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.

When you’re analyzing a script, I think you might do well to sort of pick one of those characters and track all those tensions, and then pick two characters and understand how the conflict’s happening. Then pick the family and understand where the conflict’s happening. It’s a show full of a lot of conflict. Characters are in conflict with each other, inside the family and outside the family.

On top of it, the mother decides that she’s going to buy a house. She’s going to buy a house in a white neighborhood. So, everybody has to ask, “What does it mean to, sort of, grow?” But there’s a plant that’s struggling to live, struggling to live in the sun, struggling to live in the sun like a raisin in the sun. Is it going to be the raisin or is it going to grow?

It doesn’t have a lot of sustenance, but it’s got love. It’s got attention. It’s got what the family can give it. So, on some level that’s what the show is about. It’s also about the family to sort of come apart in certain ways, so that they can then come together again. That’s what I think the play is about, and that’s how, as an actor, that’s what I would suggest. If I was scoring it, if I was directing it, I would say, “OK, where do those tensions live? This incident that happens… what is being revealed, and what is being played with, and what is being exposed?” What opportunities do the characters have to transcend where they are, to think of new stuff, to take a chance and to think of something new?

That’s how I would analyze this script, that’s how I would see my way through this—through this artificial thing called a play that happens to be called “Raisin in the Sun.”

[In performing arts,] what human stuff can be brought out? That’s how I would approach the script analysis. I challenge you all to try to uncover that stuff for yourselves.

“Let’s talk about an agent in the performing arts field,” says Bret Shuford. “If you have an agent and you get an agent — and I will say this — it is much easier to get good work than it is to get a good agent. If your goal is to pursue getting an agent, let that one go. Go for the work. Because if you get good work, you’ll get an agent as a result. If you’re going for the work, that’s going to make getting an agent easy. That’s also going to help your agent. You’re going to build a stronger relationship with your agent because you have a great resume.”

When you’re with an agent, they will send you an appointment. Now it’s all done by email, but I do remember when it was done by phone. And when they send you an email, you want to communicate with them if that time slot works. They will give you a dedicated time slot for you to go in and audition. They will also send you a PDF with the files that you need to prepare. And your job is to prepare as much as possible up until the day that you go in. So that means working with a coach, hiring someone just for an hour to go over those sides, getting a vocal coach if it’s music. And you’ll need to learn that music.

“There are lots of ways to get auditions,” adds Philip Hernandez. “If you have an agent and a manager, then they will be on the hunt for things for you. The breakdowns will go to them, and then they will shuffle off anything they think is appropriate for you. They’ll send it your way. That’s one way.”

There are lots of other ways and lots of self-taping these days. You can go on Actors Access, for instance, and you can have an account there, a profile there. They have a profile for you so that people will be able to look you up. Then, if there are appropriate roles, then you’ll be able to be submitted for those. You’ll get a notification that says you have an audition. Then you do the self-tape, which you do at home, and then you send it in. They’ll give you the sides, the copy, all of that stuff.

Finding representation is one of the things you’ll learn when you get a performing arts education.

“Among the careers in performing arts management, of course, the closest to the building of the actual production would be the stage manager and the assistant stage manager because they will be with the director, the creative team, and the actors all the way from the first rehearsal to the dress rehearsal, the first preview and the closing night,” Elizabeth Bradley says. “They are, truly, in a sense, the hub of the wheel and the steward of the quality of that creativity once the show runs.”

“A stage manager is not only in the rehearsal process,” Mary Ann Kellogg adds. “They are responsible for scheduling the day, making sure everything runs smoothly, the director getting what they need, the actors getting what they require to do the job, and the dancers being warmed up. And all that has to be scheduled so that the stage manager goes from the very beginning to the end of the process with the director.”

The director and stage manager work together as they hold auditions, come up with a cast, and begin to break down the script, which they call being on-book and being off-book, a situation where you’re working with actors who are doing scenes and speaking dialogue.

The stage manager has to organize all those departments. So, if you have a singing lesson, if you have a costume fitting, or if you have a private coach, that needs to be scheduled. And the rehearsal day needs to be scheduled for which scenes and who’s in those scenes. Everyone needs to be told and scheduled before the day begins. Take this into account as you continue your performing arts education.

The role of the actor on the stage of performing arts varies from actor to actor, and everybody has their own methods. Everybody comes in with a different agenda. Everyone has their own background in performing arts education or online performing arts education. Everything is different, and it’s up to the director to pretty much funnel it all in.

Having been raised by a theater director, I was taught and I hold it as what my own beliefs are is that when I go to do a play, I’m there to realize the director’s vision of that play. I’m an interpreter, and as an actor I will interpret the role. And I will come in with what I think the character should do, and how the character should behave, how the character should walk, everything.

Then the director will have his or her very strong ideas about the character, and then the rehearsal process — that four weeks of going into a room with actors, and your director, and the designers — is just, for me, why I do it. It’s an actor’s playground. You get to fail in that space because you don’t have an audience. You get to stretch your instrument. You get to try many different things and explore the possibilities.

Then you’ve got this director with his ideas or her ideas coming at you, and then you have another actor coming at you with who they are. So, maybe a preconceived idea of how I was going to react to a character is different depending on who’s playing the character, and all of you in this room give birth to something nobody could have thought of on their own. And that’s what’s thrilling. That’s creativity. And I could literally not perform at all and just do the rehearsal and be a very happy actor.

If you look at the beginning of the whole idea of the United States, what does it mean to move from a colonial place to a place where there are a lot of different kinds of people doing a lot of different kinds of things? This is a question worth pondering as you pursue your online performing arts education.

There are people who are very clearly connected to a European sense of theater. That might have to do with Shakespeare. It might have to do with a certain formal kind of theater that has ties to Europe.

Meanwhile, in the United States, there are a number of other kinds of folks who are looking for something else, something that feels American, something that speaks to a kind of roughness, a kind of humor that is rougher and bawdier.

And then there are also all these Black people, these Black people who are here with other kinds of theatrical traditions, other kinds of musical traditions, and other ways of telling stories that involve sound and a certain approach to energy, an approach to the voice, an approach to movement.

One of the ways in which the United States developed this whole way of thinking about theater hearkens back to the early 1800s, when there was a white traveling theatrical performer named Tom Rice. He supposedly saw a Black groomsman in the street, somebody who took care of horses. The story is that this enslaved man was singing a song and doing a dance, and when Tom Rice saw it, he said, “Oh, I’m going to copy him.” And so he copied him, including blackening his face. And he created this notion of blackface comedy.

Now, blackface existed before then, but in the United States in the early years of the 1800s, it really started to take off, and it became this massively important entertainment form. From around 1830, through the 19th century and into the very early years of the 20th century, it continued.

When you think about Broadway, you think about the American musical, you really want to think about all the roots that are in it. In performing arts education, you’ll learn about all the things that had to come together to make what we know in today’s theater.

In the period from 1900 to 1920, there was a lot happening. There were different kinds of epidemics that were happening. I think we all know about the Spanish flu in 1918. Sexually transmitted infections were also extremely dangerous. And STIs took a lot of folks out. Syphilis, for example, was responsible for a large number of deaths.

Some leading African American theatrical figures died for various reasons early in the 20th century. Ernest Hogan, the first Black entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show, died in 1909. Bob Cole and George Walker, prominent figures in early 20th-century African American musical theater who began their careers in blackface, passed away in 1911.

Now, these folks were at the center of organizations. They weren’t just solo people. So, when they died, a certain kind of large-scale Black musical theater started to become more scarce, certainly no longer being seen on Broadway.