Despite their differences, young millennials and Gen-Z share several cultural moments that will bond them forever. These include the near impossible job market, the inability to buy a house and the iconic, if not unhinged, media from the late aughts and early 2010s. One of the cultural touchstones in the family of insane young adult TV is Glee.
The show — a 2009 to 2015 musical about navigating the perils of teenage life in the high school glee club, under its well-meaning yet often misguided teacher, Will Schuester, portrayed by Matthew Morrison — was both a magnet for the Emmys and the charts, surpassing both the Beatles and Elvis Presley in the show’s sheer number of songs that ended up on the Billboard Hot 100.
But now, after taking a break from performing to focus on his family, Morrison embarks on the Pacific Northwest leg of his Show Up tour, including a performance at Salem’s Elsinore Theatre Sept. 15. It is a one-man show that has gained attention on social media, which, in many cases, mocks the show’s seemingly bizarre content.
Notable viral moments of his show include Morrison rendition of Mr. Schuester’s infamous Glee version of Sisqo’s “The Thong Song,” as well as a spoken word retelling of when he walked in on his girlfriend cheating on him in New York — during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “You better turn on the TV,” Morrison tells her, before he walks out of her apartment.
Morrison is aware of the Show Up’s online presence and is used to the scrutiny — Mr. Schuester has been getting dragged for his “cringe” demeanor since Gen Z learned how to use the internet — but he takes it in stride. “All these little clips take on a life of their own. But what you see in your phone, I feel like it’s the invitation to experience what happens when we’re all in the room together.”
Show Up was created because “I’ve done a lot of concerts in my life, and I’ve always come off stage feeling like there was this emptiness inside of me,” he says. “I gave a good show. People clapped and had a good time, but it felt very transactional to me.”
So, he says, he wanted to do something that he could call his own. “My intention going into this was to be really raw and vulnerable and honest with my own life and shit and joy and triumphs,” he says, and invites his audience to do the same.
The show is a collection of stories and songs from his career, but he says it’s not a career retrospective. Instead, he says, the show is different every night as he develops it and feeds off of audience energy. “That’s why ‘The Thong Song’ is in the show,” he says. “People kept yelling it out, and it wasn’t in my show for the longest time.” But eventually, he relented. However, he admits that among what he had to do in Glee, “‘The Thong Song’ was a crime against humanity.”
A lot of Mr. Schuester moments from Glee continue to gain ironic traction online 11 years after the show went off the air, including his awkward storylines (such as planting drugs in a football player’s locker to blackmail him into joining the glee club) and provocative performances with his in-show “students” of songs such as a twerk-heavy cover of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” and Britney Spears’ “Toxic” with his in-show “students.”
Morrison says that getting his scripts every day, “there were some really great things I had to do,” he says, but for the most part, he constantly felt like “I was going into like electroshock therapy.” But, “I am an actor and I had a job to do, and I did it with the best of my ability.”
Morrison says that for a long time, he didn’t like talking about Glee. Part of it was because he wasn’t happy that his storied career was being pigeonholed into one moment.
But the other reason is that, “it wasn’t the best experience. We were all worked really really hard, and did crazy hours, and it was just grueling.” After filming episodes individually became unsustainable, the production filmed multiple episodes at a time.
He says that working on the show became a lot of, “What scene are we doing? Where am I? What’s happening?” If the cast wasn’t filming, “we were in the recording studio, or we were in dance rehearsals, or we were doing press,” he says, amounting to 17 hour work days.
Meanwhile, he says that the production had a team on the other side of the world that would process the music while everyone else was sleeping in order to keep production on a 24-hour schedule.
At age 47 Morrison has had a storied career outside of the musical TV show. He debuted in the original Broadway cast of Hairspray as Link Larkin in 2002, and says that to this day the show’s closing number “You Can’t Stop the Beat” is the most physically demanding number he’s had to perform. “We used to call it, ‘You Can’t Stop to Breathe,” he says.
Since then, he’s gone on to star in several other Broadway productions such as Finding Neverland and the original cast of The Light in the Piazza. In 2026, he was stunt-cast in Just in Time replacing former Glee co-star and current Broadway darling Johnathan Groff for three weeks.
But after all this time, he’s developed a soft spot for Glee, despite his less than positive memories. When he was 18 years old, he applied to two schools: Chico State and NYU. He got into NYU, which was the launching pad for the rest of his career.
If he didn’t though, he said he would have gone to the smaller college and become a performing arts teacher — similar to his onscreen counterpart. Instead, Glee found him and the rest is history.
“All these years later, I’ve seen the impact firsthand from people who have grown up watching the show. How it’s changed their lives, literally saved lives,” he says.
Glee was lauded as groundbreaking in its time for depicting progressive social issues such as sexuality, teen pregnancy, race and other matters while bridging generational gaps in music. “It’s really had such a cultural impact,” he says. “So I’m grateful to have been part of something with so much legacy behind it.”
Matthew Morrison’s Show Up is 7:30 pm Tuesday, Sept. 15 at Elsinore Theater, 170 High Street Southeast, Salem. Tickets start at $45 and are available at ElsinoreTheatre.com. The show is all ages.