<p>In December my family saw a couple of shows and we really enjoyed looking for school references in Playbill, then the fun started; I have a problem that once I start something I like to do it was well as it can possibly be done. Anyway, over Christmas break I started scanning the Playbills on playbill.com and started to keep a crude tally of schools (oblivious to the fact that EmsDad had done the same thing a little over a year ago), trends were certainly emerging, but I was worried that a snapshot of bios could provide a poor dataset limited to a short time history and factors like
some schools might inspire actors to mention their schools more than others, so I wanted to dig deeper. </p>
<p>Step 1: List every musical that appeared on broadway in the past 2 years plus musicals scheduled to open soon that have a cast listing on playbill.com (Pippin was the furthest out). Accomplished by searching for plays based on start and end dates on playbill.com, and selecting all of the plays within the timeframe that playbill calls a musical. I ended up with 53 musicals (listed below). A dataset that included tours and regionals would obviously be more complete, but that data is not available in such a complete form. </p>
<p>PLAYS INCLUDED: Pippin, Jekyll&Hyde, Motown, Matilda, Kinky Boots, Hard Body, Cinderella, Christmas Story, Scandalous, Edwin Drood, ELF, Annie, Chaplin, Bring It On, Fela, Leap of Faith, Nice Work If, Ghost, Evita, Newsies, JC Superstar, Once, Lysistratra Jones, On A Clear Day, Bonnie and Clyde, Godspell, Follies, Hair, Spiderman, Baby Its You, Sister Act, Wonderland, War Horse, Catch Me If, Anything Goes, How To Succeed, Book of Mormon, Priscilla Queen, West Side Story, In the Heights, American Idiot, La Cage, Million Dollar, Addams Family, Billy Elliot, Memphis, Mary Poppins, Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia, Wicked, Lion King, Chicago, Phantom.</p>
<p>Step 2: Download the name of every actor that appeared in these shows. Accomplished by viewing the cast list on playbill.com and checking the expand all replacements box, then pasting this data into a spreadsheet.</p>
<p>Step 3: Extract the names of all of the actors from the data. This was probably the hardest programming, because after pasting-as-text, the character names were mixed with actor names and comments like swing, understudy, replacement, dates, etc. I wrote a macro based on the format of the data to extract the actors names, and verified that this process worked for some of the shows but all, particularly those with hundreds of cast members over the course of the show (Chicago, Lion King, etc.) Im pretty sure the process worked for them too, but I havent double checked them. The total number of actors identified was ~2400.</p>
<p>Step 4: Determine where to place the break between roles and ensemble. This was important to us because my daughter is not a dancer, and currently is not that interested in becoming a great dancer except that she knows she needs to achieve some proficiency to make a career viable. I realize that ensemble does not equate to great dancer for every show, while many non-ensemble roles indeed require first-rate dancers, but I think that splitting the data this way is still useful. For most shows it was fairly obvious were the split from role to ensemble was (e.g. all names listed after the first ensemble credit). The default metric was that if a replacement actor was listed in the top section of the data, then it was deemed a significant role, if the replacement was at the end of the data in the all additional cast replacements then I considered that actor part of the ensemble. I waffled whether ensemble members that were understudies should be included in the roles tally, but in the end left them out (but if I have more time I should probably make them an intermediate category).</p>
<p>Step 5: Identify all musicals that each actor appeared in, and label as role or ensemble. This was another macro that cycles through all of the cast lists for each musical and adds that show to the actors credits. The most for one actor was 6 for Charlie Sutton (who I never found a school reference for, despite seeing some photos during the search that I would have been glad to miss). Grason Kingsberry from Juilliard had 5.</p>
<p>Step 6: Identify actor gender and eliminate child actors from the list. This was done by looking at the headshots on the expanded playbill.com cast listing. I identified about 150 of the 2400 total actors as children. At the same time I labeled the actors as male and female based on their head shots (not 100% accurate of course!) there turned out to be about 25% more male roles than female (bummer for those of us with daughters), combined with a rough observation that about 75% of the auditionees we saw were female statistically these numbers mean that auditioning females are 4 times less likely to appear on broadway that their male counterparts ( .56/.25 divided by .44/.75 = ~4).</p>
<p>Step 7: Create preliminary tally of which schools that actors attended when possible I delineated whether they graduated or left early, but in the end counted them all the same in the results. This was accomplished by reading the bios online for shows currently in production and the scan of the opening night playbill on the web-site. Overall this accounted for about half of the dataset, i.e. about 50% of actors that I identified with a school listed their alma mater in the playbill or official website bio. Note, playbill.com contains the scans of every opening program that an actors name appears in, so I could check if they mentioned their alma mater earlier in their career, which several had indeed done. Note, I also denoted MFAs. There is not much of note with this data except that it is totally dominated by Yale and Tisch, with about 20 a piece – no other school had more than a few. I did not include MFAs , MAs or MMs in the data Im presenting, only undergrad degrees (or initial pursuit of undergrad degree if they left early). I also did not bother at all to record foreign schools, which may have accounted for 50 to 100 actors.</p>
<p>Step 8: After the bio searches, google the actor name to see if there is a link to a personal website, news story etc, that might contain a bio/resume that listed a school this probably accounted for about 30% of the schools that I found.</p>
<p>Step 9: Go to the websites of every school that I considered an MT school or had a fair number of preliminaries tallies, and search for pages that listed alumni or monthly newsletters, etc. I did this for 44 schools, pretty much in line with those heading the infamous number-of-posts thread. I ended up finding about 20% of the actors schools this way, i.e. when I read alumni success pages about 80% of them I had already identified. There wasnt much gained from alumni news for some schools because their actors had religiously identified their school in the playbills, e.g. Elon, FSU, while for some schools I found a lot of actors with this method e.g. CCM and BoCo. Age was definitely a factor too, recent grads were much more likely to list school than actors in their 30s and 40s.</p>
<p>Step 10: Search CC posts for alumni news. The Tisch posts on CC were the most helpful here.</p>
<p>Step 11: Wrote the coding to tally the data, and I planned/hoped to stop here, but then I started to wonder about legacy schools versus trending schools. I know these definitions could spark a few comments, but I thought it would be useful to know which schools have put out more actors over the past 5 years or decade (since the MT programs are relatively new at many schools), as well as those that have continually produced over the past 20+ years. So, I went back to the alumni websites and looked for graduation or class-of years, I probably got about 60% of the dates this way. Then I spent way too much time Googleing each actor that I did not have a date for, sometimes I would find a graduation date (or their class if they left early), sometime a high-school graduation date (e.g. links to proud hometown newspaper articles), and sometimes an age, after which I would tally their class-of date based on when they were 21. Id guess I got about 60% of the class-of dates exact, 30% within 1 or 2 years either way, and 10% could be off by a few years or more. For a few Im surely off by a lot in those cases where I had to guess age based on headshot (which is tough since head-shots are often designed to make someone look younger than they are).</p>
<p>Step 12: Prepare to respond to numerous comments to this post, some surely to be valid and perhaps some not. And for those that will respond that I have way too much time on my hands, I retort that they also must have way too much time on their hands to bother mentioning that I have way too much time on my hands. Plus, this effort may prove to be helpful to some people, so it could end up being time well spent after all.</p>