High School versus Performing Arts High School

BRbway
Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:23:01 +0000

This thread has touched on most of these subjects:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/musical-theater-major/472730-performing-arts-high-schools-4.html#post1059973972

“I went to a private boarding PA with almost 100% scholarship. I feel that my PA highschool prepared my peers and I extremely well for college auditions.
We had a private 30-minute audition technique session once a week beginning the first week of school. Those were to work mainly on monologues, but you could also bring in songs. Musical theatre kids were expected to have 3-6 monologues, and straight acting kids were expected to have 6-12.
There was musical theatre dance(including tap), ballet, jazz, and modern classes available to us. We also had a song for musical theatre, acting for musical theatre, and song and dance lab. Then you could also choose to pay extra for private voice lessons with the musical theatre teacher (part of the theatre faculty) or with the voice teachers (part of the music faculty).
We also had acting technique classes, directing, voice and diction, oral interpretation, acting for the camera, stage combat, stage elements, and stage movement classes every day. My school day was typically 8-5:30, with an hour for lunch, and some people had 1 free period. These days included very rigorous academics. They don’t offer AP classes outside of math and science, but I was able to take the AP tests, anyways, and get 5’s on both of my enlish AP Exams.
The one complaint I had though was that the theatre faculty was thoroughly knowledgable about acting programs, but only really knew about the big name musical theatre schools since most the graduates were all getting into them. Although, since it’s been becoming so much harder to get into musical theatre schools they have been trying to expand their knowledge by visting some lesser known schools and getting into contact with the heads of the programs.
At my auditions this year the main difference I noticed was just an overall confidence, preparedness, and ease that most of the kids lacked, and not all but most students from my school felt prepared enough to have this confidence. We also went in sort of knowing what would be happening at each audition, and we had our teachers with us at Unifieds. At a lot of my auditions the auditors asked about my school and told me to say “hi” to my teachers for them. I guess there’s a comfort in knowing that the schools I applied to already had a relationship with my school, the teachers, and kids at their schools that graduated from mine.”