Monday, August 28, 2017
5 Cities Outside Of NYC Where You Can Pursue A Career In Theatre
Theatre Nerds: If you’re not feeling the urge to take a bite out of the Big Apple, you can still have a great theatre career in many other cities within the United States. The regional market is thriving, so if you’re considering laying down your hat and stepping into the footlights, check out these five cities
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6 comments:
Oftentimes, I think Broadway has come to represent the sum total of theatre in the eyes of the public. Yet, this article proves that this truly couldn't be farther from the truth. For example, Chicago holds a thriving local theatre community that produces art which seeks to rectify the deep racism in the roots of the Windy City. Such theatre companies do incredible works that often goes unnoticed beneath the hubbub of the city, yet they continually plant the seeds of change.
This article has very little research and information. I am a biased opinion, but they didn't even think to mention that the Dallas Theater Center just won a regional Tony. This article appears to be based solely on opinion and doesn't have a clear way of defining why each city is best for pursuing a career in theater. I would suggest something more fact based, like counting how many theaters there are per city, or how many productions are taking place in each town. I think, if you make the right connections, and find the right opportunities, a career in theater can be possible in any city.
In American theatre, all roads lead back to broadway. This article seems to be written with the intention that careers outside broadway are quality careers, which is true, but this article just lists cities with theater companies that just feed shows into broadway, which defies the articles primary goal. Going off from Al's comment, what this article could be focusing on is the uniqueness of theater in different cities. In order to truly represent these theatre cities, we need take out the stigma around broadway, and how broadway somehow makes shows better than high quality shows around the US. The primary goal isn't to get on broadway, it's to make art that is unique, local, and important to the audiences that watch the shows. This article would benefit from research that dives in further into the depths of theatre in cities, often times rural, that create art that doesn't need to necessarily be transferred.
I’ve found that frequently when I talk to people about the fact I’m pursuing a career in the theater industry they assume I plan on living in New York City, and they are often very surprised when I say I don’t necessarily plan on living there. I knew about most of these cities having fairly prominent theater industries, with the exception of Minneapolis. I think what people often don’t realize, and what this article doesn’t point out, is that there is theater in basically every major city in the United States. You don’t have to live in a theater hub to work in theater, there are regional theaters all over the country, and plenty of them do amazing and interesting work even if they aren’t as prestigious as Broadway. Then again, I suppose there are plenty of industries that have one location where the industry is very prominent (such as Silicon Valley) but there are still plenty of other places where you can work in that industry.
As a young adult just starting to see herself pursuing theatre as a career, I thought the only city in which you can be a successful theater maker was in New York. I didn't learn that there were so many other options than New York theatre until several years later. Now I understand that New York is just one hub for a certain type of theatre and that there are so many other communities of great, professional theatre that many people have successfully worked on. Many people I have worked with Don't strive to work in New York because they simply don't want to work in that type of environment on that type of theater and that is great. This article proposes some cities that I had never thought to consider. I would like to look more into what kind of theater these cities have to offer and see if any of them are a good fit for me.
I think this article serves as a good reminder that you can find work out of what is commonly thought as the two major places for professional work, New York or Los Angeles. I think that people can too often become blinded by looking to make it big in New York and can end up passing great opportunities by at an early point in their life that can stunt or prevent untold possibilities. through my life I have never set working in New York as a major goal and because of that I may have done the inverse and not gone after some jobs, but this has also gotten me to the point I am at now and working at the level I am today. I also appreciate that the author has not just done one thing and has both acted and worked back stage, thus giving her more perspective on where and how work can be found on both sides of the curtain.
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