Oddly elaborate Twitter hoax tries to dupe Stephen Sondheim fans

When Stephen Sondheim died last November, he left behind an unfinished musical called Square One, a long-in-the-works project that has not been (and maybe now never will be) released to the public. That’s a tantalizing prospect for Broadway fans—the last Stephen Sondheim musical!—and so some mysterious prankster out there thought it would be a good idea to toy with their emotions by announcing a surprise production of Square One for late next year. But, of course, it was all totally fake.

This comes from Broadway World, which says that various social media accounts popped up earlier this week for Square One, teasing that there would be an announcement this morning about the unreleased show getting a run on Broadway. When the promised announcement came, it mentioned that Nathan Lane and Bernadette Peters would supposedly be starring and that the show would be opening in the fall of next year—but, again, it was all totally fake. There was a teaser poster-type thing and photos of Lane and Peters and everything. It seemed reasonably legitimate (if easy to fake). But it was not legitimate (it was fake).

Broadway World reached out to a representative who worked with Sondheim at the time of his death, and they confirmed that there are no current plans for a production of Square One, and a representative for Peters also denied that she would be appearing in the (fake) show. So what was the point of this, other than to cruelly prank Sondheim fans? Well, this is the internet we’re talking about, and nobody ever really needs a reason to be mean to someone else. Broadway World ties this to the ongoing problems at Twitter, which—in its words—is “struggling to contain misinformation and hate speech following the network’s acquisition by Elon Musk,” which… yeah. That is true. Twitter is a wasteland and you shouldn’t trust anything you see on there.