Yesterday, on an unseasonably warm February evening, a crowd of zoomers congregated outside the St. James Theatre to celebrate Trisha Paytas, the 36-year-old YouTuber making her Broadway debut in the sold-out, one-night-only benefit, Trisha’s Big Broadway Dream. As far as I could tell, approximately 95 percent of attendees were under 25; nearly half wore varying shades of Paytas’s trademark color, pink, donning floor-length faux furs and sparkly magenta minidresses; zero seemed to be straight men. The crowd skewed younger and smelled far more like weed than the crowds outside any other theater on the Great White Way.
“I’m here to support Mother Trisha,” Grant Gibbs, one-half of the TikTok-famous comedy duo A Twink and a Redhead, told me as he posed on the red carpet for photographers and gay theater kids from Larchmont. “She raised our generation, she raised me, and she’s living her dream.” He was accompanied by a motley crew of marginally New York–famous podcasters, content creators, and “some girl from TikTok who makes snack jars,” as a short, fuschia-clad girl next to me pointed out. When Paytas herself emerged from the stage door in a disco-inspired gold halter dress, her stepfather Frank on her arm, the crowd erupted into ear-splitting shrieks.
Just a few years ago, such a rapturous reception to Paytas would have been unthinkable (or at least ironic). For years, the YouTuber was something of a professional provocateur, going viral for self-identifying as a chicken nugget or cosplaying as Ice Spice or wondering if dogs have brains. Recently, however, she’s undergone a career resurgence, signing with CAA, appearing in a Katy Perry music video, and making a cameo with Bowen Yang on Saturday Night Live. Among zoomers who grew up watching Paytas self-destruct on YouTube, her ability to rebound from substance abuse, mental illness, and countless cancellations has been nothing short of inspirational. “It’s been amazing to see her growth,” Lacey, a 20-something who traveled with her sister from Montana to see the show, told me. “If she can do this, anyone can.”
In 2021, after years of feuding with other YouTubers and offending every demographic on the planet, Paytas had a breakdown and checked into a mental hospital, where she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She got sober and married Moses Hacmon, the brother of her former Frenemies podcast co-host, Ethan Klein. They now have two children: 3-year-old Malibu Barbie and 1-year-old Elvis. Paytas credits marriage and motherhood with mellowing her out. “When my first daughter was born, I didn’t want her to ever be embarrassed,” she told me. “I changed my whole life for her. Nobody wants a troll as their mom.”
Though Paytas has always attracted a small yet devoted following of girls, gays, and theys who consistently forgave her for her missteps, she’s recently been embraced by a larger, and younger, cohort. “She’s been a troll for so long that it’s nice to finally see her real personality,” Paige, a 23-year-old esthetician from Philadelphia, told me. (Paige was accompanied by her boyfriend, Colin, a stone-faced bro in a baseball cap and the statistical outlier to the aforementioned no-heterosexual-men rule.)
It’s fitting that Trisha’s big Broadway appearance started as a joke. On April Fools’ Day last year, the theater blog Theatrely announced that Paytas had signed on to play Roxie Hart in Chicago. Paytas famously can’t sing, dance, or act, though she regularly talks about her love for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and posts elaborate recreations of musicals on her YouTube channel. Though the news item was false, it generated considerable enthusiasm. “I turned on my phone and had hundreds of texts. It crashed our site,” Kobi Kassal, the editor-in-chief of Theatrely and co-producer of the show, told me. “People started buying tickets to Chicago for the dates we said she’d be in it.” A few days later, Kassal’s friend, producer George Strus, asked him to get coffee so they could brainstorm an opportunity for Paytas to actually come to Broadway. They decided to stage a one-night-only benefit for the Entertainment Community Fund, a nonprofit that is now raising money for industry members affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles.
The goal of the benefit, Kassal said, was not just to get Paytas in front of New York theater producers, but to “bridge this world of Gen-Z internet and YouTube and bring Trisha’s fans to Broadway,” he said. In this effort, it was successful: Many of the fans I spoke with said this was their very first Broadway show. There was a sense among many of them that Paytas had summoned this reception out of sheer will. “She manifested her kids, her husband, her podcast, SNL, this show,” Pat, a 24-year-old New Jerseyan who attended the show with his boyfriend, told me. “What can’t she manifest?”
The audience was packed with Gen-Z Broadway glitterati sipping pink mocktails, with Aul’i Craval’ho, Tommy Dorfman, and The Outsiders’s Emma Pittman (who was seated behind me, and kept shouting stuff like “SCREAMING!” and “PERIOD”!) among them. After a prerecorded segment featuring Paytas filming a vlog, praying to make her Broadway debut in front of a Sutton Foster–themed votive candle, the ensemble (led by the TikToker Amber Ardolino) kicked off a lavish opening number introducing the theme of the show (“If you just pursue your memes / you can make a meme come true!”) and its star (“a BBW with BPD and a BBL”). The moment Paytas herself strode onstage, she was met with one of three ecstatic standing ovations.
Part Christmas Carol–inspired revue and part one-woman showcase, Trisha’s Big Broadway Dream followed Paytas preparing for her Broadway debut by meeting three spirits: the Ghost of Christmas Past (Foster), the ghost of Christmas Present (Ben Platt), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Rachel Zegler). Broadway “It” girl Joy Woods played a droll version of the Spirit of Broadway incarnate, making a few references to her last show, The Notebook, for the real heads in the audience.
Paytas has spent more than a decade singing on her YouTube channel, and few people in the audience expected her to reveal Broadway-caliber vocal chops. But she was characteristically funny and charming, gamely belting out duets with her celebrity guests, who also seemed to be having a great time. The highlight was Paytas and Zegler’s rendition of “Take Me or Leave Me” from Rent, in part because Zegler — who, like Paytas, got her big break on YouTube — seemed to be fangirling just as hard for her as anyone in the audience. “You are the most fearless person in the whole world,” she told Paytas. Watching her valiantly struggle through Joanne’s part of the duet, the 1,700 people cheering her on seemed to agree.
As Paytas hoofed and belted her way through the finale — a medley of Broadway hits, including “Whatever Trisha Wants” from Damn Yankees and “SkimbleTrish the Railway Trish” from Cats, it was impossible not to cheer her on. Paytas toiled away in the content mines for well over a decade in search of fame and has come out on the other side triumphant. By the end of the show, as I watched the ensemble drape Paytas in the multicolored coat from Joseph that inspired her Broadway obsession, the guy behind me echoed exactly what I had been thinking: “Why was that so beautiful? Why did I actually cry?”