Thursday, July 9, 2015

With a Little Bit of Luck

Jan Maxwell in Scenes from an Execution.

For someone's who quite the introvert, I've had an interesting couple of days Twitter-wise.

On Wednesday, Time Out New York ran my interview with multiple Tony nominee Jan Maxwell, who surprised me by revealing that she plans to retire from stage acting after her stint in Scenes from an Execution with PTP/NYC. By the time I logged on to Twitter to tweet the article around noon, it was already trending with more than 100 tweets.

Michael Urie hides from Patti LuPone in Shows for Days (not because he was texting).

Then, that night, I attended Shows for Days, a new play at Lincoln Center's Off Broadway space starring Patti LuPone and Michael Urie. The performance has now become famous/infamous because a woman sitting by the left side of the stage (maybe in the second row?) was using her smartphone during the beginning of the second act, and as the first scene came to an end, LuPone walked by her while she was delivering her final lines, took it out of her hands and exited the stage.

It was a beautiful moment, so perfectly timed it almost looked like it was part of the show. And it solved a problem without breaking the flow of the play. Despite the late hour when I finally got home, I knew I had to tweet this before I went to bed:
I have never gotten such a response to one of my tweets: 23 favorites and 18 retweets. The Guardian even used my tweet in their article.

Both instances were heavily reliant on the luck factor. And that's a big factor in social media success — one that even the so-called experts have no control over.