BWW Blog: Alyssa Sileo - Broadway Wants You - No, Really, It Wants You

Whip out every drop of skill acquired from those Reading Comprehension lessons in Lit Class, my friends. I want to ask you to analyze the words of the title.

I'll say my admittedly egocentric eyes fly to two uses of a certain pronoun beginning with capital letter Y and the vowel sound oo.

Broadway Wants You--No, Really, It Wants You.

This proposal is immediately attractive but I'm a little hesitant to pack up my bags and hightail it on over to the city.

As a young artist given the chance to speak with active, adult artists, I've taken to 1) attempting to soak up all the luck from the room 2) asking advice. I inquire with questions like "How do I improve?" or "What do I do to get to where you are?" or "How do I sound like Kelli O'Hara?" or my personal favorite and most desperate "How can I guarantee I'll be onstage and, like, eating too and, like, be happy?"

These words and their variations have come from my mouth, fervent, impatient, and have been answered with this phrase and its variations. "Be You."

For a scrappy, not-quite-starving, unpolished, insatiable stage-maniac, those two words don't quite dissolve the cyclone-like apprehension. The gap between me and the city seems unfeasible. Or, at least, unfeasible without some Broadway blessings and magic. I want to hear what website I have to go to find the audition monologues the entire cast of The Crucible performed at their callbacks. I want to be told which Youtube video to watch that has the warmups the cast of Finding Neverland uses. I want to know where the cast of Shuffle Along got their tap shoes and I want to be given a book that tells me where every current Broadway star got their Arts degrees and I want to ask every admissions director how I can simultaneous attend all of these institutions.

I get two words instead. Be You. What is that.

Turns out these two syllables are very underappreciated.

(I think, at this age, even with our strangeness, even with our rejection of normalcy, we're still in the rut of trying to be someone else. Hashtag Teenager Issues.)
And now, a professional Development class in July: Think of the Stage as a business. (I'm expanding this central subject from the goings-on in Times Square to every fruitful performance space in the universe, because there's a wealth of incredible theatres.)
It's fairly easy to call this collective a business, it's repeatedly referred to as one. It is fundamentally just that. We know what runs the world. (Playlists of Audra McDonald cabarets and money.)

And you: You are a stockholder in this business. Which practically makes you a consumer. You're also perhaps a participant of the operations. Heyo, performers and designers and directors and all other creators of theatre art, I'm speaking to you now.

The market (theatre-goers and non-thespians alike) is demanding for more interpretations of storytelling and you (hi) provide the response, solution, and product.

I mean, who takes to the stage in the exact same way?

There's so many ways of processing a story and so many audiences' senses that are waiting to be compatible with your expressions. You offer something that has not yet been written in a prompt book's master script; you harbor talents incorrectly labeled weird or useless. Welcome to the Theatre! We will put your unconventionalism to beautiful use.
Some may think it's dehumanizing to consider your performance or skills a product. Personally, I find it remarkably freeing. It separates your Person from the Performance. It safeguards your sense of adequacy (or more like, teaches you to reshape your adequacy measuring sensors) because there needs to be a switch flipped from places to curtain. It really isn't you on stage. It is you but a tailored version. (This is a business of contradictions too.) So when the product doesn't deliver or the audience doesn't utilize the intention, you do not have to scrap the factory (yourself), you just have to revisit the device (your killer unique skill.)

You say "I do not fit the label. I don't have the voice, the look, the moves, the words." But what label? Where in the world is the rules and regulations of performance? The Neoclassicists are gone. Rest in peace. It is very easy to forget that our most revered Broadway Babies were pioneers. I'm dropping some names. Billy Porter. Kristin Chenoweth. Idina Menzel. Daveed Diggs. Annaleigh Ashford. Why did the Stage love them so much? Because that was It's first time hearing someone open their mouth like that. Same goes for content creators like Lin-Manuel Miranda and visionaries like Rachel Chavkin; they were not hired because they wrote a perfect Rodgers and Hammerstein impersonation or directed a piece that could pass for a Harold Prince production. These peeps changed the game and stepped into the space with some audacity to expand the grand catalogue.

In an time with increasing opportunities on the stage, it's fantastic to wield these proclamations. The space was not always as wide, and regardless of one's brilliance, the stage door was not always open. It still has not reached unconditional accessibility.
This is my encouragement to reject windows, less time pining and more time being, make mirrors instead, make better thresholds that fit your composition and create art in a room whose walls seem to embrace you. Your very acceptance of your gifts will propel others' acknowledgement of their own. See, this business is not automated, it is human, it is kindly, it is crucial to the realization of all our talents. Take your product--your pipsqueak belt, your awesome stage direction writing, your backwards interpretation of the fourth wall--and develop it to it's fullest existence by the second. (Claim it. You will want the patent when everyone comes to love it.)

You could be an actor but don't get mixed up. You're still you. You have original pulse and heartbeat and a name and you have to still attend to you.

I have never watched an effective or compelling performance, of someone, offtstage, acting as someone else.

Every time you don't match the cast recording of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, I would rejoice, and every time your dancing is a Robbins reimagination, I would applaud, and every time you conjure up a banter in your head of two absurd figures, I would write it down, because congratulations, you have not made your debut yet. You get to surprise everyone including yourself.

You were sewn with narrative apparatus. Your fingerprint is avant-garde and your mannerisms are genius. All you have to do to become more perfect for the part is breathe a little more. Your individuality is the best news ever. You've come this far in your theatrical journey; the exposure of uncommon capacities is not the show's closing, but rather the overture.
The Stage will never stop needing you.

I would get to it.

(The image enclosed is something I created to remind myself I can stand among my role models if I have the courage! I encourage you to save and share. Who are the artists that bring you hope and joy?)