Your song is a scene. Your movement belongs to its story. Your voice carries an action. Through musical theatre training, you learn to bring those demands into the same performance. You can study that integration through the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, known as CCM, where a musical theatre education joins the disciplines of acting, singing, music, and dance.
The conservatory and its history
Helen Laird established the musical theatre program in 1968, with Jack Rouse as its first chair. Its place within CCM gave this emerging course of study a larger musical and theatrical home. The College-Conservatory itself developed from two Cincinnati institutions that merged in 1955; it became part of the University of Cincinnati in 1962. The program’s history brings these disciplines together.
The current musical theatre degree is a four-year BFA. Its published curriculum combines conservatory training with production experience and broader academic work. In the program’s account of its philosophy, you find an emphasis on becoming a singer, musician, dancer, and actor whose skills can work together. The artistic problem is integration: the disciplines have distinct demands, yet you perform through the same body, attention, and imagination.
What it means to act a song
When you sing, you still have someone to reach, circumstances to inhabit, and something you want. You also have a score: pitch, rhythm, musical phrasing, and a composer’s choices. The score gives you a structure in which thought and feeling can develop. Your work is to hear that structure as part of the dramatic event.
A repeated lyric need not repeat the same action. You may return to the words with greater insistence, a new recognition, or a changed understanding of the person listening. A musical rest may give you time to receive something. A change of harmony may alter the pressure beneath a familiar phrase. These are ways you can investigate a song; the specific answers come from its music, language, and place in the show.
CCM’s program description distinguishes private voice lessons from individual and group vocal coaching that connects singing with interpretation. That distinction helps you understand the work. You can study how your voice functions, then ask how its resources serve this lyric and this character. Technique gives you possibilities. Interpretation gives those possibilities direction.
Dance, rhythm, and dramatic action
You also encounter dance training in ballet, jazz, and tap, together with opportunities to study choreography. Each form asks you to organize weight, rhythm, and space differently. As a musical theatre performer, you need more than the ability to remember a sequence. You need to make its timing and physical relationships part of the story.
Consider what changes when movement enters a scene. You may join an ensemble pattern, resist it, lead it, or struggle to keep up. Your relationship to the group becomes visible through timing and space. In a duet, a shared rhythm can make agreement palpable; a break in that rhythm can reveal separation. Thinking this way keeps the dramatic action present as the physical demands become more complex.
The challenge of integration is also practical. Your breath, articulation, musical timing, and movement must remain available together. You can possess each skill separately and still need substantial work to combine them. A conservatory sequence gives you repeated encounters with that problem through classes, coaching, and production.
From interpretation to new work
CCM describes opportunities for students to work with writers, composers, and directors developing new material. You can understand the particular education this offers: a score or scene may still be changing, and your performance becomes part of discovering what the writing needs. You have to make a specific choice while remaining ready to revise it.
New work also sharpens your listening. A change in a lyric can change its rhythm of thought. A shortened scene can alter what your song must establish. The performer’s contribution includes clear questions and playable proposals, offered in relation to the larger piece. You learn to distinguish your attachment to a choice from its usefulness to the work.
The broader education described by CCM includes dramatic literature, history, and the humanities. Those studies can deepen your understanding of the people and worlds you portray. A song belongs to a cultural moment as well as a musical form. Knowing more about that moment can change what you hear in its language and what you recognize in its ambitions.
The actor and the singer in your work
At JBAS, you study with Jason Bennett, whose formal training includes musical theatre study at CCM and a BFA in Acting from Florida State University. You bring voice, body, imagination, and craft into contact while continuing to respect the particular skills each form asks of you.
Continue through Instrument, Craft, and Objective. Your musical preparation and your dramatic preparation become most useful when you can hear, move, and act through the same event.
Source for further study: CCM’s Musical Theatre program.
