<p>It all depends on what schools you’re looking at, but all schools ask for two contrasting pieces. This usually means one ballad (more of a legato line) and one up-tempo, and some schools will also ask that one be from classical musical theatre repertoire (generally this means before 1965 I believe, but the schools that require this will specify a cut-off year). I myself am going through this process as well and am also having trouble finding adequate songs, and there aren’t as many songs for us guys as there are for girls (at least according to my teachers and my research but I could be wrong). I just finished reading Mary Anna Dennard’s book “I Got In” and she provided many different ways you can approach the audition piece search, so I recommend looking at that as well!</p>
<p>There is a website called Stage Agent where you can search for audition pieces and filter results by gender, voice type, song type (ballad/up-tempo), and show era. Just be careful with this website because many of the results are songs that are quite overdone these days, so make sure to cross-reference the results with a “Do Not Sing” list, which you can find somewhere here on CC I believe (??). And also, their results for contemporary songs seem to stop at a certain year as there are no songs from the past 3 to 4 years of new musicals.</p>
<p>Also, make sure to pick songs that are age-appropriate. I find it helpful to google composers, see what shows they’ve done, look at the character breakdown of the show to see if there are any of a relatable age, and then see if they have any songs (can be a solo or even an extended solo section in a duet or chorus number, since the full song is not needed at auditions). I’ve done this a few times and have discovered numerous songs that I did not know of before from shows that I didn’t even know existed.</p>
<p>Final words of advice: Don’t choose a song from Les Miz or Wicked, sometimes Andrew Lloyd Webber is frowned upon, and also Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown are not recommended due to difficulty for the accompanist to cold read and also most of their pieces contain mature content.</p>
<p>This is what I know from my own research, it might not all be accurate but I hope it helps!</p>