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Katharine Quinn didn’t intend to go into marketing.
Quinn has been a lifelong theatre lover — from the time she was five years old mesmerized by a Hello Dolly VHS tape keeping her and her sister busy during a Texas summer hurricane to what she calls a “surprise” eight year acting career.
She started making TikTok content during the pandemic, and one thing led to another, and she was getting tapped to work on The Great Gatsby’s social media. Quinn has since grown her hobby into a Broadway marketing business “And That’s Showbiz.”
Theatrely sat down with Quinn to talk about the different approaches she takes to each show and platform she works on, her time as the known “leak” as a writing assistant on Shucked, and the future of Broadway marketing.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
I'm curious how you sort of approach something like Shucked differently from how you would approach a Gatsby and Maybe Happy Ending. How do you kind of go about approaching each of them?
My title on Shucked was Writing Associate. So I was working with the script of Shucked and assisting Robert Horn on all of the edits and the many, many new pages that would come in. I was with the show for like a year and a half, which was an amazing experience. But the social media was just for my personal channels. There was a social media team that was assigned to the show, and I was just making content. I ended up getting to be, I guess, what was an early version of a social captain, which is now a thing that happens on Broadway shows or a number of Broadway shows where someone’s paid, you know, an honorarium to help create fresh content. And it's usually somebody who's in the cast. And in this instance, it was me. And I started making content with the company and feeding it to the Shucked Musical channel and then also posting content about the show on my pages.
I pitched to Mike Bosner, the producer, who's so smart with marketing and so game to try new things, I said, “what would happen if I ‘leaked’ audio from rehearsal of Alex Newell singing Independently Owned?” It’s different coming from the official show channel versus a content creator in the space. And even though I'm a micro, nano, nano influencer, it still had a different feeling than if the show had posted that. And Alex was game and Mike was game. And so we went for it and it did super, super well. Even just talking about the show on my channels was fun. tThere were not that many rules around it. I mean, of course I'm being respectful and conscientious of like my role in the show, but that strategy was just an extension of the passion that I had for the show, which I suppose might work in marketing is as well, but it was different because my capacity was as a writer's assistant and now my job is formally doing social media for the shows.
But even my strategy between Maybe Happy Ending and The Great Gatsby has been so different because they're just such different beasts and have such different fandoms. And so it's been a really fun challenge and I'm excited for us to keep stretching and growing and the different ways that we can pursue sharing Broadway on the internet.
I feel like this time last year, Gatsby was the only thing on my feed. I'm curious what went into you finding the spots you knew TikTok would like.
The creative team on Gatsby has been the most collaborative, incredible. They've been amazing partners and Dominique Kelly is the choreographer of Gatsby. From the second I saw that choreo I was like, this is built to be on video. This is going to look incredible. I have a dance background and I just got so incredibly excited watching the choreography. And generally, I follow what excites me in the room. The team offered me unfettered access to the process. I could fly on the wall for any rehearsal. I was in there a ton, especially in Papermill [Playhouse]. Because I established those relationships so early and I watched the development of the show, the things that really lit me up, like that first listen through the script and that first time seeing a run through, those are the most invaluable because you'll never get to see it for the first time ever again.
Some of it is outright strategic thinking of like, okay, that New Money choreo is built to be a TikTok trend. It wasn't envisioned that way necessarily, but when I saw it, I was like, this 100% lends itself to being a dance moment online. We made sure that we captured it in the room. At Papermill, we had iPhone video, by the time we got to Broadway rehearsals, I early on advocated for really great rehearsal video that started picking up and doing well. Then the album was coming out and we built a campaign around it where we got Dom and Cedric, our associate choreographer, to teach the choreography so that people could easily learn it. We did online tutorials. We amplified every video that we saw fans doing online. We were commenting on absolutely every single post of somebody doing the dance, like we wanted the fans to know that we were listening and paying attention.
I want to ask you a little bit about Maybe Happy Ending. I remember sitting up in Boston being like, “I need to see it by the time that I get back from winter break,” and people were nervous. Obviously it's had this incredible turnaround. I would love to hear from your perspective how that shift happened and your contributions to it.
The first time I saw the show was Invited Dress. I exited the show, obviously in tears, as one does, and I was stunned more than anything, because it was so unlike anything I'd seen on Broadway, maybe ever and certainly in the last decade. It felt so unique and so special. I guess the first answer to the question is, it helps to have a show that’s that beautiful. But how do you get people excited about the incredible work that people have put together about the beautiful thing?
And the answer is listening to other people who are obsessed with it. The answer is, listening to fans. Great Gatsby is much more of a TikTok fandom, much more of an Instagram fandom. Maybe Happy Ending lives on Reddit. The heartbeat of that show are the Fireflies and the Fireflies live on the Maybe Happy Ending sub-Reddit. They're all over the internet, but that seems to be like the heartbeat of where they congregate. And Reddit was a new-ish platform to me, but I hadn't really considered it necessarily as like a hub for Broadway fandom. But it’s incredible. Those fans, they internally organized ticket giveaways. They were sharing, they were like, “how are you describing this show to your friends?” Because it's a hard show to distill into a single sentence and explain what it is to experience the show.
I mean, it was like an inadvertent focus group for the show, and we listened to everything. They said, why don't we have souvenir cups for the shows yet at the bar? Well, I can send an email, and I can ask and say, “why don't we have these branded souvenir cups at the bar?” Or they would ask for a certain merch item, and I could send an e-mail to the merch and say “hey, have you seen that the fans are talking about this? Have you considered this item?” I just think that generally we discount the value and power of Broadway fandoms. And as a huge Broadway fangirl, I know how deep that fervor is and how deep that passion is. And they're telling us what they love about the show. They're telling what they want more of, what content they want, what they wanna highlight, what they want to learn more about, what questions they have, what merch they want. And so a lot of it is listening and then iterating and figuring out what works.
Listen, we tried some of the strategies we used on Gatsby for Maybe Happy and it did not work. It was what people responded to with those two shows, not even just in terms of what the shows are, but in terms what kinds of content we're putting out are completely different. And so it's not a one size fits all. Every show has its own unique DNA and unique fandom and unique way that it interacts with the show.
In your opinion, what does the Broadway marketing sphere kind of look like now and how do you see it changing in the future?
It is such an interesting moment. I feel like our first social media Broadway Awakening was around 2015 with Hamilton. And I think that we're seeing another huge evolution right now. If you're speaking in like marketing terms, it feels like the funnel has flipped where it felt like social media was like a “nice to have” extension of your brand, and now it's the way that people find out about your show. Usually, it is the entry point. You're gonna see a viral social media clip before you're going to see a physical billboard in the Tri-State area. Our awareness tools have shifted a lot. That doesn't mean that we don't still need physical advertising. I still think we do. But I do think that the model is shifting, and social media is the growth engine and amplifier for every other arm of marketing.
For young people who might be interested in the marketing side of things, what advice would you give to people who might be considering this as part of their career path?
Make your own content. My whole thing was, if I can, as a micro nano nano influencer, make you interested in some piece of my world, I definitely can make you interested in Jeremy Jordan, Eva Noblezada, The Great Gatsby on Broadway. The principles of making a compelling video or making compelling content or how to tell a story online or how to condense short form content — to stop the scroll — is a skill and an art. And you can do that on your own before you ever enter any sort of agency.
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An immersive production of Jacob Wasson’s play Smuta is coming to a new Brooklyn audiophile nightclub Refuge, produced by New York Nightlife icon Ladyfag. The production opens on Oct. 9 for a limited run.
It will star James Scully, who has been seen on Broadway in Oh, Mary! and Augustus Prew, who is best known for Apple TV’s The Morning Show. The production is directed by Niamh Osh Jones.
A macabre love story set in 2019 Moscow’s queer underground, Jacob Wasson’s Smuta is an epic unsanctioned thought-experiment about violence, public sex, and emotional exile for the end of times. As a surge of gay-bashings around the city upends the lives of Yakov, played by Scully, and Good Boy, played by Prew, the two strangers escape into a delirious queer odyssey while awaiting the outcome of pending national sentiments.
Composer and musician Arya Gaston will live-mix an original electronic score alongside scenic design created by multimedia artist and Julio Torres collaborator Mark Séjourné with lighting by Shane Hennessy.
Smuta opens at Refuge in Brooklyn on Oct. 9. For tickets and more information, visit here.
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It's almost time to get on the train. Classic Stage Company’s world premiere production of Marcel on the Train, written by Tony Award nominee Ethan Slater and Theatrely31’s Marshall Pailet, will star Slater in the titular role of Marcel Marceau. Joining Slater are Julie Benko, Maddie Corman, Max Gordon Moore, Aaron Serotsky, and Alex Wyse. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.
History remembers Marcel Marceau as the world’s greatest mime. But before the spotlight, he was a young man in Nazi-occupied France, guiding Jewish children to safety with nothing but courage and imagination. In the shadows of World War II, Marcel on the Train reveals the man behind the invisible mask.
The creative team for Marcel on the Train includes set designer Scott Davis, costume designer Sarah Laux, lighting designer Brandon Stirling Baker, sound designer Jill BC DuBoff, and casting director Geoff Josselson. Marcel on the Train is presented by special arrangement with Mix and Match Productions (Maxwell Beer and Mitch Marois).
Marcel on the Train will run from Feb. 5 to March 15, 2026 at CSC’s Lynn F. Angelson Theater on East 13th Street in New York City. Opening night is set for Feb. 22. Individual tickets for Marcel on the Train will go on sale in November. For more information, visit here.
