Excerpt from <i>The Penn Stater</i >: Ticket to Broadway

“Don’t worry if you’re not a dancer,” says Professor Spence Ford, trying to soothe a room packed with 33 high school seniors who, whether they’re dancers or not, are all worrying. It is 9:30 on a Saturday morning in January, the first of three separate Saturdays of auditions for Penn State’s musical theatre program. By the end of February, 140 high school students will have auditioned, will have danced and sung and acted their hearts out during the grueling six-hour day in the Arts Building at University Park. They come from all over the country, from Nashville, St. Louis, New York City, Fort Lauderdale. They all have performed in their high school musicals or in community theatres, some even on a professional stage. They all have been stars, all have been told that they have what it takes to make it on Broadway. But, out of the 140 applicants, only 16 will be offered a spot in the program. The odds are against these students. And each one of them knows it.

Today, each student will sing two songs and perform a one-and-a-half-minute monologue from a play -- all prepared in advance. But the first test of their skill is the dance -- a dance that will be shown to them on the spot and that they’ll have only 20 minutes to learn. Two current students in the theatre program demonstrate. It’s a two-minute-long, jazz-style number to the snappy song “Cool” from West Side Story -- choreographed by Spence Ford, known for the eight shows she’s danced in on Broadway, for working with greats like Bob Fosse and Chita Rivera, and for being one of the most demanding musical theatre dance instructors in the country. There are scissor kicks and leaps, balancing arabesques, and spinning pirouettes. The high school students start following along. Most can only do one turn when they attempt the pirouette. A girl in the front row dressed in a blue crushed-velvet leotard does six. She is a dancer.

“Ohhhhhhhh man,” says Chris, one of the students, dressed in sneakers and a tank top and sporting blue spiked hair. He has strategically placed himself in the last row, in the back of the room. He is not a dancer.

The theatre students finish breaking down the steps of the dance, which ends with a series of contractions and releases, lifting their backs like stretching cats and then collapsing their bodies onto the floor.

“Yeah … right,” Chris whispers to the guy next to him.

The song is ironic, really. The lyrics say, “Just play it cool.” But no one in this room is feeling very cool. Or calm. Or collected. The musical theatre faculty, all of whom are sitting behind a table in the front, know that the quality of their incoming class depends on the talent in this room. They want these students to blow them away, to be “triple threats” -- strong, all-in-one actors, singers, and dancers. And the students want to be offered a spot in this program. They can’t imagine doing anything else with their lives but theatre. They’ve been anticipating this day ever since they first felt the rush of performing, since they heard the applause. And that’s why one student, Steve, is so nervous -- he’s been feeling the stomach flu coming on for the last 24 hours. Jessica doesn’t think her injured knee will hold out during the dance. Sean lost his voice a few days ago and isn’t sure if he can reach the high notes on his song. Kristen is convinced she’s going to go flat on hers. Rachel hasn’t been sleeping well this week because she doesn’t want to go to any other school but Penn State -- and she knows it’s one of the most competitive musical theatre programs in the country.

Actually, the only thing that’s cool in this room at this moment is the room itself, Room 119, which is always so cold that the theatre majors nicknamed it “The Arctic Tundra.” This is the theatre department’s multi-purpose room. Sometimes there are dance classes here, hence the shellacked hardwood floor and the ballet bars running along each wall. Sometimes there are small performances here, which is why there’s a lattice of stage lights on the ceiling and a disco ball hanging in the center of them. Sometimes there are rehearsals, as there will be tonight for the theatre department’s spring musical, Brigadoon , which explains the strips of tape mapped out on the floor to mark where the set pieces should be placed. Right now, the fluorescent lights are on full blast, and the students are wiping the bottoms of their ballet slippers and black jazz shoes with wet paper towels, a trick to keep themselves from slipping on the floor while they dance.

They have just one more chance to run through the combination before they will break into groups of three and perform it for the real deal. Spence Ford motions for all of the students to huddle in the middle of the room. She stands in the center, wrapping her arms around as many of them as she can reach.

“Show me some of your life,” she says quietly. “I want to see faces. I want to see eyes. Enjoy yourselves as much as possible. And make sure your shoes are tied.” As the accompanist plays the intro to the song, Spence jogs over to the double doors that lead through a small breezeway into a classroom where the director of the musical theatre program, Cary Libkin, is talking with the parents.

“Five more minutes,” she says to Libkin, and then disappears back into Room 119.

If you have 1600s on your SATs, the University is going to try like hell to get you, but SATs don’t matter in this program,” says Cary Libkin, leaning against a wall in the classroom, giving the lowdown to at least 50 parents who are all stiff and straight-faced. They know that, next door, their children’s futures are about to be decided, and that this man -- dressed professorially in a tweed suit jacket, purple shirt, and purple tie -- is going to make the final call: Are their kids good enough or not? Libkin’s job is not to evaluate grades. He only evaluates talent. And talent, for Libkin, means “chops” (they must be able to sing), “wiring” (they must be alive and able to respond), and “passion” (they must have a strong commitment to the art -- essential to making it through a demanding program where the days often start at 8 a.m. with a tap class and end when rehearsal does, at 11 p.m.).

The names of the other students have been changed. Author Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02 MFA Lib is the articles editor at Philadelphia Magazine and a contributing editor at The Penn Stater.