How To Speak Broadway Like You Were Born In The Wings

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women just want to talk about it. That’s the idea on social media, anyway, where theater influencers like Amber Ardolino and Jonathan Lewis spill the (Throat Coat) tea on backstage politics to hundreds of thousands. The Outsiders actress Emma Pittman takes her YouTube audience backstage every week, while a Broadway finance pro called “Bryan the Business Analyst” predicts which shows will close via TikTok. Then there’s the thriving /r/Broadway thread on Reddit, which tracks everything from casting drama to why Hamilton vixen Jasmine Cephas Jones was at the US Open with Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Uh, because they’re friends? Calm down, guys.)

Why do people without an Equity card want to enter the drama chat? “Theater is such a formative part of so many people’s childhoods and adolescents,” says Leigh Poulos, a Tisch-trained actress and teaching artist at Lincoln Center, the birthplace of Broadway shows like Parade (and memes like Jody in Center Stage doing all those fouettés). “There’s just such an excitement, often a competitive one, with theater. It’s a lot like high school sports. Even if you never go pro, there’s still that core memory that makes you admire or envy the pros.” Meanwhile, Broadway’s experiencing record-setting grosses and attendance, and long-running juggernauts like Wicked continue to prove that musicals are billion-dollar endeavors with serious spinoff potential. (Even Starbucks had a Wicked cup last Christmas.)

And despite the “drama geek” trope on shows like Glee and movies like Theater Camp, the pros are actually cool. Internet girlfriends Cynthia Erivo and Reneé Rapp both began their careers on Broadway; Sadie Sink and Jake Gyllenhaal were last seen on a theater stage, not a movie screen; this season welcomes stars like Lea Michele in Chess.

But before you can walk Jonathan Groff’s King George walk, you have to talk the talk. Enter this Broadway glossary, culled from drama insiders and featuring 20 phrases that’ll earn you a tiny standing ovation — or at least a begrudging nod at Marie’s Crisis.

Birth The Baby

Quite simply, to get your show to opening night without going nuts. “This is all I say all day long during tech rehearsals,” says Anna Mack Pardee, a Broadway producer who began her career producing photo shoots for Vogue. “I’m just like, ‘We just gotta push through this pain and birth this baby!’” Consider it the Broadway equivalent of, “Shut up and take care of your sh*t.”

Bite Light

Nina White of Queen of Versailles loves this bitty gizmo that she first noticed backstage as a young actor making her Broadway debut in Kimberly Akimbo. “It’s a tiny flashlight that crew members hold between their teeth,” she says. “When you bite down, the light turns on, and then you have both hands free for a super-fast prop handoff [or] to help an actor with a quick change. These are falling out of style post-COVID, what with the mouth of it all, but I don’t think we should abandon them. They’re incredibly useful!” And way more fun than an iPhone flashlight app.

Go Up

“The term ‘go up’ has two meanings,” says Jeanine Tesori, the Pulitzer-nominated composer of Shrek the Musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Fun Home, and Kimberly Akimbo. “One definition of ‘go up’ is when your show starts; i.e., ‘When does your show go up?’ And the other — and dreaded — definition is, ‘to go up on your lines,’ which means you have no clue where you are, who says what, and in which order. Complete nightmare.”

Marie’s

The best bar in the universe, Marie’s Crisis Cafe is a tiny West Village piano dive that plays singalong showtunes from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. The crowd ranges from gleeful local college students to LGBTQ+ elders, retired showgirls, and occasional stars like Dylan Mulvaney and Sienna Miller, along with off-duty Broadway regulars. In the ultimate theater “in” joke, the bar is named Marie’s Crisis because it’s built on the site where American revolutionary Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet “The American Crisis,” once lived. The actual Thomas Paine is name-checked in “The Schuyler Sisters,” the Hamilton banger that includes the lyric, “I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me.” The song is sung at least once a week at Marie’s — meaning the former owner of the building keeps getting an accidental, drunken shout-out at his own bar. Hope his ghost is psyched.

Masters

The anonymous people who film and post illegal bootleg videos in Broadway theaters, or those who record and post songs from the show. You can find an extensive list of them — at least for now — on the Broadway Bootlegs Reddit thread.

“Noise!”

If your bestie’s a Broadway pro, they might yell, “Noise!” before running the garbage disposal. Tony Award-winning scene designer Andrew Moerdyk, whose dots collective helped create the Broadway hit Oh Mary!, says it’s a force of habit for theater workers. “As a courtesy, you yell ‘Noise!’ to announce any sound, no matter how big or small, to help people avoid being startled by a sound.” The gag? “Yelling, ‘Noise!’ at the top of your lungs is startling!”

Park And Bark

“That’s when you’re in a musical and you have a song in which you get to just stand there and sing your face off,” says Briga Heelan, the star of Broadway’s Once Upon a One More Time and the Tina Fey comedy Great News. The most famous example of a park and bark? Les Miserables, where one character after another drags themselves into the spotlight (sometimes while wounded with French canon fire) to belt a heartbreaking confession. “Think of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ and ‘On My Own,’” adds Heelan. “There’s no dancing or even moving around! You just do it.”

Pro Shot

A professional filming of a Broadway show. The most famous is Hamilton on Disney+, but the most underrated is Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway, which shows the last-ever performance of the original Broadway production. History has its eyes on Mimi’s latex dress, etc. See also: Slime tutorial.

Revisal

You know the Broadway-bound production of Cats that’s set in a drag ball? Or the off-Broadway Macbeth where every part was played by a teenage girl in a school uniform? (It starred AnnaSophia Robb; she tore.) Writer Joshua Safran, the executive producer of Season 2 of the Broadway TV fable Smash, says industry folk have started calling these experiments revisals instead of the traditional term, a “revival.” Though the word is meant to acknowledge the show’s significant reimagining, Safran says it’s more pretentious than useful. “I definitely don’t like it!” he says. “Just call it a revival with some work to the book,” or script.

Sitz

“That’s an abbreviation for ‘sitzprobe,’” says Hannah Cruz, who plays Svetlana opposite Lea Michele in Chess. “It’s the first day singing the score with the orchestra. Usually it’s done in a new [rehearsal] studio where we just get to focus on the music. It’s one of the most exciting days of building a musical.”

Slime Tutorial

As actor and theater influencer Melanie Sutrathrada explains constantly to her fans, “a slime tutorial is basically code for a bootleg — usually a full recording of a stage show.” To keep these clandestine videos online, clever theater kids began labeling them “slime tutorials” instead of “sketchy tapes of Hadestown with Lola Tung.” Illicit recordings of Broadway shows are totally illegal, but impassioned theater fans often argue on Reddit and TikTok that it’s something of a public service, given the high cost of ticket prices.

Snob

A Saturday night on Broadway — or the stereotypical Saturday evening audience member, since weekend ticket prices are often higher, especially on resale sites.

Stage Dooring

The act of queueing up to greet actors after a Broadway show. Once an informal process where dedicated fans would quietly linger after a show, stage dooring now comes with official meet-and-greet times and audience barriers. If you saw the term on TikTok, it’s because Rachel Zegler recently had to interfere when one zealous fan, while stage dooring, tried to start a fight with her bodyguard. (Theater etiquette tip: Don’t do this.)

Streep It Up

A substitute for “break a leg” or “good luck in there” that’s popular with Ivy League theater students, especially before theater auditions or other exams. According to Yale School of Drama graduate and Broadway veteran Miriam A. Hyman, the phrase comes from Meryl Streep’s uncanny ability to turn on her star power before trying out for a play. “We would yell it across the quad at Brown University, too,” says Klein. “Hey! Streep it up in there!”

Thank You, Getting Bagels

“Everyone knows that backstage, when a stage manager says it’s 10 minutes until the show starts, you say, ‘Thank you, 10,’” says Poulos. “But if you’re with working actors in the middle of a long show run, anytime anyone gives you info — like, ‘We’re about to get bagels’ — you sort of blurt out, ‘Thank you, getting bagels,’ before you even know what you’re saying. It’s so automatic. Please don’t judge us.”

There Is No Table!

“When we’re in a room writing a song or a scene and it’s going badly, we’ll swap ideas in and out and say, ‘Ok, let’s put this on the table; let’s take this off the table,’” says Natasha Hodgson, the co-creator of the London import Operation Mincemeat, the loopy World War II comedy about British troops tricking Hitler with a stolen corpse. (Yes, it’s a true story.) Hodgson says when creative teams need to clear the air after a flop — and take a creative risk without judgement — they’ll yell out, “There is no table!” and then start their writing from scratch, often with the weirdest idea possible. The phrase is “very freeing,” says Hodgson. Also: “Utterly devastating.”

Throat Coat

The literal tea often spilled during singing rehearsals, vocal warmups, and backstage at intermission. Created by Traditional Medicinals in 1973, Throat Coat is to Broadway what tequila is to Selling Sunset. Everybody drinks it. Spotted behind the scenes at Hamilton, Kinky Boots, Stereophonic, it has earned god-tier status by god-tier actress Audra McDonald and become a minor plot point in the beloved drama nerd movie Theater Camp.

WHAM Call

It’s like the Broadway version of overtime, says Emmy nominee Gabrielle Nevaeh, who plays Patty Newby in Stranger Things: The First Shadow. “It’s in reference to the actor’s call time” — what time they have to show up to work — “to get into wigs, hair, and makeup.” Broadway’s most impressive WHAM transformation? It might be for Wicked’s Elphaba, who gets covered in green body paint before every single show.

Wonderstudy

“This is what directors, producers, and other various and sundry authority figures involved with a production will call the understudies in lieu of actually providing them with resources to help them do their jobs,” says Natalie Walker, who has understudied and performed in three off-Broadway productions, and now stars in Mad Scenes at Joe’s Pub. “You will most often hear the term when an understudy has been coerced into going on in a [role] they are not contractually obligated to cover and have never rehearsed.” Walker says if an audience member called her a “wonderstudy” — as in, a drama Scarlet Witch saving the day in seconds — that would be “actually nice.” Still, she cautions outsiders from trying to use the term as a compliment. “There can be a little bit of a PTSD factor for people who’ve heard it from bad directors!”

2 Doe Shay

Another word for a double-header, which is a day (usually Wednesday and Saturday) when actors perform a matinee followed by a night show. “I don’t actually know where this originated,” says Cruz, “but I like to think it’s because we’re all so tired, our words get mumbled and this is what comes out!”