Marketing a (high school) musical on TikTok

This article explores the intersections between TikTok, musical theatre and youth cultures. Since its international debut in 2017, TikTok has become closely associated with teenagers and twenty-somethings who use the social media platform as a critical site to create, present and experience identities and generational culture at large. Musical theatre has been central to this cultural work. Teenage theatre makers, for example, use TikTok as a marketing tool that can be replicated by professional theatre companies and productions. I present an autoethnographic account of my work with high school students to market an all-school production of the musical Grease and use the experience to question the ways emerging digital platforms such as TikTok inform new, accessible ways of collaborating, experiencing, appreciating, conceptualizing and documenting musical theatre.