Broadway using twitter abnormally to market Next to Normal

The New York Times offers up a delicious case of theatre being marketed (gasp!) creatively:

In early May, six weeks after opening, (the Broadway musical "Next to Normal") began what is by all accounts a Broadway first: over Twitter, the social networking site, an adapted version of the show began to be published in the form of short text messages, or tweets — just a line from a character at a time. Several times daily over 35 days, followers of N2NBroadway eagerly awaited the arrival of the tweets on their cellphones and computers.

On May 12, about a week into the serialized Twitter performance, “Next to Normal” had 30,000 followers; when it ended on June 7 with the last line of text and audio from the final song, “Light,” about 145,000 had signed up. Then, as the cast began text messaging back and forth with followers, their numbers continued to grow, recently topping 550,000.

“You wouldn’t go to a social event and start selling someone something,” said Mr. Bazadona. “The content itself was doing the selling for us, so we didn’t need to bang someone over the head and say, ‘Here’s how to buy tickets.’ That would have smelled so advertising.”
-Damian Bazadona, president of Situation Interactive