My 8-year-old kid just finished his first school play recently. He’d been excited to participate for years, watching his older sister perform in several productions, just waiting until he reached 3rd grade and eligibility to join the cast. Auditions have always been fraught for our oldest with each semester’s tryouts leading to complaints, tears, anxiety, and threats to back out the day of the audition, but she always persevered and enjoyed her time with her elementary school’s drama program.
As excited as our son was for his first plan and—crucially, having understood what these plays involve over the years—he was less emotional about auditions, but seemingly quite a bit more frustrated. Since last year, before he could participate, the drama director has required some choreography as part of the audition. Pretty much everybody that auditions gets some part, but you’re still required to submit a song and dance recording with your monologue. My son loves to dance on his own, but was both put off and frustrated by having to learn choreography when he just wanted to be on stage, acting. Over the past 1.5 months he soured hard on the whole enterprise, mostly because of the singing and dancing. I don’t blame him.
Every single production of our elementary school play has been a musical. Now, I’m not here to complain about a musical with untrained child singers (not in this post, at least), but singing—let alone dancing—is a different skill from acting. Must all children interested in acting be made to sing and/or dance in order to try it out? Should you have to learn to knit if you want to earn how to bake? I think this happens at our school because the director likes it, but also because the mass of parents likes to see their kids sing and dance on stage. But how many kids never audition because they don’t want to sing or dance, or are worried that they can’t? Shouldn’t one of the two yearly plays be a chance for kids to act without the additional pressure?
In the end, my son was happy to perform; something about making it to stage rehearsals and the actual performances rescued the experience for him a bit. He was bummed that it was over. But I’m not really sure whether he’ll be keen to audition for the spring play when it comes around. It’s another musical, after all.
Is this just my elementary school, or is this a broader problem with school/youth acting programs in general?