Overture/Opening Number

As a self-proclaimed theatre kid, I have firsthand experience being overlooked. That might seem ironic, considering that we theatre kids are stereotypically known for our rowdy midnight cast parties at Denny’s that send waiters spiraling. Yet, most people aren’t as willing to give the proverbial aux cord to someone whose playlist includes tap numbers and Act Two ballads as they are to someone who’s into the iconic and obviously genre-defining band One Direction. Explaining my music taste as an icebreaker usually gets far too convoluted—I end up saying, “it’s kind of complicated” and feign a sheepish smile. Neither do I get to share my knowledge of the subject much, even if it’s relevant. Sometimes my classmates and I work together to come up with analogies or mnemonic devices to help us remember content for a test. I can think of a dozen of ways to relate the endoplasmic reticulum to a moment in a musical, but my suggestion will be invariably passed over in favor of the person who relates it to baseball.

But of course, having people listen to me talk about my (completely not geeky) interest in a manner that’s clearly in one ear and out the other is insignificant, in the long run. I’ll take the sideways glances and awkward conversations as a necessary price for the personal enlightenment found in show tunes. Where there is a real missed opportunity when it comes to the glossing over of theatre kids, however, is in one of today’s most hotly debated realms: the college admissions system.

Today, most colleges attempt to transform their admissions process from the system that used to be primarily focused on the standardized test scores and GPAs to what they call a “holistic approach.” For example, the admissions officers at the University of Maine at Farmington describe their holistic policy as follows: “We look at your high school achievements, your extracurricular activities, your work and life experiences, community service activities, artistic and creative talents, and more” (Grove). The problem is, with a possible but hardly consoling exception of the “more,” the primary measures of the applicant’s fit to college remain qualitatively similar to the pre-holistic devices. Namely, they are still firmly rooted in structured activities. The educational, extracurricular, volunteering, musical, sports, and even service activities all take place within the contexts of structured institutions, and therefore, these activities’ relative excellence reflects as much (or more) the quality of such institutions as it does the agency of the participants themselves.

And therein lies the dilemma: students from different socio-economic backgrounds have dissimilar access to the institutions that shape their Common Core content. An analysis by the Flat Hat, the College of William and Mary publication, “concluded that College athletes, on average, come from more socioeconomically privileged backgrounds as compared to the average non-athlete student at the College” (Byrne). Similarly, Richard Weissbourd, a renowned Harvard psychologist, observed: “Many well-heeled students find themselves in a ‘community-service Olympics,’ … jetting off to an exotic country to build houses for a week and signing up to be treasurer of five or six clubs when they return” (Khazan). In other words, class privilege does not end with the test-prep courses and private schools. It extends to most institutions that are considered relevant in college admissions.

While it is both impractical and unnecessary to completely exclude structured activities from the college applicants’ evaluation, I suggest augmenting it with the consideration of a tangibly different characteristic of a person. Specifically, I propose to formulate a set of college admissions essay prompts around the students’ use of their free time. By free time I don’t mean the afterschool time when students engage in structured extracurricular activities, for the time spent doing something that is in effect required to get into college is not really free. I mean truly free time, when no one is watching, no records are kept, and no awards are bestowed. It can be leisure time, time spent communicating with other people or nature, time taken to dream and contemplate, or, as in the case of this student, the time dedicated to appreciation of performing arts. I maintain that a college applicant’s relationship with art can tell a lot about who they are as a person. In my own experience, musical theatre has been an engagement of the mind, body, and soul. It is an embodiment of the world and its projection. Pondering an applicant’s relationship with musicals, therefore, could really put “holistic” into holistic admissions.

Charm Number

One may outright contend that a person’s engagement with musical theatre is an inadequate measure for predicting their academic performance—one of, if not the, main variables that colleges try to gauge. To counter, I present how musical theatre genre’s relative obscurity, both in terms of popularity among young people and its impact on education, makes it a perfect framework for student evaluation. For one, the student can produce a lyrical and musical analysis as a demonstration of her capacity for critical thinking. Since colleges want students who can think independently, and there are no SparkNotes for musicals, it would be harder to fake an interpretation of a song from a musical than it is to fake an interpretation of Catcher in the Rye. By way of illustration, consider the interpretation of “Good Kid,” Percy Jackson’s “I am” song from The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical by this author:

“Percy’s song ‘Good Kid’ … shows how he is percy-ved as the tough guy, but in actuality is simply trying to be a good kid—which the authors convey not only through lyrics but also with the help of a [vocal] melody that is often soft. It culminates in Percy’s frustration with the pain of everyone seemingly abandoning him and the sense of him blowing up a little with the climax of the song, which drops into a slow section filled with emotion that bares his heart and need to ‘be good enough for someone’ to the audience” (Volkova, Snapchat, edited for grammar and clarity).

This analysis is also representative of the academic qualities that musical theatre brings out in students. Taking into account how the melody and pacing can change the way in which a song presents a character shows attention to minutiae and their interactions within multifaceted narratives. Listening to the song many times in order to draw a substantiated conclusion about its meaning shows dedication to solving a problem.

Such examples of creative analysis drawing on the student’s free time experiences could clue colleges into the applicant’s abilities as an independent learner. Dedicating the time to look deeply into something just because it interests them, and not for the sake of GPA or rewards, is a sign of the student’s innate intellectual curiosity that is bound to guide their learning and research in college and beyond, furthering collective knowledge and contributing to academia and society. What a student does with their free time—their true free time—is telling of who they’ll be once they’re on campus, whether they’re going to pursue things that expand their intellectual horizon, or forgo it for wild parties. Someone who spends their time listening to and analyzing musical theatre isn’t going to be the wild party type—I speak from experience. After all, parties in musicals tend to end badly: friendship breakups, burnt down houses, and occasional homicide.

Eleven O’Clock Number

Aside from academic savvy, colleges look for students who will make their school a better place. Now, instead of asking students, “Why us?” (the answer to which benefits largely from the parents’ ability to pay for a campus visit), why not ask potential members of the campus community what “musicals” of their own they will bring along? Not only does this query line put everyone on an equal playing field, it helps to discern a student’s character and values. When a student shows appreciation of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, a musical based on about seventy pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it should indicate to an admissions officer that this student knows that it is important to take the time to think decisions through. Titular character Natasha didn’t do this when she agreed to elope with a man she’d known for two days, resulting in familial shaming and existential downfall. That the student has learned this lesson of deliberation suggests that it is quite likely that the student’s choice of their college was also a well-considered decision. Besides, the show’s aficionado is clearly determined in their quests, because Natasha et al. is two hours long and completely sung through.

A student who favors Be More Chill is likely a person who has been impacted by main character Jeremy’s arc of significant growth and has tagged along on a personal journey from being someone who wanted nothing more than to fit in to someone who made more effort to being happy where he was. “Jeremy regained his autonomy and made an effort to be a better friend, and someone who wasn’t obsessed with scoring the adoration of his peers. At the same time, he didn’t use that newly found realization as an excuse to be passive. He still worked towards his goal” (Volkova, Journal). For Jeremy, that goal happened to be a date with the subject of his infatuation. For the musical’s fan, it might be an intellectual pursuit, career, or personal growth.

If a student expresses key interest in the L.A. based theatre company StarKid’s Firebringer—a story about a tribe of people at the beginning of humankind and, as the title suggests, a woman who brought fire and knowledge to the tribe—they might be a potential leader who understands how ambition and greed can corrupt someone’s desire to take the lead and be a role model in a given situation. An admissions officer could discover that an admirer of Six: The Musical—which features the sextet of Henry VIII (ex-)wives singing their hearts out as a way to reclaim their stories—understands the subjectivity of history and the redeeming power of coexisting narratives describing the same events.

Musicals rely on their uniquely engaging format of storytelling to take the audience along on the characters’ journeys, all the while imparting valuable lessons and a whirlwind of experiences. In the process, musicals’ aficionados carve their own paths and map their own journeys. For colleges, that means well-rounded and erudite incoming students who will bring with them strong, positive qualities that will contribute to a favorable school environment. And hey, if they happen to bring along a jazz square, who’s it hurting?

Finale

Improving the current admissions system by focusing on the way young people choose to spend their truly free time could deliver the missing element in the holistic admissions that are still highly reliant on assessing students’ engagement with institutions embodying socioeconomic inequality. As the present impromptu case study demonstrates, college applicants’ understanding and interpretation of musicals, for example, could elicit a nuanced and earnest holistic understanding of the student and their anticipated performance in college.

In my life, both personal and academic, I strive to follow in the squeaky footsteps of my personal hero, SpongeBob SquarePants (from the musical, of course). I work as hard as I can, ask questions that arise from curiosity, play well with others, and stay as optimistic as I can be. Allowing my not so prestigious passion to convey my true personality would bring me out from backstage and into downstage center with an audience of colleges wanting to know about students’ amazing achievements. To quote Something Rotten (Kirkpatrick), “What could be more amazing than a musical?”

Works Cited

Byrne, Alexandra. Do student athletes come from more privileged backgrounds? Athletes have higher hometown median household income, many families spend thousands on club sports. The Flat Hat, September 19, 2021, flathatnews.com/2021/09/19/do-student-athletes-come-from-more-privileged-backgrounds-athletes-have-higher-hometown-median-household-income-many-families-spend-thousands-on-club-sports/.

Grove, Allen. What Are Holistic Admissions? Selective Colleges Consider More Than Just Grades and Test Scores. ThoughtCo, Updated September 29, 2019, www.thoughtco.com/what-are-holistic-admissions-788426.

Khazan, Olga. Ending Extracurricular Privilege. One man’s mission to make college admissions sane (and fair) again. The Atlantic, December 21, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/ending-extracurricular-privilege/511307/.

Kirkpatrick, Karey and Kirkpatrick, Wayne. “A Musical.” Something Rotten! Original Broadway Cast Album, Ghostlight Records, 2015. CD.

Volkova, Daria. Journal entry. July 21, 2020.

Volkova, Daria. Snapchat story entry. February 7, 2021.