FREEPORT — Four months after Jason and Matt Tardy opened the Freeport Theater of Awesome, the duo is performing to growing crowds and increasing online notoriety.

The website TripAdvisor has begun listing the little Depot Street theater as the busy town’s “No. 1 attraction,” besting even retail giant L.L. Bean’s Outdoor Discovery School.

“When we showed up at No. 9, we thought, ‘This is amazing,'” Jason Tardy said. “Then it grew.”

On Wednesday, the site featured 27 reviews of the theater. Twenty-five rated it “excellent.” The other two gave it a rating of “very good.” Reviews have been written by locals and non-Mainers.

The listing has been a needed boost for the brothers, who grew up in Buckfield and now live in Turner. They started the theater as a way of reducing their performances in Maine and across the country.

The pair perform a juggling act known as the Tardy Brothers and a music-comedy-tech act called AudioBody.

When their theater opened in March, they were greeted by a run of sold-out shows. Then, attendance slowed.

They offered ticket deals on bargain sites such as Groupon. They promoted their juggling and AudioBody shows on Facebook.

They hadn’t thought about TripAdvisor, Jason Tardy said. The site describes itself as the world’s largest travel site with more than 200 million monthly visitors covering 30 countries.

When their placement came up, they began asking people what brought them to the theater. A growing number said, “TripAdvisor.”

Soon, they were inviting attendees to post their comments on the site if they liked the show. Their rating climbed.

Such pleas are becoming more commonplace.

Christopher Schario, the longtime artistic director of The Public Theatre in Lewiston, said sites such as TripAdvisor have become a key part of being known.

“It’s the wave of the future and you have to be there,” Schario said. “It’s becoming ubiquitous.”

His theater is listed as Lewiston’s top attraction. He has a staff person who oversees social media as part of her job. Many larger organizations have people whose sole job is monitoring and boosting a business’s online image, Schario said.

Matt and Jason Tardy do their own social networking. For them, it means their audience is growing.

“We never thought we’d be No. 1,” Jason Tardy said. “We thought that L.L. Bean would always be No. 1 and When Pigs Fly (Breads) would be No. 2.

“We’re grateful,” he said. “Every weekend, the size of the crowd is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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