"Sweet Charity" Social Media

This past weekend the ONU Theatre Arts Department opened and closed our spring musical “Sweet Charity.” I was in the cast of Sweet Charity and I had a blast dancing, singing and playing onstage all weekend, but I also had a ton of fun behind the scenes! The backstage area of any show is a world within itself full of laughter, moments of bonding and the not-so-glamorous process of preparing for your next entrance. Sometimes my favorite memories of the show happen backstage. For this production our director Courtney Kattengell wanted us to share some of our backstage moments with our potential audience as a kind of marketing for the show. The way she wanted to try this was with Instagram stories. From everything I’ve learned in this class I realized how good of an idea this was, since the biggest appeal to instagram stories is it gives your customers or audience a behind the scenes look which draws them into you more. Recently we’ve been experimenting with promotional videos and there was a beautiful one made for “Sweet Charity” by Alex Capeneka, a junior musical theatre major, but the behind the scenes look adds another aspect of appeal to come see the show. I was excited to see how creative we could get with this new idea.

Courtney decided to put one cast member in charge of the Instagram story. She chose Riley Alexander, a senior musical theatre major who plays a lead in the show who doesn’t show up until the end of Act One of “Sweet Charity,” and who doesn’t have many costume or set changes. Because of this, he could take the time to catch behind the scenes moments of the rest of us who were running around like crazy. I think Riley did a fantastic job. He took pictures during tech week of exciting moments that didn’t reveal too much but were really interesting and would have drawn me in if I was an audience member; he did “a day in the life of” with another cast member to give insight to what an actor does to prepare for a show; he posted pictures of seniors and did a “senior spotlight” everyday of the show; and my favorite thing he did was come up with a new question every show day to ask each member of the cast and posted our responses. He asked things like, “Give me a sound that describes how you feel about opening night!” or “What’s your favorite line from the show?” and he got everyone in the cast involved. I can’t measure his success by how many people our story ended up reaching or how many people bought tickets based off the new social media plan for the show, but based on what I’ve learned I think it was a social media job well done, and it was exciting to me how creative Riley got. I think this is an initiative we should continue for every production here at ONU. It can only get more of a following, which is what we want!

Did any of you check out the Freed Center’s Instagram story? If so, what did you think?