Musical Theater - Bachelor of Fine Arts

Program Total Credits: 123

The four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts Musical Theater Program prepares students for professional careers as performers in the musical theater or for continued study in graduate school. The program defines the term “musical theater” in a way that embraces the richness and diversity of this challenging interdisciplinary art form, which includes musical comedy, the musical play (in the Hammerstein-Sondheim tradition), new and alternative music theater, “Broadway opera,” cabaret, and revue. Students receive the same technique training as do acting majors through their first five semesters. This training is complemented by training in vocal technique, musicianship, dance, and the study of the repertoire of the musical theater in print and recordings, as well as in rehearsal and performance.

Actor training in the School of Theater Arts lies at the heart of the two performance curricula. The training is designed to cultivate the actor’s ability to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Students develop an understanding that such truth begins with a shared interconnectedness between actors onstage.

Early technique studies, for majors in both acting and musical theater, emphasize the “reality of doing” as it is rooted in a full emotional life, driven by action and expressed with meaning, clarity, and theatricality. To this end, students are challenged to cultivate a fuller understanding of themselves and to continually exercise their skills as analysts of text and as observers of human behavior.

The program introduces students to a range of training methods (Linklater, Meisner, IPA, LeCoq, Williamson, Fitzmaurice, Laban) as a part of their training. The successful student should emerge from the program with a practicable performance technique in place, which enables her/him to develop and sustain a role from first rehearsal to closing night.

Students completing these programs are also expected to be knowledgeable about a variety of styles and types of drama, and the challenges presented by each; to work in a vocally and physically free and efficient manner; to be able to identify their character type and its potential range within the casting conventions of the industry; to have a sense of how to begin to establish a career as a performer; and to possess a work ethic that will support the collaborative nature of theatrical production.

Additionally, the Musical Theater Program seeks to train students who:

• use the singing voice in a vibrant, healthy, and dramatically effective manner;
• understand music as the singing actor’s second text and clearly present its expressive intentions;
• have a solid dance technique and a command of the language of dance and movement; and
• integrate all component skills of musical theater performance to create consistently honest and expressive behavior.