Playbill: As part of Playbill's Back to School week, take a look at our annual report on the colleges and universities with the most alumni performing on Broadway in the last season. Below you'll find this year's top 10 most represented schools on Broadway, plus a few honorable mentions that just barely missed making the top 10. Take a look and see if your school—or a school you're considering attending—made the list!
11 comments:
This article affirms so many aspects of why I decided to come to Carnegie Mellon. Being the 8th most represented school on broadway with huge names like “Hamilton”, “Hadestown”, and “Wicked” is a huge honor to be able to be trained and educated at. I think that a lot of people choose schools based on popularity, and while CMU is a really highly ranked school, I think that a lot of people don’t really understand how huge CMU really is. When coming here, I would tell people I was going to CMU and they would respond “Where?”. It wasn’t even that this upset me, but I wished that people knew the kind of institution that I worked so hard to get into and just how difficult it was. Plus, how amazing the program I got into would be for me. To see this represented in the media is really refreshing. Not to say that CMU isn’t widely pronounced in the media, but just because it is doesn’t mean people will click on an article entitled “Carnegie Mellon does x…”. This article is different as it is coming from Play Bill, a widely attributed source, and calls attention to anyone who has gone to university.
I was surprised to find that the University of Michigan is number 2 on this list of Colleges for being the most represented on Broadway. During my college search, I never even considered University of Michigan as an option because I didn’t think it had a drama program. But come to find, many of the people that are alumnus from this school ended up in shows like Chicago, The Lion King, MJ the Musical and so many more. What surprised me was that Carnegie was only number 8 on the list. I thought it would be higher up for how high of a rating the institution and program has. However, even though it’s still only number 8, there are many different shows that Alumnists have been a part of. It still continues to amaze me that I am part of a program that is as highly ranked as it is, and that one day I too could have my name on a list like this. That thought to me is amazing, and has fueled my theatre career for the past 4 years, and continues to fuel my drive for the next coming years.
Sorry, the above is actually mine, I forgot to login to my account first. So here it is again with my actual account. Sorry!
I was surprised to find that the University of Michigan is number 2 on this list of Colleges for being the most represented on Broadway. During my college search, I never even considered University of Michigan as an option because I didn’t think it had a drama program. But come to find, many of the people that are alumnus from this school ended up in shows like Chicago, The Lion King, MJ the Musical and so many more. What surprised me was that Carnegie was only number 8 on the list. I thought it would be higher up for how high of a rating the institution and program has. However, even though it’s still only number 8, there are many different shows that Alumnists have been a part of. It still continues to amaze me that I am part of a program that is as highly ranked as it is, and that one day I too could have my name on a list like this. That thought to me is amazing, and has fueled my theatre career for the past 4 years, and continues to fuel my drive for the next coming years.
Yeah, this makes sense to me. This summer I worked with a lot of performers from most of these schools, ESPECIALLY from the Cincinnati CCM, and I can pretty much guarantee they are all Broadway-bound should they desire to pursue that. I did not run into any NYU people this summer, though I have friends from high school who currently attend. I also did not work with any U of M'ers but I know the company I worked at used to hire a lot of U of M kids because the then-artistic director's partner worked at U of M as head of the dance program or something like that. Also haven't got any Juilliard performers, but I do have a friend who's there for, like, bassoon performance or something. It is kind of fun to see CMU on this list. I am not surprised to see it there, but I am not surprised that it isn't one of the top-ranking amongst the top-ranking, either.
This list seems pretty consistent with those of past years’. Seeing NYU at the top though, I wonder if proximity to Broadway really makes a difference when getting cast. It makes sense that there is more exposure for those actors since they are already in New York City, but I didn’t know it made that much of a difference for positions that are audition-based. Looking further down, I see that three out of the four honorable mentions are New York City based. The one school on this list I haven’t heard much about is AMDA. I’m also interested to see what these programs prioritize in their training. The performers here always say that CMU prioritizes acting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between that and a larger presence in plays versus musicals. And as we’re all reminded, not every performer’s goal is to work on Broadway, so it’s important to analyze other metrics of success too.
To be honest this list is almost exactly what I imagined it to be. During the regular school year here at Carnegie Mellon University we always hear of alumni from our Drama going on to act, sing, dance, etc on Broadway. Just recently we had many alumni working on A Strange Loop (Antwayn Hopper, Jon Michael-Reese, Kevin, Emrick, and Billy Porter) that was even nominated for - and won - a Tony award. I actually figured our number would be higher but then I saw how large the NYU paragraph was and quickly changed my mind. Although I am so sure the list would be longer if they included technical designers, producers, managers, and more. Honestly the only part of this that somewhat surprised me was University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music being so high up and exactly tied with CMU. I had never heard of them prior to this but now I will pay more attention to the next time I hear someone attends there.
To be honest, I really don't keep up with different colleges, so I had no idea that some of these schools even had big drama programs, let alone ones with so many alumni representatives on Broadway. I knew that we had a ton of notable alumni on Broadway, but that was pretty much as far as my knowledge went. But anyways, it really is kind of inspiring how many of our alumni make such a splash on a national level. Even though I know rationally that it doesn't really mean that a given school is in any way better, it makes me feel more confident in my choice of college. None of this is to detract from alumni that don't go on to Broadway, because Broadway is certainly not the only valid path to go down once we graduate from CMU. Even more, a list like this helps to give ideas on colleges to keep an eye on as we contemplate doing grad school later on down the line (for those of us who are undergrads).
If I were to imagine a list of the most represented schools on the Broadway stage, this is very close to the list I would imagine. It's no surprise to me that NYU is at the top -- their acting program is not only top-notch and rigorous, but their proximity to Broadway allows for earlier and more frequent networking/audition opportunities. What I would be especially interested in, however, is a similar list comprised of "behind-the-scenes" representation. Which schools are most represented in design, directing, management, technical direction, etc. I wonder if that would change which schools make the list and which schools move up or down. My guess is Carnegie Mellon and Yale would move up the list and performance-oriented schools like Julliard would fall off.
In any case, I agree with others that it's inspiring to see our own school on the list. Not because of Broadway is the end-all, be-all of theatre, but it's inspiring to see alumni out there working and achieving their passions.
I think that this article is really interesting and telling. Most of the results were not that surprising and I am proud to be able to say that I go to one of them. I will also say that I have never heard of Elon University and I was a bit surprised about University of Michigan being the second most represented. I was also surprised that Columbia sis not make the list or the honorable mention list. I did observe that all of these colleges are on the North East side of the United States. I know there are several amazing colleges in the west that are not represented. I do wonder if it is because of the huge presence of the film industry. I wonder if there was a way to track the level of TV or Film presence that students coming out of these universities has. I wonder what those lists would look like.
After just going through the difficult and tedious process of college applications, prescreens, interviews and auditions, it is so interesting to look back on myself from a year ago and see what type of research I was doing to choose the schools I applied to. I scoured the internet and talked to so many people about where to apply and statistics on each university. As someone who ultimately wants to end up working on Broadway at some point, reading this article validated that I was looking at the right places. This article makes me wonder if the close proximity of universities to Broadway stages greatly influence their statistics. I wonder if a similarly formatted list exists of design and production numbers, or even those involved in the TV and film industry. I would love to see what schools are on a ranked list of designers, managers, and directors as well.
I can’t say any of the schools on this list surprised me. And, of course, NYU at the top there. Literally in the same city, no big surprise there. I think it’s exciting to see people going into commercial theater from programs like ours, and our program itself. I think measuring any sort of “success” of a school/program/or person off of this isn’t fair (not saying people are, Broadway is only one avenue people pursue). Personally, commercial theater isn’t what I’m super excited about (again, this is my personal plans for my future, absolutely no shame to anyone wanting to do different things). But, Melissa made a great point, I would love to know what this list would look like from the design & production side of things- some universities’ drama programs are definitely more performance based versus DP, or a balance of the two. Not going to lie, this would be a cool pie chart to see in addition to the names!
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