The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical has won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, with composers Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear beating out highly decorated industry veterans such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Burt Bacharach, and Stephen Schwartz. And it all began on TikTok.
Kicked off in a video uploaded by Barlow in Jan. 2021, Barlow and Bear used TikTok to publicly chronicle the creation of The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, responding to audience suggestions and sharing snippets of songs in development. The project grew incredibly popular on the video sharing platform, with Barlow’s initial TikTok eventually gaining 2.4 million views. Other videos in Barlow’s series gained more than double that number, and all clips across TikTok with the hashtag #bridgertonmusical now have almost 273 million views combined.
As its title suggests, The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical reimagines Netflix’s Austenesque period romance Bridgerton as a musical. The full 15-song album was released in Sep. 2021, just eight months after Barlow’s first TikTok, and features tracks such as “Burn for You,” “Ocean Away,” and “Penelope Featherington.”
Coming full circle, Barlow also made a TikTok of the moment the duo’s first ever Grammy win was announced. In a lovely touch, the ceremony played Hamilton‘s “You’ll Be Back” as they approached the stage.
“A year ago when I asked the internet ‘What if Bridgerton was a musical?’ I could not have imagined we would be holding a Grammy in our hands,” Barlow said during their acceptance speech. “We wanna thank everyone on the internet who has watched us create this album from the ground up — we share this with you.”
“You are just as much a part of this project as we are,” agreed Bear. “I just have to say, this is really for all of my fellow female producers, composers, engineers, that are still struggling to gain recognition and support for what we do. It’s not that we don’t exist — we do.”
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Bear and Barlow’s work isn’t the first musical to be conceptualised, developed, and composed on TikTok. Numerous TikTok users previously collaborated to create Ratatouille the Musical in 2020, which was eventually performed in a charity benefit concert featuring Tituss Burgess, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Ashley Park.
However, it is the first TikTok-originated work to be awarded a Grammy, winning a title previously bestowed to iconic musicals including The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Wicked, and Hamilton. This year, fellow nominees included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, Burt Bacharach and Steven Sater’s Some Lovers, Girl from the North Country, Les Misérables: The Staged Concert, and Stephen Schwartz’s Snapshots.
