August 17, 2009
A Musical Meted Out via Twitter
At a recent performance of “Next to Normal,” the Broadway musical at the Booth Theater on West 45th Street, Alice Ripley, was reaching to answer a cordless telephone when she knocked it off the stage. Fourth wall broken, Ms. Ripley asked, with a smile, “Could you hand that to me?” The New York Times reports.
Audience members were suddenly on all fours, but when they could not find the prop, a woman in the front row held up her cellphone, which Ms. Ripley accepted and spoke her lines into before tossing it back, to laughter and applause.
It is, it turns out, strangely fitting that a theatergoer’s cellphone should play a role in a “Next to Normal” performance, since many people have been introduced to the musical by the devices. In early May, six weeks after opening, the production began what is by all accounts a Broadway first: over Twitter, the social networking site, an adapted version of the show began to be published in the form of short text messages, or tweets — just a line from a character at a time. Several times daily over 35 days, followers of N2NBroadway eagerly awaited the arrival of the tweets on their cellphones and computers.
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