Playbill: As part of Playbill’s Back to School week (#BwayBacktoSchool), we have combined past Schools of the Stars features that track where members of the casts for each Broadway show went to college, along with a bit of added research, to present the ten colleges currently most represented on Broadway (plus a few honorable mentions). This list represents not only Broadway shows that are currently open, but a few shows that have announced casting for the 2018-2019 season. Check them out and see if your school (or the school you’re possibly considering) is on the list!
4 comments:
When searching and applying for colleges, I knew which schools were considered the “great” ones but I didn’t know which were best for me. I scoured lists like these for hours trying to pick which schools to interview for and generally the same schools popped up. I think the editor’s note that Playbill gives in the description that they are not critiquing each school, just stating information is very helpful to the reader. I know not many students get the chance to visit every school they’re considering, so lists like these seem like a very reliable source. For the schools themselves, it’s great publicity for prospective students and gives the school a great name. Schools, like Carnegie, are usually on all of these lists, which does give us a good sense of school pride, but I feel like it hinders some students from finding what program is truly right for them.
I feel like this is something that I've been saying for years but I really wish that there were lists like this for people outside of the casts working on Broadway. For the most the alumni that get the most recognition are the people who are onstage or sometimes producing their own shows. Obviously the people in the casts are the ones who draw the most commercial attention, and are the flashiest names to advertise the actual schools. However, I still would really love to see what the results would be if they surveyed the designers and managers would be for each school. I think this will be good publicity for Carnegie Mellon, but I think that this article will be better for less well-known schools. I was surprised to see schools such as AMDA and Fordham on this list, so it's good to know that are a variety of schools that are consistently sending their alumni to Broadway.
It’s always interesting to see where people are from on Broadway. It also helps to figure out who is doing what right, and what they are doing right. I would not call any of the schools in the top ten “surprising” by any means. Truthfully, no school on this list is a surprise at all. It is nice to see Carnegie Mellon University at number five on the list. Truthfully, one might even expect it to be even higher on the list, in fact, it’s interesting that both University of Cincinnati - College Conservatory of Music and University of Michigan are above CMU on this list. One might also expect to find Northwestern and Juilliard higher on this list as well. I do not think anyone is surprised to to find NYU at the top of this list however, just due to their reputation and proximity to New York and Broadway.
In Technical Direction one this week we had a long conversation about lists such as this and as a class we thought it was interesting. While it is exciting to see that almost every discipline in the school of drama ends up on a list like this, you have to ask who makes these lists and where are the getting the info from? David mentioned he talked to peter about this and said that no one every contacts the school about these things. An interesting point David also made was that how can you compare alumni from 1970 to 1990 to 2015. Teach and the teachers evolve and the training will be different. In the end you should pick a school based on what you as an individual will need. In the end if you are meant to get a tony it will happen and it will not necessarily matter where you got a degree form.
Post a Comment