TikTok Star’s Small Role Is Big for BroadwayShow

BY ASHLEY WONG

In late October, an unexpected face joined the cast of Broadway musical “& Juliet”: Charli D’Amelio, one of Tik-Tok’s biggest stars.

A trained dancer whose choreographed routines catapulted her to fame on the platform, D’Amelio is instantly recognizable to most people under the age of 30. The 20year-old has 155 million followers on TikTok, making her the app’s second-most-followed personality. She has helped market sugary Dunkin’ cold brews, anchored a Kardashian- style reality show about her family and won “Dancing With the Stars.” Can she sell theater tickets?

D’Amelio isn’t the star of “& Juliet”; she’s an ensemble member with no lines. Still, since her Oct. 29 debut, the average dollar amount of tickets sold for all performances of the show in a single day has gone up by about 17%

compared with the daily average from Jan. 1 to Oct. 28, a spokeswoman for “& Juliet” said. The show has also seen dramatic growth in engagement on its social-media accounts.

“I think any sort of increase that we’ve seen in sales is because there’s now a wider audience that knows about ‘& Juliet’ because of Charli’s following,” said Eva Price, the show’s executive producer. On Wednesday, the show announced D’Amelio would be extending her run from January to April 2025.

“& Juliet” reimagines the Shakespearean tale of “Romeo and Juliet” into a jukebox musical, where Shakespeare’s characters sing covers of hit songs written by Swedish musician Max Martin, including the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.” D’Amelio plays Charmion, a character who appears in several numbers with in-tense choreography.

Over the summer, she said, D’Amelio’s team reached out expressing interest in professional opportunities for the young dancer. Coincidentally, the show was holding auditions for its replacement cast, so D’Amelio flew to New York to audition for the show’s director, music director and choreographer. To prepare, she worked with a vocal coach and took extra dance lessons.

“I really felt like it was right,” D’Amelio said. “Doing the audition was insanely nerve- racking, but I was just so excited and really got my expectations up, which I don’t always do. But this was something that I really, really wanted to be a part of from the second that I heard about it.”

D’Amelio grew up in Connecticut and was a competitive dancer as a child. In the summer of 2019, she started posting dance videos on Tik-Tok. D’Amelio’s takes on popular routines soon went viral.

“She just had it,” Price said. “She had the style, she had the skill, she had the vibe, she’s a lovely person. She got the part and earned it just like anyone else.”

From the end of September, when D’Amelio’s casting was announced, to mid-November, the show’s TikTok and Instagram accounts each gained more than 17,000 new followers.

The show is rolling out more stunt casting—a term for inviting big names from outside the theater business to join shows. NSYNC member Joey Fatone will fill a lead role in a nine-week limited run beginning in January, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will have a walk-on role this Saturday, an ensemble role written specially for her.

Though audiences slowly trickled back after the pandemic closed productions in 2020, according to data from the Broadway League trade association, attendance for New York shows has hovered around 12 million since 2022, down from its peak of more than 14 million during the 2018-2019 season. “& Juliet” opened in November 2022 and has grossed more than $116 million as of Dec. 8, according to Broadway League data. The show officially recouped its costs in April, the fourth new musical to reach profitability since the pandemic shutdown.

Alan Seales, host of “The Theatre Podcast” and cofounder of the Broadway Podcast Network, said convincing audiences to spend their money and try a Broadway show they might not have heard of had become increasingly difficult.

Casting stars with talent and enough built-in sway to boost a show’s profile, he said, may be the best way to ensure that original Broadway shows stay in business. He noted other shows have enjoyed boosts from outside celebrity talent, such as the off-Broadway run of “Little Shop of Horrors” featuring stars like Corbin Bleu, Sarah Hyland and Constance Wu, and “Chicago,” where reality TV star Ariana Madix held a lead role earlier this year.

Having been in the public eye since high school, D’Amelio said she knew her casting could be polarizing.

“It’s completely valid to have questions and concerns when you hear that someone who’s never done Broadway before is going to be on a Broadway stage,” D’Amelio said. “I accept that. I understand that I didn’t go to school for this, and I haven’t been doing some of the steps that a lot of other people do to get onto a Broadway stage.”

But D’Amelio was confident in her ability, she said, emphasizing she only cared to hear what people who saw the show had to say.

Tori Kalisz, 22, had no idea when she and her family caught a Sunday matinee of the show last month that one of the most-watched TikTok stars in the world would also be there.

It wasn’t until they were sitting in the theater that Kalisz spotted D’Amelio’s name in the Playbill. “My mom was like, ‘Yeah, you didn’t know that?’ It seems like she’s a little more hip than I am,” Kalisz said.

Before the show began, Kalisz said, she wondered whether D’Amelio had been cast solely to entice viewers.

“But she did a great job,” Kalisz said. “She’s a fantastic dancer.”