Humans of Broadway: Singing the Unsung Heroes of Broadway
Eli Azizollahoff
In a café filled with Jews on their lunch break, a small brunette in a beany and glasses doesn’t stand out much. She seems kind and intelligent, but very much like anyone else working in New York City. Most people passed us by seeing two young women meeting for lunch and nothing more.
Aviva Sokolow-Shahar unassuming front does not pay homage to the powerhouse within. A Broadway influencer with an account called “Humans of Broadway,” with more than 65,200 followers and an activist for improvement in the theater community and an orthodox Jew.
“How on earth could that not exist?” she professed, clearly still as amazed now as she was four years ago, to find out that “Humans or Broadway” was not an account prior to her entering the scene, “Well, I guess I could make it,” she said she had thought, “but I wasn’t exactly the most outgoing person and I was like ‘well I don’t want to do it.’”
In 2015, as graphic design major in college, Aviva started one of the premier social media accounts highlighting the heroes of Broadway, whether they were on stage or not.
While sitting over wraps and salad, Aviva described a story she had clearly told dozens of times; the words rolling off her tongue almost as if in an unintentionally memorized melody.
She described how she had chosen to study graphic design, but soon became unenchanted with the actual practice of the field. While meditating on what drew her to area to begin with, Aviva realized that designing projections for her high school productions was what made it call out to her – but maybe when she thought she loved designing, what she really loved was theater?
Inspired by this realization, she took a set design course. When she looked for features about people who worked backstage, though, she came up short; no one seemed to care to tell the stories of the people behind the curtain.
Aviva said how back in 2015, it was peak “Humans of New York” era; a social media account centered around photographing and sharing the stories of all kinds of New Yorkers, regardless of background. To her, she thought the one place she would be able to find the stories of all the members of the theater community would be “Humans of Broadway,” but when she looked into it, she discovered it didn’t exist. The words of her story rolled off her tongue with an almost musical fluidity; telling the story countless times having left it as muscle memory on her tongue.
“I wasn’t exactly the most outgoing person and I was like ‘well I don’t want to do it and I wasn’t in the Broadway community at all, at all, like I was an artists, and I was like ‘I don’t know, I’ll like sit on it for a bit.”
Fate seemed to have other ideas, though, as Aviva explained how destined her starting the Instagram account wound up feeling. She was just walking down 46th street when she ran into Chris McCarrell (in Les Miserables at the time) and Emma Pfaeffle (in Finding Neverland at the time) in a row. And there she had her first two posts: born from her approaching McCarrell and saying she had an idea of and Instagram account, to which he let her take his picture and just told her about her day. To Aviva, meeting both of them, in a row, on the same day, on the same street “was a sign.”
She posted it on an Instagram account with all of about ten followers, but somebody reposted it and suddenly she had five-hundred follower. “That was viral for me,” Aviva explained her excitement over her baby-account’s organic boom in popularity.
And so, Humans of Broadway began. Originally it consisted of Aviva direct messaging people on social media or going to stage doors with audience members looking to get their Playbills signed. “The people who spoke to me right at the beginning, when I had no followers, they really are what made Humans of Broadway” Aviva explained, with sincere gratitude lacing her voice, “because they really had no reason to talk to me, I wasn’t, like, a big thing.”
Pretty soon all the right people saw it and people started reaching out to her to be featured on Humans of Broadway. From there it kicked off, with Aviva invited to every major Broadway influencer event, to countless openings, and even to the Tony’s in her first year producing content.
Playbill featured Humans of Broadway in a list of top Broadway influencers to follow, saying: “Followers of the Instagram meet their favorite Broadway performers through stunning portraits and intimate quotes. This year, Humans of Broadway has expanded coverage to give a look at the folks who make Broadway happen behind-the-scenes—like stage managers, costume designers, and TodayTix concierges.”
The account took off and for years its popularity, and Aviva’s presence in all things Broadway, continued to blossom.
“It grew and grew and grew and then…paused,” said Aviva.
After graduating and getting a “real person job” Aviva didn’t have as much time and emotional energy to dedicate to the account and she felt her content was suffering from it. She had assistants but she then the photos and content of the account wasn’t her own and that didn’t sit well with her because, while it was helpful, it was her brand.
“And so I made the executive decision that if I wasn’t putting out content I was satisfied with, I wasn’t going to put out content until I was confident that I could be in the write creative space and emotional space to really give it everything.”
Aviva continued to explain that, because her priority was never the fame of being an influencer, as much as there was an aspect of ‘fomo,’ it didn’t matter to her to not be invited to as many events. She also felt that she had started the account the get to sing the songs of the unsung heroes of Broadway but as it progressed, the people that were often pushed for her to interview were the stars of the stage that people already knew and needed to self-promote or advertise a show. Along with this, she felt that the media had gotten so saturated with influencers that she was no longer adding something substantial and wanted to take time to reset.
And so, Aviva stopped creating content.
“Hitting the breaks during the heights of your success as an influencer is practically unheard of,” Aviva explained. But being an influencer was never what Aviva wanted, so a year ago she took a break, with a relaunch coming soon.
That year off turned out to be incredibly productive for Aviva, as she started a new job at Transport Group – a not for profit theater company –, got married, and was able to recalibrate what she wanted from life, Humans of Broadway, and the theater world at large.
To Aviva’s amazement, many of her followers stuck around during the break. “The followers are still there. They’ve been patient and that’s really impressive to me.” At the beginning she loved this job and now she feels like she can love it again, so that means rebuilding the brand and getting back to “the humans that I love of about Broadway.”
Aviva was eager to talk about all that she learned in this year off. Besides the developments in her personal life, her perspective on the world of theater – and her place in it – had grown and metamorphosized during her break.
Many people assumed it must be easier for her to get a job in the theater industry because she has connections from Humans of Broadway, but she explained she had been applying for job since January and only received an offer at her graduation. “This industry has a big impact but it’s not that big” she explained, “So a lot of people are trying to get into it and a lot of people are trying to do the same job.”
Aviva continued to explain how much has changed in the world of theater-focused social media since her start four years ago. Whereas she was once one of only a handful of Broadway influencers, not the industry has become so full of them because every performer is expected to have a social media presence and following. Along with the abundance of theater professionals filling the web, there are now people of all ages with platforms of anything from in-depth interviews to a daily smattering of Hamilton memes that have the same number of followers and must be taken just as seriously as each other from a public relations point of view.
“It’s a weird mix of what influencer means now, and what it means to be in the industry as an influencer, and I think it’s cool, but I also think it’s a lot more pressured.”
Aviva continued to explain that now that she is on the inside of the community and is actively working in a theater on productions, she has gotten further insight on what it means to be truly part of the “Broadway world.”
“I think there are really wonderful parts of the industry, but you go in with big dreams and then you get a reality check a little bit.” She explained how the industry is all glamorous from the outside, but from the inside there can be a lot of drama and nuanced inter-personal relationships. “It’s all about meeting the right people and loving the work you’re doing because otherwise you get lost in the drama.”
Aviva gave insight by saying how the theater industry is more casual and friendly than other industries but it comes with the flipside of that, in that sometimes its too casual and friendly – especially since your friends are your coworkers – and so issues that wouldn’t arise in a more tradition workplace may come up there. “I think in some ways its beautiful and you’re lucky because someone who works at a bank doesn’t get the same kind of environment, but you have to be conscious of the lines and not getting lost in drama and not getting lost in your work. Your life still matters.” For Aviva, her Judaism was crucial to her acclimation into the professional theater world. It allowed her respect people’s boundaries and differences in a way that her religion had ingrained in her throughout her life and because she hoped they would respect hers in kind.
Balancing work with life can be a struggle for anyone, but when your passion is your work that line becomes even more blurred because you want to spend your free time just as involved in that passion as when you’re working, Aviva continued. “It’s so cliché, but literally getting married helped me snap out of it. Like ‘oh, I was living every day with this being my whole life.’ It took having other priorities to be like ‘oooh you have to balance it.’” Though she disclosed that many of her non-Jewish coworkers found her meeting and marrying her spouse entirely ludicrous – though it is incredibly common in the Jewish world.
As a religious Jew, Aviva also commented that for her, her religion and beliefs helped her maintain that balance. Regardless of how all-consuming being an influencer or working in the theater industry could become, she would always have this fundamental part of her as a top priority and that would stop her from getting totally absorbed in it all.
“I think everybody, no matter what industry you’re in, needs to step back sometimes” Aviva stated, assured in this belief after having personally experienced the trials of being overly involved and the benefits of getting a more external view of her world.
A major take-away she has gotten from this year away from being an influencer, and from her experience in the theater world as a whole, is a passionate conviction for the need for HR offices in the theater industry. There was a moment of silence in our conversation while we ate and her face clearly showed she was processing an intense thought.
“Something I really want to say,” she began, “what I have found in the theater world is that I love so much of it…but I found that very few theater companies have an HR department.” She explained that she suspects this is the case because these theater companies start off small, or there isn’t much money in having an HR department, or because they expect the tight-knit nature of the community to be supportive enough for the people within it.
“ ‘Cause [the theater industry] is growing, and it is becoming a really respectable career and industry and making a lot of money, but there needs to be a system where if people need help or just a support system, ya know, they have somebody at their employer. And I have not seen that…that’s the biggest change going forward, that I want to see.”
Other jobs in the Broadway industry have unions and legal groups to support specific kinds of workers – like actors or costumes managers or set designers – but for the people whose work you don’t see on stage, there aren’t any unions or organizations of that kind. “… it’s always been what Humans of Broadway has been about – everyone who works on Broadway.”
Besides believing that the presence of an HR department would have made her transition into working in the theater world easier, Aviva, stressed the importance of such a department for an industry where boundaries are so much more blurred than in other fields. “There isn’t some kind of union or HR, like somebody you can go to if somebody crosses the line, or something makes you uncomfortable, or you have a questions and you want to learn,” explained Aviva, “and that is my biggest passion at the moment.”
Aviva detailed an instance when she was working on a project that needed more time but she needed to leave because the Sabbath was starting soon – it was nonnegotiable –, to which one of her coworkers responded with: “Can’t I just tell God to wait for you?”
Recalling this, Aviva thought of all she wanted to say to that person: “No, you really can’t and if you think that is an appropriate thing to say, your delusional in some way, because, like you don’t understand how important it is. I can’t just turn it off if there’s something that needs to get done. I can’t.” She explained how if there was an HR in that theater company, she would have gone to them and complained, but there wasn’t and so she had to face this anti-Semitism – whether it was meant in jest or not – alone.
To Aviva this is so crucial that hopes to work towards catalyzing HR departments in the theater industry and is hoping to study field so she can implement it herself. Humans of Broadway will still be an incredible outlet for creative content for her and she was clearly thrilled for her relaunch, but it seems that by becoming a human of Broadway herself she is ready to take an active roll in improving this world she loves.
Aviva’s influencer has touched many Jewish youths who love theater in a distinct way. Chana Weiss, Vice President of the Stern College Dramatics Society said, “I think it’s an amazing that people of all religious types and levels can make it in the real theater world. This is my main passion and I would hope to have an equal chance at making it in the theater world as anyone else. The victory of a Jewish woman making it in the theater world feels like a personal victory to me.”
As a Jew, as a member of the theater work force, and as an influencer dedicated to theater, Aviva clearly feels a sense of responsibility and the inability to sit idly by. I was captivated by her conviction when she spoke about using your influence for a cause and not being complacent in your silence.
“[As an influencer] to some extent it’s about your audience and if your audience is young, if your audience is impressionable, then you have a responsibility to them to not mislead them, to not insult them. You have to be conscious about who you’re working for. Like, you are not an influencer without followers, so you owe something to your followers…You don’t have to, but I think you were given a great gift because you can make a difference and I think that that’s very exciting because a lot of people want to make a difference and don’t have the platform so I think that you should.”
Aviva clearly made the active decision that on her accounts, on her platform, she would not avoid the controversial or emotionally charged topics.
“Maybe that’s just my own sense of responsibility but it’s just like, you don’t have to do anything, but you have the ability to make a difference and I feel like if you don’t, that’s a choice. I don’t agree with it.”