1,500 inmates dancing to Michael Jackson hit on YouTube inspire Filipino Canadian musical

To most, the video wouldn't go much further than it already had. A post showing Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller may have led to a bit of a viral moment on YouTube in 2007, but afterwards it was expected to do what all other viral moments do: fade away.

But that's not what Romeo Candido saw.

"I thought it was a no-brainer — I thought other people were going to write a musical about this," Candido, a Filipino Canadian writer and choreographer, told CBC News in a recent interview. "I just thought it was ripe for storytelling."

That instinct bore out, because just over 15 years later, it led to the musical Prison Dancer