Since this is a blog about whatever I am interested in...I am going to post a 3-part series about the Bachelor's of Fine Arts (BFA) in Musical Theatre degree (since we are paying for one of those kinds of degrees right now for Eric and I have three other sons in Theatre.)
The first article is against the MT-BFA (could you tell by the title?) It is reposted from this dude's blog and I have included the original link. Right up front let me say I mostly don't agree with him, however, he makes a valid(ish) point. If you are a BFA candidate, don't lose heart...more info will come.
chris
The BFA Musical Theatre Degree Should Die
Posted July 17th, 2011
Tom Loughlin: Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre Arts/Acting and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the State University of New York at Fredonia
Dunkirk NY – I have come to believe that data should play an important part in any discussion of the state of theatre and theatre education today. So it comes as a welcome treat that Broadway producer Ken Davenport has posted some really interesting statistics on the state of musical theatre on Broadway, as well on plays. His blog posts detail the decline in how much theatre Broadway actually produces, and by inference how many fewer jobs there actually are. The numbers are here, here, and here. The statistical reality (no surprise here) is that there is far less of anything being produced today. Size of musical casts went from 69% of musicals with casts over 30 in the 1950s to 27% today. In the 1940s, the number of new plays on Broadway averaged 49.4. In the 2000s, it’s now 11.7 (10.9 in the 1990s). New musicals? In the 1940s the number of new musicals each season was 14.9. In the 2000s, 9.3, an uptick from the 1990s (7.5). Broadly speaking (pun intended), Broadway is about half the size it was in the 1940s.
I came upon these statistics almost at the same time I had a typical visit from a young high school senior-to-be who was out shopping for colleges and musical theatre programs. I took her and her parents on my usual tour and then we spent time chatting in my office and they asked the usual questions. Of course, the topic of future employment came up, as it always does, and I always try to be honest with parents and students on this issue – future employment in the theatre is a slim proposition if you think of trying to make your living full-time in musical theatre. But I went a little beyond that this day, in that I began to mention that, when you really stop to think about it, there is not much work in musical theatre beyond NYC or tours. Regional theatres do not regularly do musicals because of the costs involved, and outside of Florida and a few other isolated regions like Boston or perhaps Chicago there is not much musical theatre being done in this country, especially at levels where one can reasonably make a living doing it. So why spend four years of your young life, as well as the dollars involved, to study musical theatre exclusively as a specialty, when the market is so bad and has been in decline for years?
It’s interesting to note that the rise of the BFA Musical Theatre and interest in the degree came at exactly the same time as size of casts and number of musicals was decreasing (if you charted this on a graph I believe you’d get a big “X”). It is a perfect example of McLuhan’s so-called “rear view mirror” effect, where society tends to see in its media not its future or its present, but its past. In other words, the very thing you’re watching on TV is probably in cultural decline at that very moment (which may account for the fact that TV shows generally have less than a three-year life span). The popularity of the “high school musical” rose as a reflection of the popularity of musicals in general, but even as high school musicals grew in popularity, musicals on Broadway were declining.
The musical theatre degree gained popularity as kids wanted to continually re-create the thrill of being in their high school musical. When you’re 16 or 17 and get a lot of attention and notariety because you are the local HS musical star, it’s a heady thing, and the encouragement you receive to continue your “career” in college can be overwhelming. But nobody at the high school level points out the actual reality of the business to these budding stars, and of course nobody really knows the statistics. So when they show up in my office or any other theatre program wanting a BFA in musical theatre, they no doubt believe they are good enough to succeed and there is opportunity out there.
There isn’t really, beyond a chosen and lucky few. The “failure rate” of students with BFA degrees in Musical Theatre is extraordinarily high if you define “success” as being in musicals a majority of the time. Musical theatre students who survive in theatre generally end up doing a lot more non-musical than musical theatre in their careers. They end up being “actors who can sing and dance” as opposed to bona fide musical theatre actors. And PS – how many musicals these days require high-level dancing? Most dancers on Broadway today are probably exclusively dancers, not actors or singers. A student who has trained himself or herself with the intent of being a “triple threat” does not have a grasp on the realities of the business these days. No one is writing material for “triple threat” actors, scores on the whole do not contain “musical breaks” allowing for big dance numbers (viz. Oklahoma or West Side Story), and if you can’t truly Dance, it’s probably a sure bet you won’t make the cut, because the people out there who can Dance can really Dance.
Any rationally-based corporation spends a lot of time trying to analyze their market and adjust their practices accordingly. But theatre, it appears, is not a rationally-based enterprise, and the same and more can be said for educational theatre. It is an enterprise based on nostalgia and past practice, not data. The fact is that employment opportunities in musical theatre, not to mention other theatrical trends, seems to escape the notice of theatre departments altogether, or they willfully ignore the data because they fear the time, effort and work it would take to change their curricula (not to mention the loss they’d suffer in enrollments). It’s time for theatre departments to begin to cut their BFA Musical Degree programs from their curricular offers, because given the realities of the business today these degrees are disingenuous at the very least and outright lies at the worst.
Theatre students are better off if they spend their time studying how to create and devise theatre, and if they have the interest and the talent, take vocal lessons and/or dancing lessons as a supplement to the primary study of how to create quality theatre. Having those skills are an asset in any situation. It’s not that I am against learning to sing and dance, but I am opposed to branding and marketing a degree program to students when that market hardly exists. A BFA degree program in musical theatre should exist in only a few schools at best, and as educators we ought to be honest enough to know that we are selling snake oil to most of the students who dream of doing Broadway-style musical theatre. -twl
