When the curtain fell on the final performance of Be More Chill in September 2015 at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, the cast and crew thought it was the end for the sci-fi–comedy–musical. They packed up their neon and metallic ’80s- and ’90s-esque costumes and gathered to record a cast album—a soundtrack they thought would be their only lasting mark. No one had taken the power of streaming into account.
Turns out, the story of Jeremy Heere’s yearning for high school popularity—which includes swallowing a bite-sized supercomputer (the Squip) with the promise of becoming cool—and the music accompanying his journey left more of a mark on the patrons of Two River Theater than the cast or creators realized. The soundtrack made its way around the internet and eventually appeared on Spotify with a growing trickle of streams. Then, in May 2017, plays on the platform exploded to over a million streams per month.
That’s when book writer Joe Tracz and composer Joe Iconis realized they could use technology to take their show about futuristic technology to Broadway.
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