BroadwayWannabe

all the dorms are really nice....i just personally suggest asking for more than one roommate because if you have 2 or more roommates, you are guaranteed to have a living room, which is really good if you're up later than your roommate studying or watching tv or whatever. if you have one roommate, you may or may not have that additional room. i know i found that room really beneficial last year. just gives more privacy.

it really is arbitrary which dorm most of the MTs are in. last year, it was pretty split between Pine and Spruce. i personally liked being in Furness where i was a little isolated from my musical theater classmates because it gave me a chance to make other friends in addition to my MT buddies. i am a big advocate of living in the dorms and living with someone who is NOT the same major as you because once sophomore year comes and you're probably not in the dorms anymore, you don't really have much of a chance to make new friends in other majors in the way you do freshman year. i know that now ALL my close friends are musical theater or acting because i'm not in the dorms and i'm so busy with my program and don't have the time to make new friends haha.

hope this helps!

shellipearl

That's a good point. How nice to have so many good choices.

StickerShock

I have a question about the dorm situation. Toured last week and the Spruce (I believe) dorm had no interior staircase. We had to walk through a fire door & go up poorly lit outdoor wooden steps with a nice view of the barbed wire fencing that seperated the dorm from the building next door. Plenty of Law & Order SVU jokes were flying. I asked the tour guide if there was construction going on and she insisted that this is the stairway used, and that no interior option existed. Could that be true?

Another tour guide, when quizzed, said that there is one massive audition per semester & all shows are cast from this one event. Again, sounded odd. Not a great deal of opportunity to learn auditioning skills or tailor one's material to a particular role. Can anyone confirm or clarify?

MichaelNKat

Stickershock - Here's the scoop. The Spruce dorm has an interior staircase. I've seen it, I've used it. It's just to the right of the elevators. Goes from the lobby to the top floor. The description you posted is not Spruce.

As to auditions, there is a mass audition for all department produced shows during the semester before the shows will run. All of the shows' casting directors attend the mass audition. Students then have role call backs for each show separately. In addition, at the beginning of the fall semester there is an audition to fill roles for the fall shows that have for one reason or another become available after the summer break. So there really is the opportunity to experience many auditions each semester. This doesn't include student scenes and performances for which there are additional audition opportunities.

shellipearl

Not sure which dorm you visited but it was not Spruce. I personally have walked the Spruce stairs many times and it is a spacious well lit interior staircase with room for many to move in an out at the same time.
As far as the massive audition goes, I believe that to be true but it takes place midyear and months are spent by the teachers of all the disciplines in preparation for this audition.There is also quite a lot of opportunity for callbacks. In addition for the last few months the teachers have been working with the students to prepare them for summer stock etc. auditions. I know that my daughter wishes she had had the training she now has for her college auditions l last year, they would have been very different experiences, she is now so much better trained and makes very different choices. Michael I see you beat me to the post

MichaelNKat

Don't know how I did that; I can only type with 2 fingers!

Mainstage

My turn to chime in. I too have climbed up & down those (internal) Spruce stairs!
As for the auditions, MichaelNKaT and Shellipearl have said it well.
I must add that if you thought you were an actor in high school, as the song goes "you ain't seen nothing yet." You will learn so much more.

StickerShock

Just checked the campus map & the sketchy dorm was Pine.

BroadwayWannabe

i'm sorry you found Pine to be sketchy, stickershock. i must just say that my experiences in the dorms at uarts were very positive and significantly better than the experiences many of my other friends at other colleges had. having visited some friends at other schools, i felt really grateful for how much more space i had than the rest of them. so don't let the dorms stand in the way of looking into the theater program at uarts. it really is stellar and i have grown so much in the last (wow) almost 2 years!!

NotMamaRose

Nice to hear from you, BroadwayWannabe! It's great to know you continue to enjoy your time at UArts and to thrive there. Please post more about your own experiences when you have time: you are a great rep of the school.

shellipearl

My daughter has also had friends visit from other colleges and they were "impressed" and told her how lucky she was to have a spacious apartment with her own (shared with one other girl) kitchen and bathroom. They also thought it was great to go shopping and make your own meals. They were more then tired of their required meal plans.

BroadwayWannabe

I am always happy to talk about my experiences at UArts because I love the school...sophomore year has definitely been a lot harder than freshman year in many ways, but if the school weren't kicking my butt, it wouldn't be getting me anywhere haha!

this semester my theater classes are: acting studio technique II (meisner is all year sophomore year), voice lessons, fundamentals of singing and acting, ballet, jazz, music skills, piano lab, voice and speech for actors IV, and musical theater history. i also have an additional liberal arts class of a Spain History class, which is actually GREAT this semester! I have weekly coachings in addition to my private voice lessons, plus we also have 3 master classes with our voice teachers a semester. i also have a semester of crew, but fortunately I was on wardrobe crew for a show from this past weekend so I'm done for the semester now. I was glad to have an early show to get it out of the way!

Next week, we also have sophomore evaluations. There are 4 major evaluations at UArts: 2nd semester freshman year, both semesters sophomore year, and first semester junior year. This semester our evaluations are with our acting studio teacher, our voice and speech teacher, and the head of the musical theater program who is our teacher for fundamentals of singing and acting. It's just a way for teachers to check in and let you know how you are doing. It's not a high-pressure thing as we have no cuts, but it's a good informative and beneficial way to see where things stand.

One thing that also has been very helpful this semester is that we video tape a lot of our work in my fundamentals of singing and acting class and it's posted on a private uarts website. it's really helpful because we can watch our performances on our own and self-correct.

As usual, theater thrives in Philly. Avenue Q was here a few weeks ago. My Fair Lady, Gypsy, Les Miz, and many others are on the way.....and all in the backyard of UArts.

i'm always happy to talk to prospective students, so feel free to send questions my way!

sheerviolette

Having done summer programs, I felt fortunate for everything UArts had to offer with apartment-style dorms.

I had a different experience than BroadwayWannabe with rooms. I lived in a studio with one other girl in Spruce. That was the option I wanted, and I still don't think I would have changed it.

First of all, freshman year I tended to be terminally late (something which I haven't completely amended, but have gotten much better at), and Spruce was the closest dorm to the Terra building, where we MTs have most of our classes.

Second of all, being an only child, I needed to be eased into living with somebody else. Though you are living in close proximity in Spruce, you run the risk of doing the same in Pine or Furness. While living in Pine, you could potentially live with one roommate or more. While living in Furness, you MUST live with multiple people, which did not appeal to me at all, regardless of the common room.

I agree with BroadwayWannabe that you should try to expand your horizons and not live with somebody in your major. However, I had the experience where my roommate and I both requested to live with somebody in a major other than our own, and lo! and behold, we were two MT freshmen placed together.

Regarding auditions: Being as busy as you will end up being, one round of common casting auditions is definitely enough. The shows are cast this way so no one person is spreading themselves too thin during a semester and so shows are cast fairly with directors and faculty in on casting meetings. There are separate auditions for some student pieces, though whether they are directing scenes for a class or auditions for the student-produced one-acts called EQUINOX, depends on the semester. I don't feel lacking in audition knowledge because we are taught it in classes before we leave. I find it is nearly impossible to recreate a professional audition situation with casting in universities because we still know exactly who we're auditioning for and who we're up against. There is material I would never choose to use for a UArts audition that I would use freely and openly for an audition for a paying job, and vice versa.

Have I gone off on a tangent? My apologies if I have, I'm just a bit addled from the fact that it's a Wednesday night and tomorrow is Thursday, and I still have so much homework to complete. BroadwayWannabe will tell you that you can find me schlepping a suitcase around every Thursday without fail, so I can carry everything I need to my myriad classes and then some!

StickerShock

This is a very good point I had not thought of!

BroadwayWannabe

haha i did notice your suitcase today!! and i agree totally about the auditions...when i was one of five girls called back for a role last year, i knew exactly who the other 4 girls were and what their abilities were....that certainly doesn't happen in the real world where you don''t know everyone haha. yay uarts!