For many families, the process of applying to college musical theater programs is equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Navigating prescreens, choosing which schools to apply to, finding audition songs and monologues, and sorting out potentially dozens of different application requirements can feel entirely overwhelming. We get it! We’ve been on both sides of this process and we’ve got you covered. Today we are talking all about the logistics of how to prepare for college musical theater auditions.
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For many families, the process of applying to college musical theater programs is equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Navigating prescreens, choosing which schools to apply to, finding audition songs and monologues, and sorting out potentially dozens of different application requirements can feel entirely overwhelming. We get it! We’ve been on both sides of this process and we’ve got you covered. Today we are talking all about the logistics of how to prepare for college musical theater auditions.
Get our free Getting Started Guide and watch the recent Q&A webinar,
Join our Facebook group community for parents and students and join us for bi-weekly office hours calls.
Unsure if a BFA is right for you? Listen to episode 3 of the BVC Podcast: "Is a College Musical Theatre BFA Worth It?"
Here's 4 ways you can work with us here at Broadway Vocal Coach:
Use the code PODCAST15 to save 15% on BVC Academy and BVC Masterclass at any time.
College MT Auditions? Watch our recent live Q&A masterclass! Get the replay and free college audition guide here.
Want to work with us? Take the Quiz & Book a Consult!
Connect with us on instagram, @bwayvocalcoach , and @bvcaspire for college prep content.
Find us at www.bwayvocalcoach.com
Join our free, Wednesday newsletter email lis...
For many families, the process of applying to college musical theater programs is equal parts thrilling and terrifying. Navigating prescreens, choosing which schools to apply to finding audition songs and monologues and sorting out potentially dozens of different application requirements can feel entirely overwhelming, and we get it. We've been on both sides of this process and we've got you. Today we're talking all about the logistics of how to prepare for college musical theater auditions. I'm Chelsea Wilson, a performer turned voice teacher to Broadway stars and vocal coach on Broadway productions like The Phantom of the Opera School of Rock and more.
Cynthia:And I'm Cynthia Corman Westall, a Broadway music director, conductor, voice coach, and tenured faculty member at one of the top musical theater programs in the.
Chelsea:Here on the Broadway Vocal Coach Podcast, you can expect real talk about the business, practical advice, and constant encouragement. We believe there's space for every artist in this industry. All you need is the right support. So consider us your two woman hype team. Welcome to the Broadway Vocal Coach Podcast, where we help musical theater performers get unstuck and take the next step in their career. Today we are joined by our friend and college audition expert, Katie Johannigman, man. Hi Katie. Hello. Hi gals. So wonderful to have you here with us. Katie Johannigman is a multi-talented director, choreographer, coach, and performer. Katie has spent the last five years on faculty in the musical theater department at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, also known as ccm, where she previously graduated with a BFA in musical theater. Last year she joined us at B VBC as our primary coach for B vbc Aspire, our college prep program for high school students, and this year, 2023, she has recently started a new job as the associate artistic director at the Marriott Theater in Chicago. Katie, they are so lucky to have you there. I'm so thrilled for this new journey for you.
Katie:Thank you, Chelsea. Thank you.
Chelsea:Oh, we're, we're so happy to have you with us today. Before we dive into today's conversation, I wanna invite you to check out some of our free resources for families starting the audition process. you can get our free getting started guide and watch our recent q and a webinar. Get all of that@bwayvocalcoach.com slash college. And if you wanna get personal support from Cynthia and me, join our Facebook group. For parents and students, we host biweekly. Facebook Live Office hours. We answer your questions and foster great discussion for musical theater families with middle and high school aged students. So you can join that group at facebook.com/groups/broadway Vocal coach or if you want one step easier than that, it's all linked in our show notes. You can get all of those links here wherever you're listening to this podcast. Are you guys ready to get into this conversation? I am. Oh, very ready. Let's do this. Yay. I'm gonna ask some really commonly asked questions from students and families about the college audition process, and I'm so thrilled to have the two of you here to have this discussion with, because you really see this from, from every angle. Like I mentioned, Katie, you've been on faculty at CCM for the last five years. Cynthia, you've been at the University of Michigan for the past 19. Is this your 19th? Mm-hmm. season. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Between the two of you, I think you've seen. Tens of thousands of pre-screens sat in thousands and thousands of live auditions. Katie and myself went through the college audition process ourselves many moons ago. And so we really have, we really can see this experience from every angle. So I'm so thrilled to have you guys here with us today. I guess one of the first questions we should go over is when should students and families start preparing their materials, choosing their schools? When do you really need to start the college audition process and all that, that.
Katie:That's a great question, Chelsea. You know, I think this, this college audition process is really so different than a normal applying to a liberal arts school or any big university cuz there's just so many components that go along with it. We have singing, dancing, acting, the resume, the headshots. There's just so many things that go into it, and it can be really stressful and overwhelming for families. I remember feeling really stressed out about it. My parents and I were lucky that I had teachers that could help me, but we weren't really even prepared for how intense that process is. And I will say the more organized you can be about all these components in your junior year, it makes senior year when you're busy with school and your senior shows and all sorts of things, when you're headed into all these auditions to really have your ducks in a row early. So I would recommend, I know this sounds crazy, but I'm starting to do some research on schools. If you know musical theater is what you wanna. I would start researching in your sophomore year and maybe even in your freshman year of high school, just to get some school on your radar. Start following schools on Instagram and seeing where you know, people that you admire in the business went to school, where did they study? And just starting to get a feel for the lay of the land and what's out there. And then by your junior year, I think doing some more intense research. Making sure that you are, or if you're able to, to start taking a couple of dance classes or at least getting on YouTube and learning what a plie is and, you know, starting to read plays in your, in your spare time if you're not already doing that. So I think that, that, that. Pre-preparation can really start in the junior year. And then what we've really found at BBC in Aspire is that if you are picking your material over the summer for your college auditions, that gives you lots of time to try out a lot of different stuff. You don't have to nail down what you're gonna be singing exactly in the summer, but just get your you know, kind of zeroing in on what you wanna prepare, makes for a much less stressful fall. Getting in your pre-screens and then a very easy breezy calm. An organized winter when it comes time to auditioning. So I think the bulk of the really nitty gritty preparation, if that that's done in the summer after your junior year of high school, you will feel really, really confident in going into your senior year when things start getting really crazy.
Chelsea:That's great to know. And Cynthia, talk to us a little bit about the prescreen timeline. You used to be that auditions for these programs would happen January, February of the student's senior year. But now there's all of this work that goes in ahead of time because you have to submit a pre-screen. So what's the timing like that around that for families and.
Cynthia:Usually the pre-screens tend to be open for submissions somewhere around the very end of August, very beginning of September. And, and then it's usually open for a couple months. My recommendation though, and, and I think Katie's as well, is to try to get those pre-screens in pretty early. There's a couple reasons why we think getting these pre-screens in early can be really helpful. First of all, the faculty, we're gonna all have super fresh eyes, fresh ears. We're really excited to see all those pre-screens starting to come in. And also for the student's sake and the family's sake. It's so nice to have those done that way. If you wanna be in your school musical in the fall, if you need a part-time job, if you've got friends and family that you like to hang out with, those are all gonna be things that you're gonna be able to do instead of stressing over these college auditions. So we love to get these pre-screens done pretty.
Chelsea:it sounds to me like the sweet spot for students to be doing the bulk of this audition preparation is that summer before their senior year. So not preparing too, too early, picking material, too early in. Sometimes we see that and folks are just tired of their material. When it comes time to actually do the auditions. Picking it in that summer seems to be the sweet spot.
Cynthia:My analogy for teaching, for doing something too early is imagine if you're rehearsing for your school production of Into the Woods and you start rehearsing in September and you don't stop rehearsing until May and you have nine months of rehearsal of this one show There comes a time when it's time to just do it and we're suck all the joy out of it and we're gonna, it's gonna become robotic. So yeah, you wanna find that sweet spot of starting early enough for it not to feel frantic, but not too early that you've sort of. Turned it into a little bit of something stale and joyless and a little.
Chelsea:our next question. A lot of folks wonder how many schools should they be applying to? This certainly depends on the student, the kind of programs they're looking into. So Katie, can you talk us through that? What might someone consider. In their personal circumstances when it comes to how many schools should be on their list?
Katie:Yeah, I think before you even put a number on it, I think spending some time with yourself and maybe with a parent or someone who you can have an open conversation with and help you to think about what is it that you're looking for in a college experience, both on a theatrical level, you know how many students are gonna be in your musical theater class, Do they have a senior showcase? How many shows do you get to do what's on the curriculum and what do you want out of your college experience in a bigger way? Do you wanna go to football games on Saturday? Do you wanna be in a city? Do you wanna be in a small town? Do you wanna have snow or a sun? Some of these things that when you know, not only is it. You're going to school for theater, but you only get to go to college once and having the experience that you wanna have should be a part of what you're choosing. And I think it's important to remember in this whole audition process. Tangent is that you're, you're not only, you're not just auditioning for the schools, but you are auditioning the school. And is this the kind of place that you wanna spend four years of your life and, well, a good chunk of change do you, is this where you want? So I think as you're putting together all these things to consider, can you study abroad? Do they give good scholarships, et cetera. That's gonna help to decide how many schools you wanna apply to. And I think we'll probably talk about this in a little bit, but less of how many. And just making sure that you have a really wide variety of schools and depending on how many students that a school might accept, just important to have a really healthy list of those schools. And if you do wanna throw in a couple of acting programs, if you do wanna. have some liberal liberal arts schools to attend. You know, so we, we just suggest between 10 and 15, you know, it's crazy how many new school theater programs there are. Now. You really can apply, to a million, but just remembering that each school has an application fee and you, you wanna just find a healthy balance for what works for you and your family. Between 10 and 15 is good. Making sure that you have a, a nice, healthy balance of all different kinds of programs so that at the end of the day you are really excited about the place that you're gonna be attending.
Chelsea:Building off of that, we get a lot of questions about people wondering about rankings or tiers of schools. And there's a lot of language around this that I think can really frighten students and parents when they're going through this application process for the first time. Some schools are considered to be. Very, very, very difficult to get into. Some are considered to be maybe a little, you maybe have better chances of getting in. Cynthia. Can you talk about the language that we use in our program in BBC Aspire about these, different categories of schools and how might that play into a student's school?
Cynthia:Yeah. We talk about things like reach, extreme reach schools a reach school, a target school, a safety school. Extreme reach tends to be the schools that maybe only accept 2% of the applicants. So if you have a thousand applicants and you're only accepting 2%, that's just a numbers game. And, and what I love to tell everybody is,, and this is tricky to have a mindset of, but if you don't get into one of these extreme reach schools, it is not a reflection of your talent. It is simply a numbers game. If there are 30 amazing people, but we can only take 20, that's not a reflection of those folks talents. It just means there's so few slots for so many people who apply. I think it's really helpful if you, if you want to apply to some extreme reach schools, I think that's fantastic and you should go for it. you might be one of those 20 and why not? But there's also amazing schools with really great faculty at what we might call a target school that, that accept maybe 30% or 40% of their applicants. And then safety schools tend to be schools that either don't require an audition or just have a much higher percentage of acceptance. And again, I, I think it's important not to think of the tiers as whether a program is necessarily better than the other or worse than another, and that's why the research is really, really helpful. Take a look at that faculty, look at those faculty bios. Talk to some students. If you can see what the graduates have done. See if the graduate. If there's some alum that are working professionally and doing really well, there's lots of ways to sort of figure out if a program looks really strong. So don't necessarily go by the, the tiers to determine whether a program's a really good program or not. There, there are other ways to figure that out.
Katie:But I think on a higher level also, addition, I would say that there's a right school for everyone. Mm-hmm. and just because it has this wow, fancy, we have so many alumni on Broadway and blah, blah, blah, you know, I think there really is a right school for everyone and you have to feel like it's a good fit for you and, and also that there's no prescribed path for what we do, unfortunately. It's not like, go to here and you will be a Broadway star and here's your Tony. it's, you know, I have friends who majored in English at Duke and went to go on to be on Broadway. So there's really so many avenues and paths and, you know, you might graduate from the very best school on the planet. And next thing you know, you're a marketing exec. I don't know making this up, but, you know, there's just no prescribed path. So be really open to a lot of different schools. It doesn't have to have the shiny name that we have put this pressure on ourselves.
Chelsea:and I think this is important to consider when you're putting together that schools list, having what you were talking about, Katie, this, this wide variety, this healthy balance of schools that might accept a lower percentage, might accept a higher percentage. Like you were saying, a BFA versus a ba, an acting program versus a musical theater program. There's so many opportunities, and casting a wide net just gives you more options and more things to choose from when it comes time to make decisions in the spring of your senior year. Another question that comes up often when folks are in this preparation phase, you know, before they're choosing their material, before they're pressing, send on their prescreen applications. Folks wonder about what they should be doing ahead of time. For example, common question we get is, is it important to try to be in as many productions as possible when I'm in high school? Does that look good on my resume? What can students be doing in high school in these years leading up to this process to put them at an advantage when it comes to the college audition season?
Katie:You know, I, unfortunately, a lot of what we do is very expensive and can really be sometimes cost prohibitive, but I think in this age of lots of technology and things virtually. There's so access to so much great training. Hello, b BBC Online. And if you are in an area where there isn't a large amount of training around you, there's so much online. Hello bbc. Anyway, enough of the plug. I, I will say, yes, it is great to be in shows at your high school to learn what it is, to be in an ensemble, to learn all of the things and the people that make a show, to have a great appreciation for all of the very many people. And village that it takes to create a show and come together. You know, if your school doesn't have a great theater program, that's okay. I would say the time. And, and of course money is really well spent in getting some training and that's getting some good voice lessons if possible. Learning about your instrument, letting, letting that grow over your high school years. If you can start reading some plays and maybe there's an acting class you can get into, That's really great use of time. If there is a dance class, whether it be online or in person once a week that you can get into. I think if you have to choose between the shows or the training, obviously to do both is amazing. I, I do find that that training in, in my opinion, is really, really pays off especially when it comes to preparing for these college auditions and you can have a really solid foundation of training under your belt will help ultimately create the best auditions for yourself.
Cynthia:Yeah, I think students a lot of times, and, and I think parents sometimes think this too, that you've gotta really pack your resume. That you wanna have a resume that's just full of shows and full of roles and full of lots of experience. What I would say is at the end of the day, we are really gonna focus much more on your prescreen and on your audition and seeing where you're at right now versus the fact that maybe you played Shrek when you were nine years old, you know? And I think sometimes people conflate experience with training. and I think of some of a lot of shows uh, like you said, Katie are such great experience and you absolutely learn a lot through those shows. But that's different than taking dance classes or voice lessons or acting training of some kind. So yeah, I agree. I think that if you love being in those productions, great. If you're having fun doing them, great. But I would not feel pressured to keep doing more productions to pack or pad your resume with more things, cuz it just won't matter. We're gonna be looking for skills and training and, and that doesn't necessarily matter whether your resume has a lot or a little. It really, really doesn't.
Chelsea:I had a classmate when we showed up freshman year at U of M, and she had. one thing on her resume, I mean, it was essentially a blank sheet of paper when she applied. It was made a choir. It was like a choir performance of something. And she has since gone on to have, I mean, I think the most Broadway shows of anyone I graduated with, she Broadway
Cynthia:shows. She's had any television shows
Chelsea:and everything is an incredibly successful career and it didn't matter. Like the faculty saw potential in this student and saw talent and drive and passion, and it didn't matter that her resume was a blank sheet of paper. So if this, I hope that gives anyone listening, like it's not too late to apply. If you feel like you're a little behind the game, like if this is something you're passionate about and you can get some training here in this junior and senior year to, to get you on a level where you feel confident applying to schools and applying to a varied list, like it's, it's not too late. There's no set requirement of what you have to have experienced by any point in time in order to be qualified to go to school for this.
Cynthia:I'll even give you a flip side of that. There have been times when I've seen a resume that is just packed, lead after lead, after lead, after lead show, after show, after show after show. And then the technique in real life when you see them in a live audition isn't at a super high level and you think, oh, interesting. Okay. If they've done all this, all these years and years of theater, And their skills are still sort of at this level. It, it, it can almost skew it in the other way. And you think to yourself just feels like their skill level should be a little higher with all of this experience that they packed on that resume versus if someone like you were just talking about Chels, comes in with a resume that has nothing on it. kind of blows you away with some raw talent and just a whole lot of potential. uh, Maybe you can see how, how we might think, you know what, this person seems to have so much potential and this person almost feels like maybe they've reached a lid on where they're gonna go in their skillset. There's no right answer to any of that. There's really not exactly, but I the, I think the one right answer is don't try to be more or show more in order to think that that's gonna do more for you. If you love doing these shows, great. Do it. Put'em on your resume, but don't put them on your resume and do more shows because you think that's gonna somehow get you a little further ahead in terms of playing this game of the.
Chelsea:That's a great point. We're not fans of playing the game, folks didn't. Listening to this podcast,
Cynthia:there's no game. No
Chelsea:game to be played. No game to be played. I think this is a great pausing point for our part one today, and we are gonna be back for a part two. Diving more into the materials choosing audition materials like songs and monologues and the actual performance aspect the audition process, so stay tuned for that. That's what's gonna be coming up next. If you enjoyed today's episode, take a screenshot and tag us on Instagram at Bway Vocal Coach. You can share this episode with a friend and please consider leaving us a review. If something resonates with you from today's episode, we would love to hear about it. You can DM us on Instagram or send us an email. Hello bway vocal coach.com, and just a reminder about those free resources that you have. If you want to get our free resources for Families starting the college audition process, we have a free Getting Started Guide and recent q and a webinar. You can get all of that@bwayvocalcoach.com slash. and if you wanna connect with us personally, getting personal support from Cynthia and myself, join our Facebook group. All of that information is in today's show notes. Check it out there, send us an email if you want any more information, and consider booking a consult with us. Thanks for listening.