Too Many Actors

They are singing my song over at the NY Times today. If you didn’t catch it via Artsjournal.com, check it out here before it disappears into the paper’s archives and you have to pay for access-So Many Acting B.A.’s, So Few Paying Gigs.

While I am not rabid about it, I have considered it my mission over the last twenty years or so to attempt to dissuade people from going into acting as a career. In my mind, people romanticize their ability to go to New York City and get an acting gig after a short period of suffering in a chic spacious warehouse loft. That’s how television and the movies portray it after all.

The NYT article however echos some of my sentiments.

“It’s just tragic how many people want to go into this business,” said Alan Eisenberg, the executive director of Actors Equity. “These schools are just turning out so many grads for whom there is no work.”

“We’re producing too many people,” Mr. Steele [executive director of the University/Resident Theater Association] said, “many of them poorly trained or moved into the field without the connections or relationships necessary to make their transition to a career possible. It’s as if medical school were graduating people without giving them internships at a hospital.”

“Twenty years ago, you didn’t sense the kind of urgency these kids have now,” said Mr. Schlegel, who represents many successful New York theater actors…”Now they think if they don’t get signed by an agent right away, they’ve failed. They never think they’ve got to learn the ropes a bit, get seasoned. They want to know, ‘Where’s my TV series? Where’s my film audition?’ It’s wrong, of course, but that’s what they think, and in a business where we fall all over the young ones, you can’t blame them.”

As you might imagine since these acting programs need people taking instruction from them in order to justify their existence in the university, none of them are reducing the number of students they are graduating. Rather they are including classes in how to get jobs upon graduation as part of their training regimen. Students learn about auditioning effectively, networking, etc.

Just for the record, I don’t know if I have ever dissuaded anyone from going to NY or LA to pursue their dream. Honestly, I never expect my dire pronouncements about how tough the market is, how there will be 10 other people with their level of talent who look just like them at every audition, some of them will have more experience and are a surer bet. Then there are the minimum 10 other people who are better looking, more talented and more experienced who are showing up too. I also go into the cost of living in New York City, the crime, the cold, the dingy apartments, etc.

Its hard to picture that your mind for the glow of stars in your eyes. My sole hope is that knowing what I have told them, they make semi-realistic contingency plans to deal with all potential problems I have mentioned.

One last quote from the article I want to feature in an admittedly snarky attempt to further comment on the American Idol entry I made yesterday.

Ms. Hoffman’s auditioning seminar is one effort to iincrease the responses. Too much vibrato, Ms. Hoffman told a young man who sang the U2 song “With or Without You” and finished each line with a lovely tremulous quiver. Vibrato is more expressive than communicative, she said; in an audition, you want to communicate.

He still had trouble. “It’s really hard, I know, to stay on pitch when you’re straight-toning,” Ms. Hoffman said, this time adding, “So you can add the vibrato if you feel yourself sliding off.”

That is one lesson I took away from observing auditions at a training program with which I was once associated. Vibrato might sound impressive and appeal to the crowds, but it can indicate a lack of mastery of ones vocal instrument.