Paddington Bear, © Isha Shah
In 2025, it’s pretty hard to keep a secret in theatre.
By the time the curtain call hits, half the audience may have already posted clips on TikTok, and whatever surprise you had planned is out there before the applause has even stopped. Which is why Paddington The Musical’s reveal of the Bear might just be a masterclass in how to play the social media game.
Rather than letting blurry photos leak online from the first preview, the producers were one step ahead. At eight o’clock sharp, just before the end of act one, when the first audiences were about to spill out into the interval – they dropped everything at once. Interviews, videos, photos, the works. The Guardian led the charge by a handful of minutes, followed by a perfectly timed wave of coverage from everyone else, including our chat with the two bear performers and a variety of pics. By the time anyone in the auditorium had a chance to post their own snaps (including those we at WhatsOnStage were invited to film), the official images were already everywhere.
In an age where nothing stays under wraps for long, they managed to make the big reveal feel both surprising and completely in control. Avid punters had formed a spontaneous digital queue on the ATG website. Demand had soared. My siblings sent me urgent WhatsApp messages asking whether it was suitable for their children.
It’s the reality of modern theatre publicity: you can’t stop people sharing things anymore, so you might as well build that into your strategy. Often, big musicals or plays will put out production images days before opening night, sometimes weeks after previews have started (not helped by fairly protracted approval processes, even more torturous when there’s a big star involved). Those are valuable weeks when online fandoms could have already watched illicitly filmed “slime tutorials.” Footage from the new Hunger Games stage show is already seemingly unavoidable for anyone on social media. It’s hard to forget the one curtain call snap of a blood-soaked Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard that went viral across tabloid websites, grainy and blurred – could higher-resolution snaps have been disseminated by the producing team instead?
The Sunset Boulevard team can, of course, be commended for turning Tom Francis’ famous stroll across London (and New York) into a big social media moment – I can’t recall just how many grainy shots of West 44th Street I’ve seen over the last 12 months. Director Jamie Lloyd did an admittedly impressive job transforming Rachel Zegler’s balcony rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” in Evita into a “moment”, without the production once prompting or promoting Zegler’s outdoor appearance. The crowds formed organically, following small clips shared online. By the end of the run it was all anyone could talk about.
Rachel Zegler in Evita, photo supplied to news desks by CarvePR
It’s interesting to compare Paddington with My Neighbour Totoro, which famously kept its puppets a mystery until fairly recently – almost two years into the show’s journey. That approach built a sense of wonder – but it also belonged to a slightly different moment. Totoro’s creatures appear fleetingly in the story, conjured from the power of collective belief, while Paddington is the centre of the whole show – he’s the reason people are buying tickets. It makes sense that his arrival had to be big, coordinated and, most importantly, on the producers’ own terms.
In the end, Paddington’s reveal worked because it accepted how people actually experience theatre now: half in the auditorium, half online. The show didn’t fight that – it used it. And in doing so, it might just have set the new gold standard for how to surprise an audience in the age of social media.
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