Inside a bar in Toronto’s Little Italy, two singers belt out the ABBA anthem Super Trouper from jukebox musical Mamma Mia. Around them, 140 or so self-proclaimed theatre kids dance, jump and sing along, with some following the lyrics on a screen and others scream-singing every word by heart.
The crowd is Gen Z and millennial with a smattering of Gen X, happily out on a weeknight for BELT’s musical-theatre karaoke.
It’s not typical karaoke where singers pick from a vast book of songs. At BELT’s events, one musical is featured each night, with participants signing up to perform their favourite numbers from prologue to curtain call. About once a month, they take over a bar in Toronto.
This particular Wednesday in November, the musical is Mamma Mia. A month ago, it was Wicked. Before that, it was High School Musical, Six, Hamilton and Rent. Attendees often dress up – think witches’ hats and brooms for Wicked, 18th-century waistcoats for Hamilton and island-wear and bridal veils for Mamma Mia. Sometimes people act out scenes and perform dance moves from the shows.
Maya Santos from Mississauga has attended nearly every BELT karaoke event.
“It is such a great vibe being in that room. I am obsessed with it and that’s why I keep coming back,” she says.
The 25-year-old social media manager arrived alone to her first BELT event because none of her friends liked musical theatre. Now, she’s met a whole new group of friends.
Maya Santos (in the brown T-shirt and heart-shaped sunglasses) has a whole new group of friends now, thanks to BELT.
“It’s very hard, in your 20s, to make new friends,” Santos says. “But I think this is a very easy place to make friends because we all have one very, very specific thing in common, and that is our love for musical theatre.”
At the centre of the action are the three Toronto sisters who run BELT: Sydney Hall, Jaimee Q. Vicente-Hall and Sam Hall. Sydney greets guests and hosts while Jaimee and Sam prep the playlists and handle the audio-visual elements. The trio came up with the idea for BELT (Broadway for Everyone Live in Toronto) because they were looking for an outlet for their own inner theatre kids.
“We grew up in musical theatre, doing it in school or community programs,” says Sam, 28. “It was such a core part of all of us. Once school ended, we were like, ‘Where did that go? How do we tap into this part of ourselves?’”
Jaimee, 30, says she and her sisters started renting out private karaoke rooms for their birthdays and “there would be 30 people standing on chairs being Elphaba” from Wicked.
“We’re half Filipino – karaoke’s in our blood,” she adds. “We found it so fun to be in a space that was completely judgement free.”
On a whim, the sisters decided to post a couple of TikToks asking whether anyone would be interested in a karaoke night where they play every song from one musical, end to end. The posts went viral, the comment sections filled with people begging them to host the night and offering suggestions for musicals to feature.
BELT hosted their first sold-out event featuring bohemian Broadway smash Rent in June. (BELT gets the ticket sales while the venue gets bar sales.) The sisters document every event on social media and now they have more than 15,000 followers on Instagram and more than 700,000 likes on TikTok. Their events almost always sell out.
“For so long we wondered, ‘Are we the only ones who want to do this?’” says Sydney, 34, whose day job is working in schools as an intervention support worker for kids with autism. “But seeing all these people come, I feel like people were craving this type of environment. We tell people if you don’t want to sing alone and you sign up by yourself, there are many people who will come up and sing with you. You will not be alone.”
Megan Levine, 28, a writer and editor from Mississauga, has attended almost all the BELT karaoke events and says they have “filled a hole” in her life.
“I moved to Mississauga from Montreal right before the pandemic and I was going through some health issues at the time. I was really struggling to make friends and find community,” she says. BELT has changed that for her.
“I’ve made some really great friends. I’ve actually invited a bunch of them to my wedding,” she adds. (Appropriately, she wore a bride’s outfit to the Mamma Mia night.)
Levine says she appreciates that it’s a welcoming space where everyone is cheered on, regardless of their singing ability: “I think a lot of theatre kids have a similar experience of feeling like the odd one out. I was bullied when I was a kid. So I feel like we all have a past where we haven’t felt like we belonged somewhere, and so we want others to never feel that way either.”
'We want to make events by theatre kids for theatre kids,' says Sam Hall.
On the heels of their success with their karaoke nights, the Hall sisters have expanded the BELT experience. They host choir events where participants gather to learn and sing a musical-theatre song in four-part harmony in one night – recent songs included One Day More from Les Misérables and You Will Be Found from Dear Evan Hansen. And because their BELT karaoke events are 19+, they hosted a kid-friendly, all-ages version. They’ve also recently expanded their karaoke nights to the show tune capital of the world, New York.
Jaimee, who is a stage manager when she’s not doing BELT, says the New York opportunity came when a theatre producer she worked with last summer, Alan Kliffer, heard about the concept.
The sisters say they have big dreams for the BELT experience. They’ve done partnerships with local theatre companies including Crow’s Theatre and Mirvish and hope to do more. They want to do more kid-friendly events and maybe expand to more cities.
But Jaimee notes that they don’t want to get too big, too fast and end up doing events that compete with each other.
“We’re being very deliberate about it, like does this make sense for our community and for our people?” Sam says. “We want to make events by theatre kids for theatre kids.”
BELT will host karaoke events featuring the musical Rent at Track & Field in Toronto Dec. 9 and Dec. 17 (both 19+) and in New York Dec. 15 (21+). BELT will also host an all-ages choir night featuring Seasons of Love from Rent on Dec. 11. All events are ticketed.
