There’s a new crop of pop stars popping up among Gen Z, and don’t be surprised if they do a kick-ball-change at next year's Grammys.
Ariana Grande, whose recent album Eternal Sunshine went number one on Billboard in March, got her start on Broadway at 15. She also stars as Glinda in the movie musical Wicked, which will be in theaters this Friday. Olivia Rodrigo, the queen of teenage punk-pop, took off after her feature in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Sabrina Carpenter, the “Espresso” singer who’s touched the top of the charts twice this season, played the lead role in Broadway’s Mean Girls opposite Reneé Rapp, another rising pop star.
Then, there’s the 26-year-old singer Chappell Roan. She’s not technically a theater kid, but she’s bringing mainstream music its biggest dose of theatricality since Lady Gaga’s meat dress. Her music is an electric mix of hyperpop and tragic rock, but she’s better known for her elaborate drag. She’s appeared as everything from a sexy Statue of Liberty to a Renaissance pig. From the wigs to the snout, Roan is acting out “what I wished my life could be,” as she told the L.A. Times.
The thing is that “theater kids” aren’t just people who participated in a musical or two in middle school. Theater kids make performing their whole personality. They go all in. Unlike the diaristic songs of Taylor Swift, or the high-art-inflected albums of Beyonce, or the sexier stylings of Megan Thee Stallion, theater kid pop stars are proudly dorky and far from bashful. Sabrina Carpenter told Vogue, “I keep my Harry Potter wand on display just in case I need to cast some spells real fast” before proudly showing off her baby grand piano.
How did the theater kids take over the world? Blame Glee and its creator Ryan Murphy for mainlining theater kids to the masses. Fifteen years ago, the show saw jocks and cheerleaders transform into card-carrying musical theater heads. Before long, we all wanted to be Finn Hudson: quarterback by day, star of Rocky Horror Picture Show by night. Around the same time, Nick Jonas forged a path from Broadway boy (he played Gavroche in Les Mis and Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, among other roles) to boyband man, and Zac Efron was starting his own journey from High School Musical to Sexiest Man Alive. Musical theater just kept getting hotter.
“We’ve had exponential growth around the country,” Rachel Reiner, Executive Director of the Jimmy Awards, a national high school musical theater prize, told me. “We started with 16 regional awards programs, and this year, we had 51.” Reiner estimates that there are over 140,000 students participating in Jimmy-affiliated high school musical programs across the country. Rapp was one of these students. She won the competition in 2018 with the song “All Falls Down” from the musical Chaplin.
What’s so special about theater kids? Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently wrote on X that the group excels because acting gives them gravitas and confidence. “Learning the embarrassment of forgetting a line or your notes as a kid—and moving on from it—is a valuable skill,” she wrote. “Sports won’t teach a kid this.” Theater shows you how to hold a gaze and it endows the bravado—or maybe overconfidence—to keep a pathologically-bored generation watching. Just take a look at some of our most powerful figures, and you’ll see the pattern: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson did improv in undergrad with Matt Damon; New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy once played King Arthur in Camelot; and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started his career as a high school drama teacher (a Will Schuester of the North, you might say).
Reiner described other skills honed in theater, from public speaking to “Your ability to work as a team, to take direction, to see moves ahead of the current situation, like in chess.” In other words, musical theater makes you a bold leader—but it also teaches you how to step back and listen to the ensemble. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that today’s theatrical pop stars have made careers out of a unique cocktail of fearless eccentricity and acute cultural savvy. Whether they’re in music or politics or anything else, theater kids are among the most capable of us all.
In 2024, it’s increasingly clear that, as Josh Groban put it at this year’s Jimmy Awards, “If you want to get something done, hire a theater kid.”
Pop music got the message.
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