From Broadway To Arenas: Reneé Rapp Is Here!

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Aweek after releasing her pop-heavy sophomore album, Bite Me, Reneé Rapp describes herself as doing just “fine.” She has a short break following her album, and is now gearing up to fully throw herself into preparations for her upcoming tour.

“I was just trying to get through the last week of my life for the last couple of months,” Rapp tells Pollstar. “So, now I’m starting to think about the tour, which I’m excited for, but to be honest, I really am so emotionally hungover from the last couple of weeks. I was bracing myself to try and get everything done that we had to do.”

One of the things Rapp managed to get done, as of this week, is to have the No. 1 album on Billboard’s Album Sales Chart and debut at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. Bite Me led by Rapp’s powerhouse vocals atop super catchy pop hooks, was released on Aug. 1 with its lead single “Leave Me Alone” amassing nearly 35 million Spotify streams. Her audience, primarily made up of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha, are clearly loving the album well and eagerly await her return to touring.

With all the intensity of releasing an album, Rapp finally has a minute to collect herself before her “Bite Me Tour,” the biggest of her career, kicks off Sept. 23 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver. The trek continues with major arena plays at Madison Square Garden, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, Boston’s TD Garden and Inglewood’s Kia Forum. She wraps her North American dates at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center on Oct. 29 and returns in March with a European leg that kicks off in Belgium, with stops including Berlin, Paris and London (two nights at OVO Arena Wembley) before wrapping at 3Arena in Dublin on March 22. Live Nation is promoting the majority of her dates.

“With the venue sizes change from the last tour, it’s a different dynamic,” Rapp says. “You have to work harder to make the shows feel more intimate. I’m excited for the challenge in that way, but I also believe thoroughly in my fanbase that they will be just as insane. And it will be fun. But, it’s a new capacity for me, so it’ll bring new challenges.”

Artist development in the live space these days does seem to happen much faster (see Alex Warren, Chappell Roan, Benson Boone, Doechii, Sabrina Carpenter, and on and on). Just three years ago, Rapp set out on her first tour, “Everything to Everyone: The First Shows” with stops in Brooklyn (Music Hall of Williamsburg, 650 capacity), New York City (The Bowery Electric, 225-cap, and Le Poisson Rouge, 725-cap), Boston (Sonia, 350-cap) and Atlanta (Center Stage, 1,050-cap).

The following year, she set out on a bigger trek in support of her 2023 debut studio album, Snow Angel. The “Snow Hard Feelings Tour” featured 36 dates in theaters across North America and Europe, kicking off on Sept. 15, 2023, at Boyau Music Center in Houston (3,464-cap) and wrapping at 3Olympia in Dublin, Ireland, on March 4, 2024 (1,240-cap). Between, she performed four shows in New York City (two dates at the 3,000-cap Terminal 5, a show at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, which sold 3,316 tickets and grossed $174,531, and a night at The Great Hall At Avant Gardner in Brooklyn (2,776-cap).

With 15 headline shows reported to Pollstar’s Boxoffice since 2022, she’s sold a total of 42,746 tickets, grossing $1.7 million. Highlights from her “Snow Hard Feelings Tour” included a sold-out date at The Anthem in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 27, 2023, with 6,000 tickets sold and a $258,550 gross. This time around, she’ll perform at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on Oct. 6, with a 19,319 capacity.

While her touring career seems relatively young, she actually had years of study and preparation. Her mother intentionally named her Reneé for its alliteration, providing her with a ready-made stage name. She debuted on Broadway in 2019 for the “Mean Girls Musical,” where she took on the role of Regina George at just 19 years old. (She reprised the role for the “Mean Girls” musical film released in 2024, marking her big-screen debut). In 2020, she joined Mindy Kaling’s comedy series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” where she played the character of Leighton Murray, a closeted lesbian. (Rapp herself came out in 2024).

Now 25, she’s something of a stage veteran with her experiences on Broadway, film and television seamlessly translating to her live music performances, giving her a fortitude and “the show must go on” ethos not often seen.

“Being on Broadway taught me how to perform when you’re sick,” Rapp says. “When you’re on Broadway, you don’t have the opportunity to be like, ‘Oh, I’m super sick. I’m not coming.’ That taught me how to push through just about anything, which is a really good feeling. It’s also gratifying, at the end of the day. I got really good at performing under harder circumstances. On my tour that we did for my first album, I was emotionally under stress and performing on stage, going through a breakup at the same time. Which is incredibly difficult, but happens to so many artists by the nature of touring. Touring reveals what’s more unsteady in your life.”

For those in the crowd, though, they’d never know if Rapp were dealing with something difficult. “I don’t want them to know that,” she continues. “I want them to be enjoying a show that feels raw and right in that moment.”

Rapp’s manager, Immersive Management’s Adam Mersel, began working with her in 2020, ahead of her music career. He’d seen clips of her performing on Broadway and was immediately hooked.

“I thought with her stage presence, she was born to do it,” he says. “She won the Jimmy Award in high school, the National Theater Award. She was destined for sure. We’re just lucky to be in her universe.”

Mersel emphasizes Rapp’s ability to connect with her audience, making even the most massive rooms feel as intimate as a theater. On her last tour, she invited Bryson Tiller on stage during her final stop at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles – a full circle moment for Rapp, who first went viral for a cover of Bryson Tiller’s “Exchange.” “There was just something in the air that night,” Mersel says. “Looking at her, watching her say to herself, ‘I made it.’ That was really special. It just felt like a homecoming.”

Born in Huntersville, North Carolina, Rapp will have another true homecoming when she wraps her “Bite Me Tour” at the nearby Spectrum Center in Charlotte. However, that final date of the North American tour, with the fanfare of families, friends and community in attendance, evokes worry for Rapp.

“It makes me a little bit anxious,” she admits. “I love going home, in a way. But I also don’t. I don’t know, I think afterwards, it’ll feel good. But the thought of it makes me a little bit uneasy.”

While she’s nervous about the performance itself, she says she is greatly looking forward to spending time off the road and with her family, hoping for a nice reset with them all.

Her opening Red Rocks show marks her and Mersel’s first time at the legendary venue that, for many touring artists, is a milestone. Rapp’s agent, WME’s Ben Totis, went to the venue as soon as they figured out what her touring time frame would be in support of the album, as it was a bucket list venue for the team, and it’s one of the hardest avails to book.

“As soon as we had an idea of what our touring time period was like, we went to Red Rocks to figure out what date we could get,” Totis says. “We honed in on which one would be the best as it relates to the rest of the tour, and fitting it all together, and that’s where we landed.”

Rapp is candid about past mental health struggles and plans to approach this tour differently from past treks when she spent much of her days either in hotel rooms or on her tour bus.

“It’s really easy to feel isolated and like a prop on tour,” she says. “That’s something I dread a little bit, but I’m going to try and put things in a place where I don’t feel like that. Routine is so important. Trying to set aside time for yourself is incredibly important. On my first tour, I was giving away way too much of myself. I would dedicate my entire day to the show that night. I was dedicating my mental anxiety to the show as opposed to dedicating my physical and mental well-being to be OK in general and then doing the show that night.”

She hopes to hike in Colorado ahead of the show, she says, balancing out the grueling nature of touring with time for herself and to see local sites. It’s a practice she hopes to maintain throughout the trek in an effort to have a healthier touring experience.

WME’s Totis says the touring game has changed as far as routing and how to best get fans through the door, especially with a glut of tours.

“It’s so crowded these days,” Totis says. “There’s so many artists touring. If you look at a show schedule in L.A., for example, on a weekly basis, there’s not only a show every night, but there’s two or three shows that you might want to go see. When you have to move things around, make sure you’re in the right markets on the right dates for routing purposes, and it all makes sense – it’s challenging. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is for the timing to complement the music. You investigate as much of that information as you can to have an idea of what their touring plans are,” Totis continues. “Agent to agent, manager to manager, promoters, we all try to communicate with one another to some degree to understand this. But, it used to be a lot easier to manage traffic control because there weren’t as many artists touring all the time.”

Teaming up with Live Nation’s Lesley Olenik helped with the routing, making things move relatively quickly (although Mersel admits that it still took longer than what would be considered “fast” just a few years ago). Olenik is an avid fan of Rapp’s since her early beginnings and has remained a steadfast champion. She promoted the “Snow Hard Feelings Tour,” and was a natural fit to come back around for “Bite Me.”

“It’s been exciting to see how much she’s grown since the last tour,” Olenik says. “I’m especially looking forward to her Red Rocks debut, her hometown show in Charlotte and her sold-out night at Madison Square Garden. Internationally, she’s already sold out OVO Arena Wembley, and we just added a second date due to demand.”

Despite issues of overlap, Rapp’s team emphasizes that ultimately, the most important part of planning out tour routing is how it best makes sense with her album rollout. Her upcoming tour starts up a month and a half after her album release, giving fans enough time to learn the songs before Rapp takes the stage.

There are also songs from the new album Rapp hasn’t performed live yet, and she’s looking forward to seeing how they’re received.

“I love ‘Good Girl’ on this record,” Rapp admits. “It’s such a girly-pop song. I hope that’s something that translates live really well, because that’s surprisingly one of my favorite songs, which is so rogue because that’s not my kind of thing.”

On this trek, Rapp’s bringing along Ravyn Lenae and Syd for select dates, both artists feeling like a natural fit to join along. Rapp became a fan of Ravyn’s after seeing her open SZA’s “CNTRL Tour.” For Sid, Rapp discovered her on the internet and has followed her work ever since. She wanted to find strong female openers for the “Bite Me Tour,” continuing a recent trend of women supporting women on the road, which includes Chappell Roan opening for Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams joining Taylor Swift on “Eras.”

The tour features a singular festival date, where Rapp will headline the All Things Go festival debut in Toronto. She headlined the New York City and Washington, D.C., editions last year, and she and her team formed a tight bond with the All Things Go organizers. When they were routing “Bite Me,” they knew they wanted to have a show in Toronto and headlining the inaugural edition offered that opportunity, knowing that the audience at All Things Go will be slightly different than her other dates.

“They’re a different subset of your fanbase,” she explains. “They’re also pulling up to see other people. They know your music and like your music, but they aren’t diehard fans who are pulling up to every show. It’s a different energy. There’s nothing different in the preparation, but I go in knowing I’m going to have to engage with the crowd a bit more. It’s a different energy for a show. Sometimes it’s crazier, sometimes it’s not. It’s a challenge.”

One thing Rapp’s learned over her years of performing on stages, be it Broadway, movie theaters, amphitheaters or arenas, is the importance of reading and connecting with her audiences.

“I don’t know if crowds recognize how important their attendance and their energy is to an artist,” Rapp says. “A lot of times people are like, ‘Oh, this artist is on tonight.’ And it’s like, yeah, well, usually if I’m on, that means the crowd is on and it really makes a difference.”

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