From big stage to small screen: How one marketer turns live theater into social media fodder

Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic, aspiring cabaret star, and a classroom of teenage girls reading The Crucible have one thing in common: their social media manager.

Austin Spero, also known by his drag persona Reese Havoc, is the marketer behind the social presence of Oh, Mary! and John Proctor is the Villain, Broadway plays that nabbed five and seven nominations, respectively, at this year’s Tony Awards. (Oh, Mary! took home two awards Sunday night, including best actor to creator and lead Cole Escola.) Before the theater industry gave these shows their flowers, Spero cultivated a social strategy that brought both shows into the public’s attention. Accounts for both shows collected thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, and the comments section of each post is littered with adoring messages. John Proctor has become the most-followed show from this Broadway season on TikTok, according to Spero.

In theater, it’s long been a challenge to sell seats, let alone achieve profitability, but at this year’s Tony Awards, host Cynthia Erivo noted that this past season was Broadway’s most financially lucrative year ever, a feat that has officially brought Broadway back to pre-pandemic enthusiasm—so long as it can keep casting Succession cast members, she joked.

Amid a season packed with glitzy stars and adapted IP, social marketing has emerged as a key avenue to get new shows’ names out there and appeal to a younger crowd, Spero told us. And if you ask him, no one quite gets the theater social world like he does.

“I remember saying, when I originally met with Kimberly [Belflower], the playwright, and Danya [Taymor], the director [of John Proctor], I was like, ‘You guys are gonna think I’m crazy, but I promise nobody understands teenage girls better than I do,’” Spero said.

All the world’s a stage

While social marketing can nudge audiences to make an eventual Broadway ticket purchase, Spero doesn’t see it as a sales tool. Instead, he said, he thinks of the channel as a brand-builder.

“Your audience means more than the people that are ticket buyers,” Spero said. “Audience means anybody who you feel like this story can reach.”

But how can a show aim to connect with a wide audience, especially when it seems like the product itself is only available to people in New York with a certain amount of disposable income? Spero said that staying attuned to what people are asking for online can help make theater a more accessible experience. That could look like promoting ticket lotteries and rewards programs, bringing activations to life, or hosting giveaways that can reach both diehard theater fans and newcomers alike.

“Your audience is always telling you what they want, and your job is right to meet them in the middle,” Spero said. “There’s always going to be people [online] who are advocates for your show, and I think advocating for them back is the important part to me.”

For people who ultimately can’t make it in person, it’s just as important to make a show come to life online, he said.

That can be easier said than done. Fans sometimes ask for more in-theater clips and behind-the-scenes content to be posted on social media, Spero said, and while he would love to deliver these, it’s not always possible. Not only are there multiple parties’ interests to balance between a show’s artists, producers, and other marketers, he said, existing union protections can make it difficult to capture additional content in a theater.

There are sometimes ways to make it happen, like in the case of Oh, Mary!, where Spero helped produce video vignettes showcasing key figures like Escola and director Sam Pinkleton. In those cases, he said, the excited engagement he sees makes it all worth it.

“Probably no one experiences the love of a show more than the people behind socials, just because you’re seeing all of it,” he said. “[It] brings some of the joy of the play in a very simple way to people.”

Play right

As Broadway shows look to attract younger audiences, Spero believes the trick to connecting with Gen Z theatergoers starts with respect.

“The key to appealing to younger audiences is to actually not treat them like, quote, younger audiences, but treat them with the same intelligence and respect and humor that you would any audience,” he said. “It’s just about getting specific in terms of the trends and nuances and intricacies that Gen Z really responds to.”

For John Proctor, Spero borrowed a page from Billie Eilish’s book, but with a little adjustment. Rather than adding the account’s entire following to an Instagram Close Friends list, he and his team selected and manually added highly engaged online fans to the exclusive group, where they could access special deals and new behind-the-scenes clips. The aim wasn’t necessarily to convince them to buy (potentially another) a ticket to the show, but rather to give back to fans that already loved the product, Spero said.

“It’s about continuing that goodwill and good word-of-mouth out into the world so that maybe, that reaches somebody else who will buy a ticket and come see it for the first time,” he said.

Another sometimes controversial tactic from productions is to cast big-name film and TV stars, a practice that some have derisively referred to as “stunt casting.” While the draw of a Hollywood star can do some of a show’s marketing for it, some theatergoers have expressed concern over the practice, fearing it takes opportunities away from lesser-known theater artists while driving up ticket prices.

John Proctor has its own Hollywood star in cast member Sadie Sink, who is perhaps best known for her role in Netflix’s Stranger Things (which is also getting the Broadway treatment with a prequel play this season). While Sink’s star power is certainly a helpful element shaping Spero’s social marketing strategy, he said he aims to make sure all of the play’s stories are being told online, not just the most glamorous ones.

“Your star is one story, and hopefully on social, you can [take] every single aspect of the production and deepen the audience’s relationships with the people that they may not expect, that they may not have heard of before they fell in love with them seeing this play,” Spero said. “I take pretty seriously my obligation to all of the artists involved, finding the best way to tell your story.”

Spero, for one, isn’t sold on some of the criticism of stunt casting.

“People are really hard on stunt casting until it’s their favorite celebrity,” he said. “As long as there is room on Broadway still for new voices and new playwrights and up-and-coming actors and new, exciting work, then there’s a place for John Proctor is the Villain, and there’s a place for Stranger Things.”

Update 06/12/25: This story has been updated to clarify a statistic.