This news should bring joy to Verona High School’s theater arts students: The Paper Mill Playhouse is partnering with the online arts platform Acceptd and a large group of top university musical theater programs to introduce universal criteria for digital auditions. The partnership is called the Musical Theatre Common Pre-Screen.
“We identified this issue in Paper Mill Playhouse’s College Prep program where students reported having to create more than 30 media files to submit audition videos to eight schools,” said Mark S. Hoebee, Paper Mill’s producing artistic director. “We knew we had the capacity to positively impact these college applicants. The promotion of arts education and supporting the greater musical theater community, as core to our mission gave us the motivation to facilitate guidelines with universities across the nation to relieve some of the stress on graduating seniors and provide the most inclusive process among musical theater programs.”
As MyVeronaNJ reported in 2017, theater majors face a daunting college application process. Mia Corbett (VHS ’17) did all the same Common App paperwork as her classmates for 16 colleges, but then had to follow it with dozens of auditions that took her and her mom from New York, to Boston, North Carolina and the Midwest.
Schools that have adopted the Musical Theatre Common Pre-Screen criteria for 2019-2020 applications are:
• Boston Conservatory at Berklee
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Coastal Carolina University
• College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati
• Elon University
• Indiana University
• Ithaca College
• Missouri State University*
• Montclair State University*
• Pace University
• Pennsylvania State University
• Rider University
• Shenandoah Conservatory
• Texas Christian University
• Texas State University
• Texas Tech University
• The University of Alabama
• University of North Carolina Greensboro
• University of Oklahoma, Weitzenhoffer School of Musical Theatre
• Wright State University*
*these schools do not require a digital pre-screen, but use the criteria for digital audition submissions
