<p>Someone brought up a question about this in another thread so I figured we could all go after in in its own thread.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, when I was at the American College Theatre Festival we had a great workshop with this gentleman who works in NY as a director, and along with talking about audition technique and resumes and the like, he made it a big point to talk about agents. He said you need one, absolutely no question about it. At the beginning of your career it can help to find you gigs, but once your career starts going a bit more the agent you work under can work to give you that reputation boost that you lose after graduating from TopMT University. They also help you to get salary increases and handle some of the more legal parts of the business that I sure as heck know would confuse me. (Of course once you become Burnadette Peters, as every student on this thread will! You'll need a manager, but that's another story.)</p>
<p>As far as finding good agents, it's all about word of mouth. Any person can list themselves as an agent in a Theatre business newspaper, but there are legit books to flip through. It's sort of simlilar to the process of finding schools for musical theatre, of which we are ALL experts. When you first start out, with a huge list of schools it's daunting, but word of mouth and research can make tons of difference. It's also not such a huge deal to switch Agents. You'll know pretty quickly if your agent is any good or not. A simple test: go to their office (if it's in a basement you'll know real quick what kind of agent they are, lol) and they usually have pictures of their more sucessful clients on the walls. Are there any notable people up there? That won't always work, but it's something...</p>
<p>Anyway, I don't pretend to be an expert on the topic, I'm sure some of the coaches on here know way more- I'm just sharing what I got out of a really good workshop :)</p>