Ah, the power of fandom. Time for a youth perspective. Mostly a ramble, but covers some key things about the fanbase, why kids are into the show, history with it, and why I personally will not see it on Broadway. Skip if that sounds boring, but bold stuff might be worth a skim.
So I got into this show in January 2017. Back then, it was just a cast recording and a script. Alright. There was a community built around fanart, fan pages, lots of stuff to support the show. A lot of the cast would interact, everybody was very sweet, and all in all, nobody did much harm. Come May 2017, the community around the show had grown massive, they would be on Tumblr fandometrics and everything else. Shipping was rampant. Many fans (including myself) would travel to see shows the cast was in. The rights for the show were also released around this era (??) if I'm not mistaken.
I fell out with this show in September 2017. The fandom was awful, I'd been bullied on several occasions surrounding the show, and I'd listened to some other amazing shows that this one could never live up to. I deleted most of my connections to the show or renamed them, and that was that. The soundtrack sounded worse and worse the more it was replayed. Seeing myself reflected wasn't enough anymore.
March 2018, the off-broadway revival was announced. It had been a while, but I gave it a shot off-Broadway by buying a ticket in April 2018 for the first off-Broadway preview, and on 7/26/18 I saw it off-Broadway. It was nice seeing it on stage (especially with Salazar, Roland, and Hsu, all of which I'd seen in their other shows before seeing this one, and Roland remembered me) but at the same time probably one of my worst theatre experiences. Outside of the cast, I didn't enjoy the show or the content. The songs were atrocious, especially the new ones.
Hearing it had gotten transferred to Broadway wasn't surprising. Obviously, the Tumblr fans boosted it there. The plethora of Instagram fan pages in my explore exploded. So many people wanted to see it but were too far from NYC. Those who could see it saw it multiple times. They experienced the same feeling I had in 2017; except now en masse. There are pages that have been running since 2017 solely off of Salazar or BMC content with thousands of followers. Pages are created every day as well.
It's seen now with many teens like myself are posing that exact issue with the show. It's already on TKTs, they don't want it to close since they're too far, and even if it sold out off-Broadway, the house is 3x bigger on Broadway. It might have sold out off-Broadway, but even if EVERYBODY who saw it off-broadway saw it twice on Broadway, it couldn't last more than 6-7 months. Of course not everybody is, and new people will see it, but this still stands in general.
The fans will keep it running is my prediction. As long as they can see it, it'll stay open. They will bleed money for the fans. And Tumblr will get them on Fandometrics again this year. But lots of fans will leave. Its peak was May to September of 2018, and it's already losing fans due to the fanbase. Quite ironic.
People on Tumblr make guides on how to be an audience member for people seeing this show. And the audience was awful off-Broadway with only 300 people, so I couldn't imagine how bad it will be with 950 people. Not that you shouldn't see it because of the audience, but I certainly am not. Maybe it's better? Maybe it's worse. Either way, Be More Chill has been built off of fans since day one. No wonder it's on broadway, but it never would've gotten there based off the content of the show alone.
I don't know where I was going with this, but if you read this all, I hope you're a bit more educated on BMC. And If not? At least you read it.
Also quick question about the show on Broadway: Is it true there's lots of fanfare to the Chloe/Jenna and Rich/Michael shippers? Because if so, that just furthers my point of how the rise of this show will become its fall.
