Theatre has long served as a gathering place in unsettled times.

Across cultures and centuries, when political and social pressures have tightened, humans have continued to assemble in shared spaces—around story, around music, around the simple act of witnessing something together. In Elizabethan England, playhouses remained crowded even amidst plague and instability. In 20th-century Europe, underground performances flourished under censorship. In communities across the United States, artists have responded to moments of unrest not by retreating, but by creating rooms—sometimes literal, sometimes improvised—where people could gather, share stories, and connect.

The impulse is consistent: when circumstances constrict, art expands.

Earlier this month, that instinct took the shape of Dear Minneapolis, the latest #Giveback Concert livestreamed on Broadway Unlocked, in partnership with Project Success. Through its #Giveback series, the company has raised substantial funds for nonprofits across the country, pairing performance with purpose and proving that a livestream can feel less like a broadcast and more like a convening.

All Together Now, a production company devoted to creating communal live experiences, approaches performance with a similar philosophy: that proximity is not the only measure of connection. Their work producing live experiences for digital audiences consistently asks how artists and audiences can meet one another with intention, whether in the same room or across great distances.

For more than three decades, Project Success has worked with Minneapolis-area middle schoolers to ensure that every student graduates high school with a plan for their future, equipped with the confidence and skills to carry them forward. In recent weeks, when many of the students they serve were confined to their homes by fear, the students themselves asked a simple question: could there be a way to come together through music, even if they could not be together in person?

The answer became Dear Minneapolis.

As the concert streamed from a small room in New York City, thousands of students across Minneapolis tuned in to watch a live performance together. Alongside the livestream, a digital program served as a shared point of reference—opened nearly six thousand times that afternoon—offering the same artist acknowledgements, notes, and framing to everyone participating, whether seated in the theatre or watching from home. For students gathered around laptops at kitchen tables or on couches, the experience of opening a program was not symbolic; it was tangible. The same names, the same media, the same context held in the palm of a hand, in real time. In living rooms across the city, the container of the theatre extended outward.

Broadway artists performed in solidarity, offering a range of voices and textures that shaped the afternoon; from buoyancy and wit to the weight of longing imparted by isolation and fear, to a beatboxing set built from a word cloud generated in real time by viewers across the country, resounding with words like hope, love, dreams, community, pride, together. Throughout the concert, ASL interpreters remained present on screen, translating not only lyrics but tone and cadence. Their movements carried the music visually, ensuring that the language of the afternoon was accessible in more than one form. The gathering widened.

Letters from third graders in Brooklyn, read aloud, counseled a friend in Minneapolis they had never met to keep going; stay safe; stay powerful; you are resilient; I will support you; there is always tomorrow. In Minneapolis, students from Project Success spoke about what the organization has meant in their lives—not in sweeping terms, but in specifics: mentors who push them to grow, programs that open doors, a community that stands beside them, and the steady expectation that their futures matter. 

What the afternoon revealed was not simply the comfort of music, but the safe haven innate to the act of gathering itself. Theatre––a shared container––asks people to arrive at the same time, to contemplate the same ideas, to hold attention together. Whether in a single auditorium or across hundreds of living rooms, this simultaneity transforms isolation into community. The concert did not claim to resolve anything beyond its hour. It did not attempt to restore order to the chaos and complexity of the world outside it. Conversely, it turned inward, creating a shared frame in which people could see one another and be seen in return.

Historically, theatre has endured not because it distracts from difficulty, but because it acknowledges and insists on connection in spite of it. Art, in these moments, is not ornamental. It is connective tissue. It is a reminder that community exists even when it feels fragile, tenuous, or even impossible.

Sometimes that gathering happens in a theatre. Sometimes it happens across great distances. What persists is the act itself—the decision to convene, to listen, to offer voice, and to remain present and accountable to one another.

In that sense, the work cannot be nostalgic, symbolic, performative, or trite. It is contemporary. It is necessary. And it continues.

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Watch Dear Minneapolis on Broadway Unlocked. 

Project Success is a 501(c)(3) organization. To learn more about their important mission and donate to their cause, visit their website.