Ashlee Latimer fostered a young online community through the musical’s social media. Fans know her better as Mx. Thief.
The Twitter account for “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” has more than 50,000 followers. Ashlee Latimer knows them better than most.
She knows their names and handles, their inside jokes, their favorite Percy fan theories. She knows which follower is a massive Taylor Swift fan, and she knows that a delegation of Norwegians loves the musical. When she posted a tweet with a pair of cryptic emojis, a wink to a lyric on the then-unannounced cast album, she knew exactly which sleuthing follower would reply within minutes and crack the code.
But the show’s fans know next to nothing about Latimer.
They’re plenty familiar, though, with her alter ego: Mx. Thief, the gender-neutral alias posting memes and motivational notes on the @LTMusical account since the show’s run Off Broadway in 2017. Mx. Thief has become a carefully crafted and recognizable voice — in some posts mysterious and teasing; in others, urging followers to spread kindness. Sometimes, Mx. Thief is straight sass, a camp counselor crossed with an older sibling, calling out trolls, or professional theater critics.
The result is a Twitter account that, beyond its purpose as a marketing tool, doubles as a digital gathering place for fans of Percy Jackson, the demigod protagonist of the musical and Rick Riordan’s best-selling children’s series. Few other Broadway shows have matched this balance — or number of followers — on their social media accounts.
And now that the Broadway run is over — “The Lightning Thief” had its final performance on Sunday — Latimer, 28, is coming out from behind the curtain for the first time.
Mx. Thief became a fan favorite, not unlike the characters onstage at the Longacre Theater, receiving gifts and art works from followers — including an illustration of an anonymous figure with a thick, old-school computer monitor for a head and a collage sent from Australia of the artist’s favorite Mx. Thief tweets, printed and mounted on blue cardstock.
“Getting messages and tweets and comments about the ways that the show has changed their life, and also how the social has impacted them, has been so special,” Latimer said.
But for three years her identity remained anonymous. This isn’t unusual; most brand accounts have no reason to disclose the social media manager pulling the strings. But when followers began to ask questions — Who exactly was running the account? Was it a member of the cast? A character from the Percy Jackson books? — it was decided that Latimer should maintain the mystique.
While the musical was met with harsh reviews and low weekly grosses, its social media presence helped to bring in first-time theatergoers, said Carl White, one of its producers.
“Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” have far larger Twitter followings, but “Lightning Thief” was on par with the long-running “Phantom of the Opera” and “Waitress,” which also closed on Sunday.
And producers encouraged Latimer to push certain envelopes: After opening-night reviews were less than stellar — Jesse Green in The New York Times called the show “a failed attempt to board the teenage fantasy-angst train” — the account responded.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with clapping back at one’s critics,” said White, who praised the account for prompting “tremendous” engagement. “We know that a consumer is more likely to listen to the recommendation from a friend than they are necessarily a critic.”
For many fans, that’s what Latimer became. Followers last year gave her the name Mr. Thief, before she requested a correction that caught on: Mx. Thief would be a better choice, to avoid making an assumption about her identity. (Latimer is gender-fluid and uses she/her pronouns.)
In 2017, Latimer was working at the Pekoe Group, a theater marketing agency, and was assigned to take on “The Lightning Thief” and its social media. After the Off Broadway run wrapped up, the musical’s producers hired her directly to stay on through last year’s national tour and the transfer to Broadway.
Since August 2019, she has also been an associate at TBD Theatricals, where she juggles a full-time creative development gig with her “Lightning Thief” responsibilities.
There’s another pretty big Mx. Thief detail that followers don’t know about: She has a Tony Award. Latimer was a producer on “Once on This Island,” which won the best musical revival prize in 2018. (A video of her weeping on live television during the acceptance became a bit of a meme.)
Latimer is not much older than the primarily Generation Z fan base for “The Lightning Thief,” but there are enough years between her and her audience to have had what she calls “‘Freaky Friday’ crypt keeper” moments — using acronyms and slang from her teenage years that no longer translate.
She grew up in the era of Myspace and still has traumatic memories of the fear that came with accidentally overusing pay-per-minute internet on her cellphone. “I feel like the kids are going to hear this and be like, wow, she is ancient,” she said.
Her closest tie to online fandom was through now-defunct Harry Potter message boards, where she could post dissertations on “Half-Blood Prince” fan theories. Fast-forward a decade, and she’s the one helping “Lightning Thief” followers meet kindred spirits in other time zones.
Fans shouldn’t mourn Mx. Thief just yet. The show will have another national tour, though Latimer won’t be behind the account anymore. “There will be a new Mx. Thief,” she promised, “whoever they end up being.”
In the meantime, it was Latimer as Mx. Thief who said goodbye after the production’s last Broadway performance, quoting a lyric from the closing number: “we love you, demigods. thank you for an incredible quest.”
