Abstract
This article examines Vivek Shraya’s debut theatre show How to Fail as a Popstar, which played at Canadian Stage in Toronto in February 2020. The show revolves around the multidisciplinary artist’s music career and her struggle and subsequent failure to achieve pop superstardom. With reference to contemporary artists and scholars writing about failure and theatre, including Sara Jane Bailes, Sarah Garton Stanley, Jordan Tannahill, and Jack Halberstam, this article observes how Popstar takes on and subverts the music biography genre and intervenes in contemporary discussions about failure in the theatre. Ultimately, it argues that Popstar uniquely addresses failure in a post-truth Trumpian era by subverting conventional narratives in which failure is only a stumbling block on the road to success, by focusing on failure’s devastating emotional reality.
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