<p>Two things: First, “deserving it” is a designation that has no place in the entertainment industry. This is a business within which it is completely legitimate to prefer to hire one person over another based on appearance, personality, connectedness to others in the industry and so on. Those are actual qualifications. There is no required training, no licensing system with exams to pass, none of the objective measures that might determine which strivers succeed. Fairness could not be less of a factor in determining preference of employment.</p>
<p>Second, few working actors stick to one type of platform any longer. Most anyone who is making a living is doing so through a combination of media: theater, TV, film, commercials, industrials, voice over, etc and an even wider variety of genres within those platforms. There is no longer a distinction between “stage actors” and others. “Remember, $1500 a week is only $78K a year”. That’s if you work 52 weeks a year. Of the AEA members who were employed at all last season, the average number of weeks worked was 16. 1500 x 16 = $24K. That’s not a living wage. Cobbling together a career from sporadic work in all areas is the pathway to survival and it’s a struggle that never ends. </p>
<p>All of which is just to say that parents might want to have extremely frank discussions with their teens about the wisdom of funding an education as narrowly focused as a BFA in musical theater. Even the most gifted, hard-working, and fortunate one among them is incredibly unlikely to build a working life around musical theater alone. Better to be clear about that reality going in than to have it slowly dawn five or ten years out of school. These numbers are real. </p>
<p>And still, my kid’s pre-screens are out and essays are underway… </p>