I will say @HappyDancer98 on the experiences my D has had during high school and even to be honest auditioning for community theatre in middle school, she always had to bring / choose her own song. Now sometimes they do ask for you to read from the script when there , so actually she has less experience on having to come up with monologues , but songs she has almost always had to have at least one chosen. Now that was not a huge issue because she had a voice teacher who helped her pick them so there is your training reference. She had access to someone who advised her. I will say that the regular high school theatre teachers are usually not well versed in what songs/ monologues are overdone. They tend to always recommend the same thing over and over. My D has a friend auditioning at a few schools this year and her choir teacher didn’t even stop her from singing a Les Mis song… Yikes. We told her NOOOO!!!
I also agree with @Bogeyw about the audition experience of learning how to ACT after you do not get a part! Your child should not act like an a-- afterwards. You have to learn to be gracious & that is a tough thing to do as a young person/ teen. Burn a few bridges in your local theatre community and that can come back to haunt you…
My daughter has always been asked to come in for auditions with monologues and or songs of her choosing. After callbacks then you get sides. That has been how it’s done in community theatre here in CA.
For high school, they were always given songs in advance. For community theatre, she always brought in her own 16-32 bars.
And unless your private voice teacher or acting coach really has their finger on the pulse of the audition scene for college, their advice in choosing monologues/songs is always going to be hit or miss. My D’s voice teacher (whom I adore and is WICKEDLY talented in addition to knowing lots of working actors) did not give accurate advice on song choice.
That is one place where I think audition coaches have completely found their niche - they are tapped in to what those college want to see - and don’t want to see. As well as taking a kid and crafting the best package that suits THEM.
Again, it’s one of my biggest regrets in my D’s audition season and if I had it to do over again, I certainly would hire a coach.
Having been to auditions in multiple states I have never come across a community theatre that has provided material for their initial auditions. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but it definitely helped D to have been through an audition process that resembles college and/or professional auditions. I think community theatre is going to be the best place to get that experience. The value of high school productions will depend on the program and the experience of the person heading up that program. We were lucky to have some good people running those programs at our high schools.
@KaMaMom…LOL on the advice for “There are Worse Things…” I had my younger D in a theatre program several years ago and they had her perform the song “Tik Tok” by Kesha. She was 7. There are DEFINITELY people out there that don’t know what they’re doing…
Thank you everyone for posting in this thread. I’ve learned a lot. I had no idea that our kids’ experiences could be so different just based on where they reside. We live in a fairly large metropolitan area (3 million people) with many community theatres and solid schools, but no PA high schools. Our D has performed in many plays and musicals at 6 different community theatres and one university. None asked those auditioning to bring songs or monologues. She did bring them for a regional audition. Thank heaven I found out about audition coaches early on by perusing this board. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Our D has benefited greatly from her coach, both in terms of choosing material and in helping to craft a balanced list of schools. I have two other kids in college so you’d think I’d heard of most colleges out there. But many of the really good MT programs are at schools I had never even heard of. We’ve had a lot to learn and based on what I’ve read from the old-timers on this board, there’s much more to come! Chicago Unifieds are around the corner. Break legs everyone!
Wow - I am dumbfounded at some of the stories from High Schools.
For clarity - there are many schools where auditioning involves picking your own monologue or song and singing it with an accompanist.
For those of you with early high school children, I would really recommend finding schools that work the best. Many urban areas have great P.A. high schools. There are great P.A. boarding schools in this country, or schools like mine - that are boarding schools with great P.A. departments. And all of these schools can be incredibly affordable - especially for students with exceeding talents.
When my D was in elementary school, she had an agent in Chicago. She worked and auditioned fairly consistently for about two years and did a fair amount of work. Until she entered middle school and we cut ties with the agent - and that was my choice.
Why? There would be lots of time for my D to work, perform and audition when she was older - I wanted my kid to have a fairly normal childhood and I also thought that school was very important. (Her time away from school seemed to be steadily increasing.)
So I dunno @TheaterHiringCo … a lot of us don’t live close enough to an urban area to make a PA high school feasible. And boarding school just isn’t an economic possibility - even w/ scholarships - for a lot of people. And I would say there are some of us, myself definitely included, that who would move heaven and earth for their kids, but who also want them to be well rounded individuals as well and experience a normal school and not move away from home til the very last second because once they’re gone, they’re gone.
At this point, I don’t even know what I’m rambling about.
I guess it’s a little bit of the fact that I’ve seen kids get really pushed into things that they’re not ready for just because of the parents expectations & dreams for them. It really is the rare kid who is chomping at the bit and ready to go and take flight … and who has the innate talent at such a young age AND drive to be able to sustain that without crashing and burning.
I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. More coffee is needed I guess.
If checking out PA high schools, delve deeply beyond pretty pictures and what their websites advertise. Yes, there are some great ones out there. Unfortunately, that was not my S’s experience at an urban public PA HS - HIS choice to transfer there as junior, against parental desires. Classes (academic AND theater/dance/vocal) were fairly remedial compared to what he hoped they would be (opportunities for music theory and technical studio comp class might be only exceptions). Stage productions were exercises in patience while standing on stage waiting for the director to give EVERYone their blocking and for others to learn their lines - up to and including tech week. Guidance for getting into college performance programs was nonexistent (even the teachers seemed pretty clueless). Everything S learned (except maybe patience and holding his tongue) came from outside of school. My S would say it was his excellent training at various local venues in evenings and on weekends (again, HIS choice; very little time for community performances) - and a well-timed trip to SETC his junior year (PA HS did not attend, even though it was 2 hours away!!) - that gave him what he needed to be prepared for auditions as well as the tenacity it takes to “make it” in his current program. Many of his HS peers who relied solely on their school experience got less than ideal results from their college auditions.
Wish my S could have attended your school @TheaterHiringCo. S’s PA HS stage productions sure looked “professional” from the seats in the house. . .
@KaMaMom , your “rambling” made complete sense to me! I completely agree, and your thoughts were the basis of us staying local with D and taking full advantage of the theatre scene there. Granted, it’s a rich theatre scene, but we still could have gone a more intense route in a bigger city. A boarding school would have been too expensive, and I wanted my D at home. (Not judging those who have kids at boarding schools at all. We’re close to people who do, and I completely support their decision. It’s a personal one.)
I have a few relatives in the TV/theatre scene, one of whom most people on here would recognize by name. They all knew of D’s talents and passion from the time she was young, and they advised and supported the path we took with D for various reasons. I admit that we still sometimes look at the kids who go to far away auditions and do national shows and briefly wonder if we did the right thing? If we shortchanged D? I’ll obviously never know. It’s just what we decided, and I’m glad we did for many reasons. I do know that this time that I have had and our family has had with my D was incredibly rich and, looking back, short lived.
Again, I’m not judging those who make different decisions at all. We know people who have kids at at PA boarding school quite well, and we support them, too. I just know what KaMaMom was saying.
(Full disclosure: we allowed another D to commute 1 1/2 hours each way 5 days a week for elite gymnastics for a couple years. We missed a lot of time with her, but she was doing what she loved. Although we didn’t move for gymnastics, we did end up moving close to that gym because we discovered due to this that the area was better for my husband’s business. Life changing for all of us–not bad, but, yes, life changing. I wouldn’t choose to allow that again, but I understand. See how I can’t judge? 
)
@myloves No judgment here! I can totally relate on the gymnastics front. 5x/week for 10 years - then my D finally said “enough!” I’m so glad she did as she is finding she has so many other interests and talents. Burn out can happen in any profession, vocation, career. It’s hard to keep our actor/MT kids (and let’s face it - their parents!) balanced.
We moved so our kids enroll in a PA HS 1/2 days Junior/Senior year. We had people tell us we were crazy to move for “such a thing”. A few of my D’s gymnastics friends (elite gymnasts) moved far from family and friends so they could train at elite gyms - and be homeschooled or tutored - so I didn’t consider a 30 mile move to another (much better) school district to be one of the whackier moves we ever made 
… and just to be clear - I wasn’t judging any parent who moves to be closer to opportunities for their kids and/or sending them to boarding school. Nope.
But sometimes I read things in a way here (and other places in the interwebs for certain) that allude to the fact that if you don’t do X for your kid, you’re a lesser parent and robbing them of future opportunities.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
(All of this said with a smile … and I really try to be the least Judgey McJudgerson person in real life. Different strokes for different folks and all thos other cute and applicable idioms & proverbs you can come up with._
Being in a performing arts high school doesn’t necessarily translate into being in lots of shows. My daughter goes to LaGuardia, and the acting training is phenomenal and she loves it…but there are very few opportunities to be in a show. They do just one musical per year, and almost all the roles in that go to juniors and seniors. And the only plays they do are in the Senior Drama Festival, which is a showcase for seniors only. So as a sophomore, my daughter hasn’t been in any shows. The only performing she does in school is scene work in class. Ironically, if she’d gone to a “regular” high school, she would have had more opportunities to be in school plays. But she loves the acting training she’s getting there, and feels that that’s more important than being in shows (as much as she would love that too).
As a further extension of the concept of pursuing balance versus a laser focus on either training or performing, at least for some kids it’s great to add a healthy dose of academics to the list. Several of D’s college friends who pursued double majors have made Broadway debuts within months of graduation, so it doesn’t seem that time spent on something unrelated to MT was harmful to their professional prospects.
I’m not sure that I have a lot to add to this, because I agree with so much of what has been posted, but I’ve always got an opinion, so here it is. The shows should be thought of as one aspect of the training which goes along with dance, voice and acting; it’s the aspect that is going to tell your child that this is what they want to do as a career. My experience has been that the kids that only do the performances; without any other training have a harder time getting into the better programs. Focus on the training and get good coaching for the college audition process.
I’ll weigh in here. My D went to a very big public HS (over 100 kids in her graduating class and over 4500 kids total), and I would say I (and I think she would as well) that having a more traditional high school experience was very important to her. The football games, homecomings, proms, etc., etc. are all things you get one shot at in life; you don’t get to redo high school and she wanted those experiences.
Now, as to performing. There were multiple plays and musicals and the competition was very tough, being such a big school. And although she was the lead in a play her senior year, not one time in high school was she the lead in a musical. Not for high school productions, and not for summer stock which she did each summer. She did perform in a lot of musicals though and that experience I think helped her a lot. And despite this she was accepted at 3 of the ten BFA auditions she did.
Questions were asked about training. She had a private voice coach who was great (and another coach just for auditions for MT), but she also sang in choirs all 4 years and in competition show choirs for three of those, and it did not seem to have any effect on her voice at all. And she loved show choir, a really big deal at her HS (they always rank in the top ten nationally). She had taken dance up to high school, but after that most of her dance was from show choir, and she would probably tell you she would keep up with dance lessons (especially ballet) if she had it to do over. She also took a lot of honors/AP classes and those helped with scholarship money as well as helped clear some room in her college curriculum for other classes.
So in the end each kid will have different ideas what they want. As a parent though, I would encourage you to encourage your child to not be in too big a hurry to grow up. I’d fear a child getting burn out if all they do is perform from an early age. I have a sister in law that coached college scholarship athletes, and she’d always tell me how much a lot of them were burned out and absolutely hated the sport they played, but felt trapped because that was their ticket to college
Y’all have made me feel a bit better this morning. Hadn’t been on CC in awhile and was just checking in. We don’t have a lot of audition/performance opportunities in our area and I was worried my D’s resume would be too thin. Thankfully, she has been putting the effort in to training the past nine months (since her decision to go the BFA MT route). The overwhelming agreement that training is important has made the dollars that have flown out of my pocket seem like it will be worth it. We will find out next year…