Scott Illingworth shares with us that in moving from audience to participant as a performing arts director, the period of time you have with a script is a unique and individual, and only you can utilize it for insight and productivity. For a director, the journey is similar to that of an actor at the beginning of a production. This is because, in many ways, the director is the audience until the viewers can be present. It’s important to start, bit by bit, from the place of what the story is about and what the audience needs to understand. What are the critical events? What are the significant moments?

From a performing arts education perspective, a director will question how the audience is going to experience the story based on their level of insight. It’s hard to recapture that initial impression if you don’t make notes and think about the meaning during your first time through a script. But once you’ve done that, it’s a director’s job to help the rest of the team— that includes designers, actors and technical staff—to begin to construct a shared view of the world in that story.

Sometimes the created world of the plot is clearly obvious from the text. But many playwrights don’t have such specific information in their text about what the world should look like or how the viewers should perceive it. So, it’s important that you collaborate with other team members like designers to ensure that you work together to build this imaginary world you’re inviting the actors into as part of the process.

He says, “Another thing that directors don’t always think about is something that I’ll often refer to as ‘the machine of the play.'” He thinks that a really well-written play or well-written film script is like an incredibly intricate machine. All the pieces perform certain functions. They’re all meant to communicate particular ideas along the way. The lines are specific. They’re chosen to take the audience on the journey of this story. So, like any complicated machine, if one of the pieces is out of place, if it’s not doing its job quite right or if it doesn’t fit properly with the other elements, that’s something the audience will experience really quickly. An online performing arts education can help directors become familiar with this approach to reading a script before production begins.

While working on a play, it’s important that the director apply this constant process of zooming back out to see if the machine in its entirety is still working. Then, you will zoom back in to tinker with specific elements, whatever they are, that are not working correctly. Sometimes it’s about working with an actor or actors on a scene. Other times, it’s about rethinking something you thought was understood at the beginning but have grown to understand differently over the course of the process. Presenting a successful big picture on the stage or in film begins with the director’s minute examination of the script.

A musical director in a theatrical show, in a Broadway show, or in a musical is the person who is the head of the show’s music department. So, a musical director is a person who is in control of how the music is expressed. The musical director typically teaches the music, and music on a page is one thing, but music inside bodies is another thing.

First of all, what is the story? The musical director should have a very clear idea of the story, and that idea should be something where they are in collaboration and conversation with the writers, assuming they’re alive and present. They should certainly be in communication with the director who is in control of the entire production in a musical theater piece. Typically, the choreographer and lighting designer are also involved in these conversations.

You’re all creating this big animal together that takes a lot of people to put together. There’s music. There are costumes. There’s hair. There’s movement. There’s acting. There’s figuring out where on stage things happen. What’s the best way for someone to sing? How should they pronounce this word? What word should they hit? What syllables should they hit in a particular melody?

How should that melody come out? Should it be loud or soft? Should it have vibrato or not have vibrato? All of these questions are ones that are inside the musical director’s province.

Additionally, the musical director is also sometimes playing the show, playing the piano, playing the guitar. If there’s a band, typically, the musical director is integrating the band—controlling how the band sounds and how they sound with the actors. And when I say how it sounds, in larger shows, there will be someone who takes the music that they’re given, whether it’s written down or not, and they will orchestrate it. They will decide what instruments are going to play. They’ll decide how things are arranged.

If you have an interest in pursuing a career as a musical director, or any career in the performing arts, consider exploring online performing arts education. Obtaining a solid performing arts education will help equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to reach many of your goals.

There are many valuable lessons found in online performing arts education. Based on his experience in performing arts, Gianni Downs tells us, “There are three major stage configurations. There is the proscenium stage, which is essentially what you might think of as a theater. A lot of the Broadway houses are proscenium stages. You might see musicals produced on a proscenium stage.” These are set up so that the audience is on one side, and the action is happening on another side, often with a frame around the action. That is the proscenium arch itself. This is a very common type of theater and is very useful for hiding scene changes. Musicals spend a lot of time in proscenium stages.

“A proscenium is an arch,” says Jeff Kaplan, who has years of performing arts education. “Next time that you’re in a theater, look at the shape above the curtain. It makes a picture frame. So, the idea is that you’re looking into a diorama. You’re looking into a world. And traditionally, the performers are inside that world, and you and the audience are on the outside. That forms the fourth wall, but that’s not the only way that you can do it.”

Gianni Downs picks up from there. “Another common theater-type is the 3/4 thrust. You’ll see a lot of regional theaters and off-Broadway theaters will use a 3/4 thrust stage. This is where the action will project into the audience, making a horseshoe shape of the audience. So, the audience sits on 3/4 of the sides of the action of the play.” This is often more used for straight plays or more intimate plays. A very famous 3/4 thrust is the Guthrie Theater, and it might provide a good reference for what that looks like.

Jeff Kaplan then finishes, “There’s theater-in-the-round, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The audience is on all sides, or maybe 3/4. Arena Stage in Baltimore is a very famous example of that.” Circle in the Square in New York is largely a theater-in-the-round. That’s a fascinating experience in which there’s no front where you’re all inside of this world. It’s like a virtual-reality theater.

Typically, a producer is somebody who’s leading the ship. When you’re the producer, in many cases, you’re both everyone’s friend and everyone’s enemy. You’re also the person signing their paychecks. Sometimes, you may even be their therapist. Being a producer can look many different ways.

Particularly in the world of the independent theater industry, because the budgets are smaller and it tends to involve renting a space, it’s inevitably going to be a smaller creative team. As a producer, you’ll need people to do a bit more than they expect to be doing, and it’s only because you want to get the show running. Because of this, though, you have to be flexible, and be able to avoid getting stuck in a rigid space.

As a producer, you tend to be the one that everybody looks to. Personally, I have been a part of productions where I haven’t necessarily attended every rehearsal, because I haven’t needed to; there’s a director that was hired, and there’s an entire creative team. However, I’m there at auditions, I’m there at the first rehearsal, and I make myself available.

I don’t find the need to be micromanaging at every rehearsal, though, because I’m not a micromanager. Because I know this about myself, I know I don’t need to attend every one, but I do make a point to let people know that I’m available for whatever comes up. When stuff does happen, it isn’t the time for a meltdown—as the producer, nobody cares about your feelings. You need to fix it. You need to get it going, and make it work.

To learn more about the world of being a producer, both standard performing arts education and online performing arts education can be very beneficial as a starting point.

One of the fundamental truths about the theater is that it’s about community. Even if you have a physical theater, it’s still about the community. My favorite theater is the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago at the Goodman, where I lived for 15 years. I live in Boston now, and soon there will be a new favorite Boston theater.

When you think about your favorite theater, you remember that it’s a place where the people would gather. That’s why it’s essential for theater companies and programs to engage in the local communities.

Theaters Canvassing Neighborhoods are Crucial for Performing Arts Programs

The primary responsibility of theater companies and programs is to link the physical theater buildings, spaces, and productions to multiple communities within a city. This is the key to a successful and thriving theater. You can’t just imagine a play, open the doors, and expect people to come. You have to engage with the local communities.

Even if the theater has subscribers, their goal and obligation is to impact the conversations within the society. Community education specialists and directors of community engagement will go out and build partnerships within local communities. Sometimes this includes productions where actors will go out and canvas local areas. They will go to places like schools and libraries to talk about the theater content and sociohistorical components of the production. They will discuss their own lives and stories to build connections with the people in the area. They are trying to convey that the community is not just for the actors; it’s for everyone. It’s everyone’s theater.

The fact is that the theater is always in need of new audiences. The theater building may be there for over 100 years, but it’s not enough to bring in the people by itself. The theater crew has to go out and do the work of bringing in audience members. Community specialists are responsible for going out and gathering the culturally aware people that create the evolving dynamic of theater audiences.

The benefit of this kind of canvassing work is that many people haven’t spent much time thinking about the theater, but they have studied it at some point. Remember those Shakespeare plays you had to read in high school. Now, you have an actual theater company talking about literature, language, self-expression, and the reality of transporting a person into the world of theater.

It doesn’t make a difference if you love Shakespeare or not. There is still an appreciation for his theater skills. Those skills of self-expression, telling a story concisely and passionately, and reading history through culture. These are the things that you want people to take with them when they leave the theater.

Theater Arts Bring Communities Together

There is a whole way of thinking with this kind of outreach. For example, interacting with the kids at school can quickly spread to other people that they know. The communication within the kids soon reaches their parents, grandparents, siblings, and neighbors. This sense of community is why this work is so important. Communities can be brought together through the arts.

When people think about the many different roles played in the theater, they often refer to only the actors on stage. They usually don’t think about the people who are out making the theater an active part of their lives. These are the people that work off-stage and behind the scenes.

These are the people that are working in offices somewhere. They talk with people in the neighborhood about what’s going on and the concerns surrounding those things.

The theater stage is also a great place to talk about social issues, including relationships and health issues. The theater is a way to acknowledge real problems that people can relate to. Every family is strained at some point in time. Those individuals who have to portray these issues in the theater can help make a difference in the real world.

All of these reasons and more are why the people who specialize in community engagement are so important. There is no one more active or integral in terms of a larger ripple effect of theater than these folks.

In musical theater, your book is a three-ring binder that has all of the songs that you sing for auditions. In this book, you should have everything that you’ve worked and honed and now sing really well.

Your Book Can Reveal Your Vocal Range

You should have one song, for instance, that you present as three different cuts. You can have an eight-bar cut, a 16-bar cut and a 32-bar cut. You can also have a full song. Having these cuts already available makes certain that you’re prepared no matter what they want to hear.

A lot of times, you go to an audition and you’re told, “Well, we’re running behind schedule. We’re only going to have you sing eight bars,” or they only want to see you perform 16 bars. You need to construct those 16 bars so that they show you not only you as a person, but they also show your acting chops and vocal range. Each cut has to be tailored to the needs of the audition, which means that you should have three or four versions of every song in your book.

You should also have a representation of all of the styles that you do well in your book. For example, you might have a Golden Age song from “Oklahoma” or something from “Jesus Christ Superstar” like “Heaven on Their Minds.” You should have a wide spectrum of songs that you do really well.

Two Books Make Life Easier

Your book, you must realize, is also your accompanist, which is why I actually have two books. I have a book of stuff that I’m working on that’s just for me. It it has my audition material in it too. I also have a book marked up for the accompanist that has only audition material in it.

Anything I might want them to do, such as crescendo or slow down at certain places, is marked in musical notation in the audition version of my book so the accompanist can see it and play it the way I want them to play it.

I make certain that each page of the book is inside of non-glare sheet protectors as well because I don’t want the accompanist to struggle when they sit down in an audition room under harsh fluorescent lighting. I want to make their life as easy as possible because then I can make the most of my only opportunity for that particular audition to perform at my best.

Your Performing Arts Education

This is only an introduction to the actor’s book. You can learn more tips for creating, using and maintaining this critical tool in your online performing arts education courses. Your performing arts studies can provide all of the details you need to make certain that your career takes off quickly once your formal academic education is complete.

One thing that comes up a fair amount in performing arts is the feeling that I’m trying to communicate something with these words but I don’t understand how it works in my body. So, I really advocate for people thinking about acting through using action verbs.

It’s something that’s been around for a long time. In performing arts education, we often talk about actioning a script or using action verbs to talk about what you’re doing to another person. If you had a very simple text, like “I love you,” that you were saying to somebody, rather than simply loving them with that text, can you think of something more specific that you’re doing? Maybe you are adoring that person.

But I can also imagine a very interesting scene where someone says, “I love you,” but the action they’re playing is eviscerating. I’m interested in what that means. It’s exciting for an audience, too, when something about the action you’re playing and the text support each other but don’t necessarily simply duplicate each other. It produces a reason for the audience to lean forward to try to investigate what it is that they’re experiencing.

And while that might make perfectly logical sense in text, I think it’s, sometimes, harder for actors to understand. But that’s also true in their body. If I’m saying, “I love you,” but my action is eviscerating, that’s going to manifest in my body in some way. That way might be enormous. It might be very small. But it’s going to be present, especially if, as you explore a text even before you get into rehearsal, you’re thinking about those action verbs.

We know now that simply thinking about action verbs starts to spark some of the same parts of your brain that doing those action verbs would do.

When we look at the narrative structure of performing arts, most of the stuff that we’re seeing on TV, or most of the other stories that we see, are following a linear structure.

However, there is also there is a non-linear structure to be studied in performing arts education and online performing arts education. These are scenes that sometimes don’t come in chronological order where A met B, and they encountered this problem and tried to solve these problems. They fell in love, and then they solved the problem, and here is in the end of the piece. That would be like a linear structure and it’s the easiest light for the audience to see a lot of things that are happening.

An example of a non-linear structure would be when you go into most commercial flashbacks or sometimes you go into a time that is discontinued. You start with the end, and you progress towards the beginning. Or, maybe it’s a middle of the play, and everything is dropped, and the new story starts to happen. Maybe you have a series of tiny but completely different stories that link together to a scene. That’s when you are working with a non-linear narrative. You can play with those non-linear narratives like a pattern in any way your imagination allows you.

You can, for example, take a food recipe and create a play on that structure. You can take a game and create a play on that structure. If you look around, the University’s full of structures, and can have fun and borrow any structures that you want.

Of course, it has to make sense for your project, and then see what happens if you think of your play as a magic trick. There would be an introduction. There would be a distraction of attention, and so there would be magic that happens underneath. There would be like a boom.

It would be like if you’re break it in steps. You can start seeing how a story can be adapted on that type of structure. It’s really, really important to find the structure that makes sense for your project. Otherwise, maybe you did this play on the structure of a recipe, but why? If you have no reason to play around and stick with the traditional, there’s nothing wrong with it. The reason it’s traditional is because it works well.

“I was a great admirer of the novel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” says Elizabeth Bradley. “And at one point, I thought it would be a great idea to teach a course on adaptation. And if I had ever done such a thing, and have not done so yet, I would probably have used that novel as an example of how impossible it actually is to translate the core ethos of a beautifully constructed novel to the stage.”

Well, how wrong could I possibly have been? Because watching Marianne Elliott’s adaptation of Curious Incident in the Nighttime, I sat there and thought, I mean, I’m ready to fall in love with the theater all over again. Because this kind of enlivened theatrical imagination, if you can do this, the theater can do anything. So just when you think, “no,” somebody comes along and says, “yes,” and brilliantly.

It was a different kind of challenge. Of course, that is written in letter form. I think it’s called an epistolary novel. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a letter to his son about the reality of living his life as a Black male in America and as a young Black male in America—an important concept in performing arts education.

And the way the adaptation was handled was through a rotating cast of readers, both men and women who tackled sections of the scored book. By scored, I mean the original music composition that was created to accompany the read prose text created another whole piece of emotional access leverage if you will. You felt like you were falling into the words via the music, in a way that you couldn’t really have done sitting at home reading it, no matter how profound that experience was. And I would argue that both have value in the performing arts.

American Theater has this odd attachment to its own mortality. In the 1940s, Arthur Miller was writing plays like All My Sons and Death of a Salesman in America. This was a prime time for American theater. These plays were taking charge across broadway. Arthur Miller made statements about how he wished the theater across the pond in the UK was happy like the theater in America.

Good Theater Never Dies

By the time you get to the 1930s and 1940s, you’re looking at the emergence of Odet’s plays, Arthur Miller’s plays, and Tennessee William’s plays. These were all very popular at the time and still today. Eugene O’Neill appeared twice in the 1910s and 1920s. He then came back after he died in posthumous performances like Long Day’s Journey.

Performing Arts is an Experience that Dates Back to the Early Greeks

What makes American theater great is the sense of sitting around, hearing the stories of your neighbors, all while actually sitting next to your neighbors. This concept goes back to the earliest moment of the Greeks. The most important and magical moment in theater is when you walk through the door. It’s the experience of what you are doing and what you are about to be doing. This represents tracing of the past to the present. It’s something that’s not unlike what the ancient Greeks encountered and experienced back then.

Theater Is a Community Experience

So you walk into this playing area, look around, and see your neighbors. You look on stage and notice familiar faces from the community. You hear stories of adventures that you are going on vicariously through these people. The drama transports you beyond the stage and arena into a world beyond the theater. Together, you are seeing life being portrayed.