Review: In 11 to Midnight, Cost n’ Mayor Bring New Year’s Resolutions to Viral TikTok Trends

There are 7.5 million people on TikTok watching husband-and-wife dance duo Cost n’ Mayor perform hip-hop-flavored routines to the Meow Mix jingle. You don’t have to be one of them to feel the spirit of the Tok suffusing the Orpheum Theatre.

Austin and Marideth Telenko, better known by the online pseudonym that made them a Covid-era sensation, choreograph and lead the off-Broadway premiere of 11 to Midnight, a dance play loosely hung on the premise of a group of friends declaring their resolutions on Post-it notes at a New Year’s Eve party. Much like a New Year’s shindig, it delivers a smorgasbord of snackable treats within a time frame suitable for an audience of scrollers. Everyone’s gotta get out when the clock strikes 12, but for all 60 minutes promised in the title, you can feel the wraithlike (and sometimes actual) gaze of an iPhone. Fair warning to all Instagram husbands: You might be called to service.

There’s nothing wrong with building a piece of theater around the appetites and cognitive preferences of digital consumers. And if a Post-it sponsorship gets your show to the stage, you bet a number featuring Post-it-ography is called for. It does, however, leave us wondering if dance theater—the kind Broadway audiences came to know through properties like Contact and Movin’ Out of the early 2000s, or even the just two years bygone Sufjan Stevens project Illinoise—is destined to drift away from the narrative and toward the clippable. But enough of the existential quandaries. At the end of the day, much like the videos that reach viral status, 11 to Midnight does entertain.

When the seven-person company first enters designer Arnel Sancianco’s apartment set (implausibly spacious and professorially decorated), their high-octane dance to Lawrence’s “Whatcha Want” gets the blood flowing (lighting designers Jeff Croiter and Sean Beach and sound designers Ben Scheff and Steve Toulim maintain the energy of an arena concert). The number is also supposed to suggest a simmering spat between our married hosts (Austin and Marideth, whose fans clearly love to see them in love).

But even as they bear out that conflict in a series of flashbacks that go from carefully choreographed cabinet door slamming to romantic reconciliation, this is not a show that plumbs the depths of marital negotiation. Even the way director Lyndsay Magid Aviner allows clumsy bursts of chatter in the nearly dialogue-free show and leaves us scratching our heads at the ratio of physical to mimed props—it all loops back to a common theme. Attention is grabbed one moment at a time.

Cost n’ Mayor are inventive commercial choreographers who shine when they’re devising clever conceits for dance sequences: A party game where the contents of red Solo cups have to survive a hip-hop groove; a high-pressure round of freeze dance; the ubiquitous group TikTok moment. They even mimic their online success, turning old-fashioned (bordering on dated) channel flipping into a TV-inspired dance medley.

The pair also play to their dancers’ individual strengths: Aché Richardson, with his whippable hair and bottomless well of energy, is the heart and soul of every dance circle; Brendon Chan brings athleticism and charm to a nerdy wizarding fantasy; Kati Simon lends her notable power to the show’s most lyrical solo; and Tyson Hill and Makenzie Olsen sparkle as a couple of bashful sweethearts whose aspirations for love are facilitated by Frank Sinatra.

It’s wholesome charm and energizing dance sitting on a bed of new-year-new-me platitudes best served on a For You Page. That’s the thing about quick bites. They’re tasty, but they don’t fill you up.