The American conservatory approach at The University of the Arts

Charles Gilbert
Associate Professor, Theater Arts
Head, Musical Theater Program
The University of the Arts, Philadelphia PA USA

Abstract: Young performers preparing for professional work on the musical stage need an extensive foundation of technical skills to meet the artistic demands of a varied and challenging repertoire. In America, a growing number of universities offer conservatory training in musical theater performance to give aspiring performers the opportunity to develop the skills they need to succeed in this highly competitive field. The Musical Theater Program at The University of the Arts, established in 1990, incorporates many of the best practices of these programs in its curricular design. Classes in acting, dance, singing, musicianship, speech, movement and script analysis are complemented by the study of the history and repertoire of the musical theater and its relationship to the other performing arts. A wide range of productions are mounted each year to give students exposure to representative styles and genres, and projects undertaken in partnership with area professional theaters, including staged readings of new works, help students build their resumes and gain exposure to the field. This presentation examines the underlying rationale of the UArts curriculum and the methods it uses to prepare students to work in the musical theater of the future. The University of the Arts is a private university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania devoted exclusively to professional training in the performing, visual and media arts.

The University of the Arts is a small private university located in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American constitution and one of the many industrial cities in the Northeastern "rustbelt" currently striving to reinvent itself as a center of arts, tourism and technology. The University was formed in the late 1980's by the merger of two institutions, the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA) and the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts (PCPA), formerly the Philadelphia Musical Academy, both of which were founded over a century ago. Its urban campus is located in the heart of downtown Philadelphia on a stretch of Broad Street which has recently been renamed "The Avenue of the Arts." The school's neighbors include the Academy of Music, home to the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Opera Company of Philadelphia, the Wilma Theater, one of the city's most acclaimed and successful resident not-for-profit theaters, and the construction site for the new Regional Performing Arts Center, scheduled to open in December of 2001 and provide a new home for the Orchestra and several other leading music and dance companies in the city.

The School of Theater Arts at U Arts is a relative newcomer to the institution and the city, having been established as part of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts in the early 1980's. Until 1990, PCPA offered separate programs in theater arts, dance and music, but it took a visionary dean to set in motion the initiative that would lead to the establishment of the Musical Theater Program at The University of the Arts. Although all three schools were involved in the discussions leading up to its creation, and faculty from all three school play a role in the current activities of the Musical Theater Program, it is administered by the School of Theater Arts and its students receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in Theater Arts.

Early in the planning phase of its creation, the mission of the Musical Theater Program was defined thus: "to train and develop young artists for professional work in the musical theater." It was therefore essential that those responsible for the design of the program take a close look at the field of musical theater, past, present and future, and examine the practices of the training programs being offered at other universities and conservatories. I was the person chiefly responsible for that initiative, and as the present Head of the Musical Theater Program, it continues to be my responsibility to examine the best practices of my colleagues at other schools and important recent developments in the field of musical theater in an effort to continuously refine the design and content of our program.

The first challenge I faced in planning the Musical Theater Program, then, was devising a satisfactory definition of the musical theater, and it remains an ongoing challenge, made more complicated by the naivete of my students, the prejudices of my colleagues and the inchoate nature of the field itself. I often use the parable of the three blind men and the elephant to try to describe this dilemma: three blind men, having encountered an elephant for the first time, afterwards find it hard to agree on what the animal is like. "An elephant is very much like a snake," claims the first blind man, having grasped only the elephant's trunk. The second blind man dismisses this assertion with scorn, claiming with equal authority that "an elephant is solid like a great stone wall," having only touched the elephant's massive, solid side. The third blind man knows the other two are wrong; having seized the elephant by his ear, he asserts confidently that "an elephant is like an enormous leaf." And so the three of them argue, each having encountered a part of the beast but none of them aware of the whole animal or the relationship of its parts.

This is a challenge which those of us who work in the musical theater must face as well. For instance, in my efforts to establish a musical theater program at the University, I had to persuade narrow-minded colleagues who maintained that the musical theater was merely commercial entertainment and not worthy of study in an academic institution. In the case of my students, I must open their eyes to the fact that there is more to the musical theater than the show they performed in as seniors or the latest Broadway hits they've seen. And in planning the content of classes and choosing shows to produce at The University of the Arts, my colleagues and I must constantly confront the question, "just what is the musical theater we are preparing our students to take their place in?"

Just like the elephant, it is an enormous beast, and some of its parts appear (at first encounter) to be very dissimilar. I interpret this phenomenon as a sign of the vigorous diversity of the art form, and attribute it to the fact that the musical theater, perhaps more than any other art form, is built on contradictions - the word, interestingly enough, which legendary director and producer Harold Prince chose as the title for his memoir. The musical theater is a complex, interdisciplinary art form whose unique character is the result of the juxtaposition of often disparate, even contradictory elements. In his seminal study The Complete Singer-Actor, educator and director H. Wesley Balk develops the notion that "the music-theater aesthetic is firmly grounded in the blending of opposites." (H. Wesley Balk, The Complete Singer-Actor (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed., 1985), 37)

Consider, just for starters, the relationship between words and music, which is the basis of song: words have logical meanings which we respond to with the right hemisphere of our brains, while music communicates through feeling and connects with our more intuitive left hemisphere. This blend of thinking and feeling, left and right hemispheres, accounts for the unusual expressive potency of song, but poses a substantial challenge for the singer of songs.

Consider, too, the nature of the business environment in which musical theater is produced. Is it art or entertainment? Artists of the musical theater extol the possibilities of the form and chafe against the limitations imposed by its commercial restraints, while canny impresarios use their entrepreneurial skills to make a killing in the business of show business. Showgirls prance in glittering casino shows and cars fill the parking lots of stadium-sized theaters built along the autobahn, while passionate artists with original voices and visions find themselves unable to find a venue willing to take a chance on work which is not highly marketable. Even so, in time, the innovative practices of artists on the "fringe" come to invigorate the commercial "mainstream." In training students for the field, should we cast our lot with the visionaries or the showmen?

The musical theater is poised at the precarious convergence of high art and commercial entertainment, embodying elements of both grandeur and intimacy and borrowing freely from a wide range of musical, theatrical and dance styles. The dialectical tensions which characterize the art form must inevitably affect those of us who are attempting to provide professional training for students seeking a place in that field, and it is a debate which can be heard to varying extents in the corridors of every department at The University of the Arts: Are we a trade school or a conservatoire? Do we ponder the creations of the great masters and prepare young artists to push back the boundaries of their chosen field, or are we providing proven "tricks of the trade" so our students can get jobs?

The simple answer is, "yes." Neither thesis nor antithesis, but a synthesis of these points of view must be found, one which faculty and students must embrace at some level. For young singing actors to thrive in a dynamic professional artistic environment, they must be equipped not only with a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges of the field but also a set of skills which will give them the versatility and resourcefulness they will need to adapt to a broad range of artistic circumstances.

Insight, resourcefulness, versatility - these are the touchstones of the training we provide in the Musical Theater Program at The University of the Arts, and they form an important part of the mission statement which the faculty has devised for the program, wherein we announce our intention to:

provide a safe haven in which we nurture young artists' ability to play and take risks
instill self-confidence and encourage self-discovery and self-reliance
cultivate personal passion and nurture each individual student's unique artistic voice
help students to understand the standards and expectations of the profession and give them a realistic sense of their own abilities in relationship to those standards
encourage versatility and resourcefulness by exposing students to a variety of styles and teaching methods
instill a sense of responsibility and integrity of purpose and a sense of "artistic citizenship" by helping students to see the connection between their artistic work and the communities to which they belong
guide young artists toward a path of a lifelong personal and artistic growth

The craft of musical theater performance is a complex one, involving proficiency in a diverse set of disciplines, including acting, speech, singing, musicianship and dance. The curriculum at U Arts is designed to break that complex task down and introduce students to its components in a manner that is progressive and sequential. This approach to training is so common-sensical that, in other fields, it almost goes without mentioning; no teacher would ask a beginner to undertake a complex mathematical problem or a challenging feat of gymnastics. Yet students training for the musical stage seem eager to plunge into the singing of songs, a tremendously complex task, at the outset of their training. We ask students to defer those desires at least for a short time, while we establish the technical foundations they will need to call upon in executing a complex performance.

Students come to the Musical Theater Program at The University of the Arts with a variety of prior experience. For the most part, our prospective students are high school seniors, roughly eighteen years of age. In many cases, they have performed in musicals in their high schools or local amateur theaters, though some students actually have professional experience while others have tremendous innate talent but little experience. They usually have had some prior training in one or more of the component disciplines of acting, singing, music and dance; in some cases, that training is rather extensive in one area, but it is typically the case that they excel in one or a few areas but are less strong in other areas.

Students are selected for admission into the program on the basis of an audition. Auditions are held each year in the winter and spring, and hundreds of prospective candidates present themselves for consideration for one of the thirty-six spaces we currently offer for incoming freshmen. In their audition, their skills in dance, acting and singing are assessed, and in a brief interview, faculty members try to assess the student's maturity, goals and level of self-discipline. Acting, dance and singing abilities are assessed by separate faculty members, whose scores and impressions are composited at the end of the day. The goal of the audition process is to select the most capable and talented group of students possible, and to choose a group that will thrive and succeed given the training we offer.

The sheer number of students seen (and, consequently, the brief amount of time spent with each candidate) makes this a challenging task for the selection committee, and the task is made more difficult by the fact that admissions are offered on a "rolling" basis - that is, offers of admission must be made to students who were seen at the first sets of auditions without any knowledge of the quality of students that will be seen at later auditions. This means that judges must be able to score students on an objective scale which will enable the selection committee to make fair comparisons between students seen on different days by different faculty members.

Many students apply to more than one school, hoping to be able to pick and choose the best of the multiple offers they receive. At U Arts, as at other universities, scholarship offers are made to students based on their talent and/or their financial need. Thus, we need to offer admission to roughly twice as many students as we know we can take in our freshman class, knowing that half of those students will choose to come to U Arts.

Students who arrive at U Arts to begin their training are typically nineteen years old and fresh out of high school. In many cases, this is their first time living away from their parents, and for many, it is their first time living in an urban environment. They are treated as adults, expected to be able to make wise decisions about how to spend their time, and some students will struggle with these new responsibilities.

At The University of the Arts, as at other American university-based conservatory programs, the specialized study of musical theater is the principal but not the exclusive focus of our students' academic activities. As an institution of higher learning committed to the training of "citizen artists," we place a good deal of emphasis on a student's general studies, and about one-third of a student's course work is in subjects outside the major. Courses in writing, literature, history, art history, psychology and other subjects in the humanities and social and natural sciences are offered by the university's Division of Liberal Arts, and throughout the four years of their education, our students are encouraged to use their studies in liberal arts to develop their ability to research, write, think critically and understand the historical and cultural contexts from which works of art emerge.

The curriculum for the degree in musical theater at U Arts requires four years of study, which is common for the bachelor's degree at American universities. U Arts follows a semester calendar, with a fifteen week term in the fall (September - December) and another fifteen week term in the spring (late January - early May). Students carry between 12 and 18 credit hours each semester, which amounts to about 25 hours in the classroom each week. A total of 128 credit hours (an average of 16 hours per semester for eight semesters) is required to complete the degree.

In the classroom, the freshmen year is devoted to foundation skills. Musical theater and acting majors are combined together in acting, speech, script analysis and stagecraft classes. (Whenever it is pedagogically justified, acting and musical theater majors are mixed together, and held to the same set of standards.) Freshmen receive private singing lessons, one half-hour per week, and meet weekly in groups of twelve to study subjects like vocal anatomy and vocal health and practice singing for one another. Dance in the freshman year includes ballet, jazz and modern dance, with an emphasis on instilling a basic vocabulary and secure foundation of concepts. In a musicianship class, students study music theory, solfege and keyboard skills, with an emphasis on those skills that support the student's ability to sightread with ease and accuracy.

One of the ongoing challenges faculty face in professional training programs such as ours is the need to maintain a nurturing and supportive atmosphere in which students' talents can blossom and thrive while preparing them for the highly competitive environment they will be faced with once they enter the field. All musical theater students participate in jury examinations at the end of each semester, where they will sing for a panel comprised of faculty from throughout the program. Starting with the freshman year, the student's grades reflect the quality of their efforts and the progress they are making toward a professional standard. A grade of "A" is given to students who consistently demonstrate mastery of skills. Students who fail to demonstrate sufficiently consistent mastery receive grades of "C" or lower and are placed on academic warning or probationary status; several consecutive semesters on probation can lead to a recommendation for dismissal.

About seventy percent of our freshmen students continue on to their sophomore (second) year of study. Most of those who leave at the end of the freshman year switch to other schools or move to other programs within U Arts, where it is possible to transfer internally between the acting, voice, dance and musical theater programs. Interestingly enough, we are finding that the percentage of freshmen continuing to the sophomore year is growing, which I interpret as a sign that we are being more selective in our admissions process and attracting students who are better prepared to succeed in our program.

Foundation training continues into the second year of the Musical Theater Program, but the focus of the second year is integration, by which I mean the student's ability to combine the various component skills they have been learning into an intelligently-realized performance. Voice lessons and music, dance and acting classes continue, but students must now confront the task of singing-acting in a systematic fashion and learn how the ability to integrate voice, body, face and emotions in a musical performance must be mastered as another kind of foundation skill. Students must bring together the tools of expression and the tools of analysis to which they have been introduced and learn to make choices which effectively communicate the dramatic event of the scene or song they are presenting.

At the end of the sophomore year, all students participate in an upper-divisional proficiency exam for both acting and singing-acting. Each sophomore chooses songs and monologues or scenes to present to a panel of faculty, who evaluate the students' readiness to advance to the third year (the "upper division") of the training. Students who cannot demonstrate consistent mastery of the skills introduced in the first two years may be advised to withdraw from the program.

Each year of the musical theater program brings new challenges, and the junior year is, for many students, the most challenging work they have done so far. The focus of the junior year is application; third-year students must apply the tools and skills they have mastered in the first two years to a broad range of repertoire in a variety of styles. Musical theater studio classes introduce musical scenes, solo songs and dance repertoire from many different eras, from the nineteenth century to the present day, while the students pursue an intensive study of the history of the musical theater in an academic class offered concurrently. (Voice lessons and dance and acting classes continue through the third year of the training.)

By the third year of their training, most students are participating in musical theater productions in the department. Each year, the Musical Theater Program mounts three productions, including at least one large-scale musical on the stage of the Merriam Theater. This historic theater opened in the 1920's as the Shubert Theater, and has been home to out-of-town "tryouts" for many legendary Broadway shows. The first performances of such musicals as Kiss Me, Kate and Gypsy took place on the stage of the Shubert Theater. This facility was renovated in the 1980's and, for much of the year, the theater hosts performances by touring Broadway shows and ensembles like the Pennsylvania Ballet.

Musical productions are chosen for the school's season on the basis of their co-curricular value - that is, for the way they can be used to support the training program being offered in the studio. Both classic and contemporary titles are featured, and we strive to incorporate a range of musical, dance and theatrical styles so that, over a period of several years, a student will encounter many of the kinds of shows they are likely to perform in once they graduate and enter the profession. Some of the titles we have produced include:

Large-scale Broadway musicals On The Town A Chorus Line Cabaret Nine The Mystery of Edwin Drood Company Into The Woods Carousel (spring 2001) Smaller "off-Broadway" musicals Sunday In The Park With George Lucky Stiff Once On This Island The Club Weird Romance (fall 2000) Revues Rodgers and Hart, A Celebration Broadway Swings, And The World Goes Round (fall 2000)

Reading of new musicals are included in our production program as well, often undertaken in partnership with the Prince Music Theater, formerly the American Music Theater Festival, a Philadelphia not-for-profit theater committed to developing new work for the musical stage. U Arts was home to the first reading of "Floyd Collins," a musical by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau which had its New York debut at Playwrights Horizons and has been produced in London and on tour in the US, and U Arts alumnus Jesse Lenat can be heard on the original cast album. The opportunity to perform in new work with the authors in residence is one of the most important experiences we can offer our students.

In their senior year, students prepare to leave the protected environment of the conservatory and enter the profession. By now, the best of our students will have already tested those waters, working in summer stock or in small roles with Philadelphia professional theaters. An intensive study of auditioning and the business of the theater is undertaken, and students prepare for a senior showcase to which agents and casting directors will be invited. The required course load in the senior year is somewhat lighter, giving students more time to participate in productions and pursue individual interests such as choreography, directing, recording, stage combat or opera performance.

Throughout their four years at U Arts, students take advantage of the unique set of resources which the city of Philadelphia offers. They are able to attend performances (often at no charge) at five Philadelphia regional theaters which produce musicals, and to see touring performances of current Broadway shows at two other theaters. The city offers professional performances in opera, ballet and symphonic music, and boasts a world-class art museum. Its lively arts scene includes a number of smaller theaters (many of whom are featured in the annual Philadelphia Fringe Festival) and alternative venues for film, dance, music and the spoken word.

The University has worked to build ongoing relationships with many Philadelphia institutions for the benefit of our students. Our faculty perform or direct with many of the city's leading theater companies, and we sponsor a steady series of visits from artists connected with current productions in Philadelphia and New York. In preparing students for a life in the professional musical theater, we believe it is important to expose them to as many aspects of that life as we can during their time with us.

The program at The University of the Arts is not that different from the programs offered at many of the other excellent conservatory programs in musical theater offered at US universities. Major programs can be found at the University of Cincinnati, Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Syracuse University, the University of Michigan, the University of Miami, New York University, Wright State University, Emerson College and the Boston Conservatory of Music, to name a few, and the number continues to grow as musical theater becomes an increasingly attractive course of study for students contemplating a professional career in the theater. Students will encounter some variations in proportion and sequence at different schools, but the essential pedagogical principles are substantially the same at all these institutions. The culture of the school and the community to which it belongs, the physical environment of the campus and its surroundings and the personalities and temperaments of the faculty account for most of the significant differences between these programs.

Recently, program heads from undergraduate musical theater conservatory programs in the US and the UK have met and formed the International Music Theater Training Symposium. The exchange of ideas and perspectives which took place at their first two annual meetings has proved to be enormously valuable, and the participants have resolved to continue to meet to share their "best practices" and learn from the successes and failures of their peers. The activities of the international Musical Congress in Germany, the second of which is currently being planned for September of 2001, offers an opportunity to extend that dialogue to the international level. Our students are certain to benefit from these discussions, but the ultimate beneficiary will be the musical theater itself, a complex and dynamic art form which remains one of the most exciting and challenging of all the performing arts.