Dance Dance Revolution

James Whiteside has built a career playing romantic leads onstage, from Romeo to Prince Siegfried. Offstage, he creates experimental music, choreography, and more through bombastic online alter egos, such as a singer named JbDubs, drag artist Uhu Betch, and a turkey-baster-wielding journalist called Shannon Boban-non (who “fires news like a cannon”). As theaters went dark during the pandemic, the New York-based Whiteside began putting out a flood of original content on Instagram and YouTube: going behind the scenes of his workouts and rehearsals, offering live dance classes, creating comedic skits, and debuting inventive music