravagantly.
Another musical-theater dance night was about to start.
Theme nights have long been the meat and potatoes of nightclubs. Punk pop night, emo night, ’70s disco night, indie electronic night, darkwave night, Taylor Swift night. For years, it seemed there wasn’t a musical genre too niche to inspire its own dance night.
Well, maybe show tunes.
But then a year and a half ago, Ethan Maccoby, a Brooklyn-based dance-party promoter and former theater kid, created the Broadway Rave to fill a desire that no one knew existed. Now Maccoby is throwing musical-theater dance parties in 150 cities across North America to increasingly sold-out crowds of theater nerds who arrive dressed as Hamilton, Mr. Mistoffelees and Sweeney Todd. And they’re occupying steadily larger dance floors.
Do you hear the people sing?
“To be honest, I didn’t think this was doable,” said Melanie Russell, the Nashville-based DJ who will spin show tunes in Chicago on Feb. 9, when Broadway Rave returns to Wicker Park’s Subterranean, a relatively small venue that Broadway Rave is already outgrowing. (Indeed, Broadway Rave sold out the Subterranean weeks after being announced in December.) “It was awkward the first time I DJ’d one of these. Show tunes are not my thing. I’d get requests for songs full of monologues. But you look into the crowd, people are in the middle of the floor performing. I mean, they know every syllable. It was like they had musical theater in their veins. It’s sort of hard to explain.”
You have to see it.
So I drove five hours through a blizzard to Detroit, the early home of techno, to witness the early days of a different kind of happening. Make no mistake: Despite being called a rave, this is no all-night, drug-soaked, nonstop, whistle-tooting, neon-waving thump-thump-thumping blissed-out celebration of musical transcendence. I asked several people if this felt like a rave and many told me they had never been to a rave. This is a room of theater kids unleashed for the night — current theater kids, former theater kids and wannabe theater kids — lip-syncing dozens of mostly contemporary Broadway classics, for hours, with all the charm, annoyance and dramatic feelings that suggests.
Leah Brown and Jayla Smith, both in their late 20s, both from Detroit, stood at the edge of the dance floor, sipping from long straws sunk into long glasses, spinning to face each other, belting out the lyrics of “Cell Block Tango” from “Chicago,” only to crack each other up and dissolve back into each other’s shoulders, laughing and laughing.
He had it comin!
He had it comin!
He had only himself to blame
If you’d have been there
If you’d have seen it
I betcha you would have done the same!
They were electric amateurs, full of confidence, playing to an audience of each other. Which is not a bad way of describing a lot of people here. I asked them if, having been out of school a while, they found all these theater kids annoying or cool. Smith said, “Well, I see ourselves as a bit of both.” Brown said, “You’d have to be to come here.”
“Chicago” faded into a hyper-chipper number from the musical movie “The Greatest Showman.” A different Annie — not the vaping Annie — sauntered past. A Greatest Showman in his red ringmaster lapels pogoed in the heart of the dance floor. A pair of waitresses from “Waitress” danced alongside Cats and Hamiltons. I spotted a Penny Lane from the musical adaptation of “Almost Famous” smiling dreamily, vibing behind oval John Lennon shades. A few things about a Broadway Rave becomes readily evident: This is more like a Broadway take on cosplay, and as for the music, you’re more likely to get tunes from contemporary shows like “Beetlejuice,” “Wicked” and “Hadestown” than, say, a buoyant 2024 dance explosion via “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“Actually, I have tried ‘Fiddler,'” Josh Batista, the DJ at the Broadway Rave in Detroit, told me later. “I’ve also tried ‘Guys and Dolls,’ and it’s all kind of hit and miss with this kind of crowd. They’re generally younger. Sometimes I do ‘Anything Goes,’ but again, spotty reaction. Those older songs often have these massive dance breaks and though this is called a rave, it doesn’t really translate to people who want to become part of it.”
A boyfriend and girlfriend, eyes theatrically alarmed, faced each other, held hands and belted “Omigod You Guys” from “Legally Blonde” like it was Rodgers and Hammerstein:
Omigod!
Omigod, you guys!
Looks like Elle’s gonna win the prize
If there ever was a perfect couple, this one qualifies!
One tune finished, and another began without a break. “OK,” Batista shouted from the stage, “who’s ready for the theater kid ‘Hokey Pokey’?” He clicked at his laptop, and the revving rhythm guitar of “Time Warp” from “Rocky Horror Picture Show” chugged loudly, as familiar a blast of cross-generational euphoria here as Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” which itself (via “Mamma Mia”) sent the crowd into rapture, flowing into “American Idiot” from Green Day (via “American Idiot: The Musical”) then “We’re All in This Together” from the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical,” and then “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl.” Musical theater here also means film and TV movies, yet it’s perfectly seamless, of the same cloth, power ballads transitioning into empowerment pop, and as obvious as this sounds after the dawn of the jukebox musical, Broadway Rave is like an elaborate reminder the DNA of Broadway is inseparable from contemporary hit music. And vice versa. Which, of course, is why the Broadway Rave works as well as it does.
Near the back of the venue I noticed an older guy with graying hair — maybe 40 — and asked what he was doing here. He told me with a theatrical sadness: “I’m Willy Loman.”
“Oh no, you’re not!” his girlfriend groaned, swaying to “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked.”
“I am feeling pretty old right now,” he said.
They didn’t want to be identified. They taught theater at high schools in a wealthy suburb of Detroit and didn’t want anyone to know they were an item. Weren’t they worried they would run into a student here, I asked? “More like terrified,” she said.
Not far from them, a teenager in the corseted dress of a character from “Six the Musical” lip-synced to “The Schuyler Sisters” from “Hamilton,” her eyes not focused on the DJ or the people dancing in front of her but, I suppose, the imaginary stage in her head, staring into the back of a nonexistent theater, arms thrusting triumphantly as the song crested, then, as it ended, huffing, puffing, like she just finished a showstopper.
I might have clapped for her but a doorbell rang, and the opening number of “Book of Mormon” began. Elliott Smith, dressed conservatively in a white short-sleeve shirt and black tie, wore a name tag that read “Elder Smith.” He wound through the dance floor, nodding “Hello …” with the cast recording, shaking hands and introducing himself. He’s 28 and lives in a nearby suburb, he told me. He’s an engineer at GM. He had a big, gruff friendliness and the staccato laugh of Seth Rogan. He did not give off theater kid vibes.
“I really wanted to come to this,” he laughed, introducing me to his wife, Nicole Durant. Some of the best times they’ve had out lately were at extremely theatrical concerts, such as Beyoncé, so this seemed perfect. He played lacrosse in school, he said, but liked the theater kids, then turned to his wife: “I can think of like 15 friends who should be here.”
So far, his parties, Maccoby said, have been millennial-ish and younger, full of casual fans, theater kids and theater-industry professionals; last fall, the cast of “Hamilton” did a few tunes at a Broadway Rave in Manhattan, and other New York shows have drawn performances from cast members of “Mean Girls,” “Wicked” and “Les Misérables.” But when Maccoby started promoting musical-theater nights in Brooklyn, crowds were thin. Pitching the idea to clubs around the country was even worse: “They were skeptical, for sure. It’s not a crowd they imagine going out or drinking, and they want alcohol sales.”
A couple of years later, a crowd of around 400 turned out for the Chicago parties, but in other cities, Broadway Raves is pulling in three times that. Clips of raves on social media have helped. As has the cost of musical theater itself, Batista said. “There’s only so many student tickets, and even touring shows are not always financially accessible to some of these people.” A Broadway Rave is often closer to how a lot of younger audiences are experiencing Broadway shows now — in nuggety, bite-size form, through clips floating around YouTube, through movie adaptations and endlessly streamed cast recordings.
Naturally perhaps for a generation raised on TikTok and Instagram, soon after Maccoby organized his first Broadway Rave, audience members — without being invited initially — would climb on stage, find the microphone and lip-sync through performances. Then came the cat ears, the Hamilton coats, magic wands and French “Les Misérables” flags.
Now it happens at every party.
By the end of the night in Detroit — all three-plus hours — Batista had pulled a half-dozen people on stage. “This space is for us,” he said, shouting out to theater kids who see themselves as “too awkward, too fat, too gay.” During the final song, “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” — the theater kid “Freebird” — he jumped off the stage and joined everyone.
525,600 minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights …
He pressed his mic into their faces, but more than a few had brought their own.
9 p.m. Feb. 9 at Subterranean, 2011 W. North Ave.; tickets (ages 17+, sold out) and more information at subt.net
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
