Happy Thursday!

By the time you receive this, I will have been sitting at a theater for five hours for a Wicked and Wicked: For Good double feature. Hopefully, this second installment is good and worth the entire day spent. I’ll let you know!

In today’s newsletter, a mini scene report from the Palace Theater, where Trisha Paytas made her Broadway debut. Also, media drama, an AI-generated TikTok dance hit, and 15 years of Kesha’s Animal and Cannibal. Subscribe to the Yapper tier to read the full newsletter.

When it was announced that Trisha Paytas would be in Beetlejuice on Broadway, I got that uneasy feeling I get whenever any problematic influencer fails up. If you’ll recall, there was quite a bit of backlash when her casting was announced last month. Many people felt like she was being rewarded for her bad behavior. Although she has certainly grown a lot in the past few years as she has taken care of her mental health, gotten sober, and became a mother, Paytas quite literally built a platform on being controversial. Now, she’s supposedly in her healed era — and, despite the criticism, she has garnered a lot of goodwill. 

I got to see Paytas in Beetlejuice on Tuesday. Coming into the show, Paytas still felt like an abstract idea on my phone. It was hard for me to conceptualize the real person behind the screen that so many spectators love and hate. So, it was kind of surprising to overhear the excited murmurs of her fans, of which there were many, in the crowd. Some had noticed her husband Moses Hacmon in the audience and approached him with gifts for her. Later, there was a massive hoard outside the stage doors, most of which was waiting for the YouTuber.

Paytas has a very small role — quite literally one scene. It was hammy, but she got uproarious applause when she walked on stage. Her main job was to give a silly little laugh and act ditzy. Perfect! While I had mixed feelings about her casting, I came away feeling as though it was pretty harmless if it helped the production in some way. Honestly, a show as camp as this one with a part as minor as she had makes sense if you’re looking to get people into seats. The cast also plugged a fundraiser for Broadway Cares at the end of the show, so hopefully her stans helped raise more money for the nonprofit. 

Yap Year oomfie CT Jones spoke to Paytas about achieving her Broadway dreams for Rolling Stone. The influencer is deeply aware of the critics and skeptics, saying: “There are many people too that are still like, ‘We can’t look past this,’ and I totally get it. I can only show that I’m trying to be better.”