It's hard to make an off-Broadway show go viral, and even harder to sell tickets. More Cotton FrankA controversial, conversation-inducing new musical that reimagines the story of Anne Frank as an intersectional, multiracial, gender-queer, Afro-Latino hip-hop musical somehow does both.
The concept itself made political headlines when the show was first announced, but digital marketing on Instagram and TikTok turned it into a minor sensation.
The show comes from a composer-provocateur Andrew Fox and writer-co-creator Joel Sinensky, both of whom are also currently starring. Together, the pair have developed an impressive social media strategy for Cotton Frank as a result, he gained hundreds of thousands of subscribers, millions of video views, and sold out 33 of his first 36 shows.
We spoke with the duo to look at their strategy for attracting audiences for their bold stage show, which has resulted in multiple off-Broadway expansions.
DEADLINE: Cotton Frank went viral before it even opened. What post or moment sparked early interest?
ANDREW FOX: Around Christmas 2024, I announced the project on my personal TikTok, which got about 100,000 views – nothing special. Exactly a month later, a small right-wing Instagram aggregator reposted this post as I was boarding a plane to Los Angeles. By the time my plane landed, this repost had attracted thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of views. A few days later, we launched our official Instagram using the same video, which, along with a repost with subtitles, received a total of nine million views.
ALEX LEWIS: The video that really brought us into the zeitgeist was our very first video. We showed various actresses who have played Anne Frank in the past and asked a simple question: what do they have in common? The answer to this question is that all the actresses in the photo were white. The message of this video is entirely based on the questions and themes we explore in the series.
When we released our first video, we invited viewers to be part of the game. Check out our comments and you'll see what I mean. Once we got into it and we all loved it… that's what changed the game for us.
DEADLINE: How quickly did the internet hype start to turn into sold-out shows?
FOX: Well, first we had to schedule and announce the show. As the attention grew, we realized that we would have to book a venue for the concert. After many rejections, we found a venue and announced our two shows on March 18th. By March 19th we had sold out all the tickets.
LEWIS: We've been creating content on our pages for months, and back in June we decided to put tickets online for our concert reading. We sold all the material in just 36 hours – faster than our establishment has ever sold anything!
DEADLINE: Would you say your marketing strategy was more of a design or a happy accident—exploiting organic chaos?
FOX: From the very beginning of this project, we knew that social media would be huge – and that if we just promoted this show in a very simple way, we could get a lot of attention.
Once it started going viral, it was like any good improv scene—make lots of suggestions, listen, and keep adding information. There are so many feedback mechanisms and so much interactivity when you're on the Internet that you'd be foolish not to turn on the chaos and take advantage of it. The fans gave us catchphrases, they gave us content and really helped build the world and shape how we present the show. A lot of our catchphrases came about organically through interactions with them and during workshops about what they did and didn't do. We also had the benefit of all these TikTok formats to stylize, as well as a plethora of lines and history throughout the play to draw upon.
LEWIS: It's hard to say where one ends and the other begins. I don't think any of us expected how viral our first videos would become, but we always knew that the message could continue by responding to what had already been posted. What really drove the initial engagement was the doubt that the show was real; people did not believe that there was such a progressive theater company as ours, ready to tell the story of Anita Franco and her journey from the areas of Frankfurt. Then when we started sharing clips from the show, it sparked a whole new conversation. It's not just a thing realbut is it good?
DEADLINE: Andrey, you have been called everything from “provocateur” to “Internet troll.” Considering there are so many Cotton Frank it's about identity, which label seems most appropriate to you?
FOX: I don't know how willing I am to accept any one label. However, I have seen some great descriptions of myself. One commenter in particular struck me when he said, “You'd have to really love musicals to hate musicals as much as this guy does.”
DEADLINE: Now you are on the show yourself. Does being on stage change your perception of your own narrative?
FOX: Being on stage absolutely changes my experience of the show, especially when it comes to watching the show and planning rewrites. My experience as a show writer focuses on rhythm, pacing, clarity, and shaping the audience's experience. On stage, the show is more about trajectories. By playing the role yourself, you become very aware of when the trajectory stops or changes route. Both for your track and for the entire ensemble, which, especially in this show, needs to be treated like its own organism.
Sitting in a chair at the back of the theater, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and forget your responsibility to the actors to give them a roller coaster ride that will take them from the beginning to the end of the play. The more inevitable and clear I can make their journey, the more brilliantly they can become themselves.
DEADLINE: You've attracted audiences from across the political spectrum, even around the world. What does this diversity of responses tell you about where the culture is now?
FOX: It's no secret that our culture has become atomized and fragmented. While it's nice to have a “safe space” from time to time, I don't think it's necessarily sustainable in a democracy where people need to have some shared sense of reality.
Cotton Frank is a deliberately opaque creation in which you can never be 100% sure what is real and what is not, or what point of view the creative team is coming from. Layers of sincerity and irony—both on social media and in the live theater experience—give a kind of permission for everyone to play along, no matter where they're from. Which means you can get a lot of very different people from very different walks of life who are all involved in something together – and who now have at least one more thing in common.
LEWIS: In my opinion, it's kind of an emphasis on art itself and how it transcends beliefs. People have many views on what exactly the show is and the political views of the creative team, and those views often diverge. Our fans are the same way, and that excites me incredibly. People came in and absorbed messages from the show that they found incredibly profound and diametrically opposed to what other people had internalized. All sorts of people love and hate this show for completely opposite reasons, and yet the show brings these people into one room to watch art and then discuss it.
DEADLINE: How has the show been received among different political and cultural groups?
FOX: I love seeing the different answers and how people see their experiences reflected in them, and I think people would be shocked at how much they have in common. We have a lot of people who have never paid to see a musical before, and they're all coming out to support this new work in development. It's wild to walk out into the lobby and see a Hasidic Jewish family standing next to a group of frat brothers pouring beer – and then see more traditional musical theater people trying to make sense of the actors around them.
DEADLINE: Has online outrage ever spilled over into a show?
FOX: When we started rehearsals, we had a whole plan for what to do if someone tried to forcefully stop the show, including an emergency plan to protect our actors and a budget for a Broadway security team for every performance of our little show. So far the crowd has been much better behaved than we expected – most nights they have been downright lively and friendly. But knock on wood: we're keeping that security budget intact.
LEWIS: Every now and then we have people who leave the show and make a big show out of it. As a theatergoer/entertainer, I find this annoying, and perhaps because of the popularity of crowd-pleasing comedies. But I know that what we do is pretty incendiary, and I expected that at some point people in our audience would get angry or awkward.
DEADLINE: Were there any moments during the performances that caught you by surprise emotionally?
LEWIS: There is a very tense moment towards the end of the show that produces a surprising amount of laughs. It drove me crazy at first because I treasured it. – Stop, this must be intense. But now I Love that people laugh. By the end of the show I realized that we were breaking people's minds, so it's very interesting to me now when we hear that laughter.
DEADLINE: How did you approach ticket pricing to keep the show affordable?
FOX: It's difficult because it's such a small house that it's hard to recoup the costs with affordable ticket prices. However, we have added two $20 ticket tiers – Rush tickets before the show and then Standby tickets right at the curtain to fill unclaimed seats. We also often share promo codes on our Instagram.
LEWIS: We stopped eating.
DEADLINE: If you could change one thing about how you market your show online, what would it be?
LEWIS: Personally, I would have shown more clips from the actual show. In my opinion, it will actually attract more people, whereas most people on my team think that it might stop people from buying tickets because they think you won't go because you've already seen the content from it. I used to watch a bootleg Avenue Q after school every day in California, and every time I came to New York, I bought a ticket back. Maybe it's just me, but I think spoilers can often be helpful.
DEADLINE: How do you want people to feel when they leave? Cotton Frank?
FOX: The best reaction a play can cause is if you are so shocked that have go to a bar and talk to someone about it – or become so overwhelmed that you can't talk at all.
