Arielle Jacobs with her brother Adam, in Times Square. She recently moved to New York City, where her brother also lives, from Los Angeles.
Broadway star Arielle Jacobs creates Girls Camaraderie Project to help girls empower each other.
By Michele Alperin
Princeton High graduate Arielle Jacobs has a dream career. A successful singer and actress, she has starred on Broadway and performed along side famous performers such as Teena Marie, Chaka Khan and Stephen Schwartz.
But it was tough days in middle school, when she had to deal with harsh words and actions from her peers, that led Jacobs to create the Girls Camaraderie Project (GCP), an organization that seeks to bring young girls together and help them to empower each other.
During the free GCP workshops, young women ages 10 to 13 spend several hours dancing, singing, learning to trust each other and exploring feelings about their bodies, both negative and positive.
Jacobs, who recently moved to New York City from the Los Angeles area, is planning to hold GCP events in New York and New Jersey. Past GCP events were held in Southern California in Hollywood and Burbank.
Jacobs said the goal of the workshops, which are led by female performers, singers and dancers, is to open up to each other, be vulnerable and find the strength to bond with each other and support each other.
Jacobs, a California native who moved to Princeton in the ninth grade, attributes her first real appreciation of music to Charles Sundquist, the choir leader at Princeton High School, where she graduated in 2001.
Although singing was always important to Jacobs, she was also passionate about the environment, an interest she traces to her first professional show, at age 10, when she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The show was a Native American musical, and the cast members would do a smudging circle before every rehearsal and show, where they burned sage and addressed the spirits of nature.
“I got this deep appreciation for nature starting with that and over the years learning about what was happening to the planet,” she said.
When it came time for college, she applied to schools for environmental science and others for music, ending up at New York University, where she graduated with a degree in music, with a concentration in musical theater.
But her environmental consciousness remained strong. When she was on her first national tour of High School Musical, she got frustrated because none of the theaters had recycling, and none of the adults seemed to care about the environment. Jacobs, though, felt an obligation to her young audience, which ranged from 2,000 to 5,000 a day.
“I had to do something to influence the children who were looking up to me,” she said.
So she started the website called helphealtheearth.com, which was active for several years. The site was dedicated to informing children and young adults about the planet’s current environmental problems, while inspiring them to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
At the same time her music career was developing. Jacobs managed to get an agent when she was still in college when her brother Adam, also a Broadway actor, happened to drop a headshot of Arielle in the middle of a pile of his own that he left for his agent. Several months later the agent invited her for what was a successful audition.
Also before graduating college, she got her Actor’s Equity Association union card, performing the lead role in a musical in West Virginia at the Contemporary American Theater Festival.
You might say Jacobs came by her musical talent honestly, even though her father, Alan, who works as the director of new business development for publishing company Reed Elsevier, is tone deaf. His mother, though, was a cabaret singer in the 1940s, and Jacobs’ own mother, Abby, can sing and play the piano.
Although her mother never got the chance to develop these talents, she eventually went to nursing school and is now a nurse case manager, working with insurance companies to ensure care for lead-poisoned children in New Jersey.
Jacobs has starred on Broadway, replacing American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, as Nina Rosario in the four-time Tony & Grammy award-winning musical In The Heights.
She performed on the national tours of In the Heights and High School Musical. Her other credits include Broadway workshops MASK, GoGo Beach, It Shoulda Been You, and 21. She also starred as Julia in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Two Gentlemen of Verona: a Rock Opera.
Jacobs’ television and film credits include roles in Commander in Chief, Dance War, Water Lilies, and Disney’s 365. She has also performed the national anthem for the LA Kings, the Boston Celtics and the Texas Rangers.
Outside of her career, she has volunteered at the Downtown Women’s Center which serves the homeless and low-income women in downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row community. She also produced a benefit concert for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS with the touring cast of In the Heights.
She also held a concert titled Divas Unite to raise money for the Girls Camaraderie Project.
Jacobs is currently taking the summer off to travel and recover from a recent tonsillectomy. The surgery was necessary due to chronic throat infections that affected her singing, she said.
The night before the surgery, Jacobs sang at Lincoln Center in a concert. The performance was for an event called “Songwriting in Schools,” in which Broadway singers perform songs that were written by middle school and high school kids.
“It was a beautiful evening, and so moving to see the kids light up as we performed their lyrics and music for an audience,” Jacobs said.
Working with kids is soemthing that seems near and dear to Jacobs, in part, due to incidents in her past. She said that although she is happy now, growing up was not so easy for her.
She had two traumatizing experiences involving other girls that bubbled to the surface last year while she was taking a self-development course that challenged participants to do a project they were passionate about and would benefit the community.
She wondered why she had a lot of guy friends and not a lot of girl friends and came to attribute it to negative experiences with girls when she was younger.
Jacobs said that during 7th grade all of her schoolmates were ignoring her and she had no idea why.
She eventually found out that it involved a perceived competition over a boy that led a girl that Jacobs thought was a good friend to start a club called Triple A, which stood for All Against Arielle.
“I felt like I was surrounded by people lying to me and making fun of me,” said Jacobs. “That is what broke me in terms of trusting groups of people when I was younger, and even to this day I feel much more confident when I’m with a friend one on one than with groups of people.”
She started to think about the roots of her harassment and traced it to the competition between girls in middle school, as their bodies are changing drastically and they are getting bombarded with ideal images of women in the media.
A desire to eliminate those competitive feelings is what led Jacobs to create the GCP.
“Those feelings make us turn inward and get self critical and lose the connection and trust we had with each other before puberty,” Jacobs said.
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