Making Your Dream of Being a Musical Theater Performer a Reality
Delve into the transformative power of mindset shifts and self-belief in making your dream of becoming a musical theater performer a reality. In this insightful blog post, we explore the importance of controlling your inner narrative amidst the challenges of rejection and societal expectations. Discover empowering strategies to navigate the uncertainties of the industry, embrace opportunities, and redefine success on your terms.
Ashlee Espinosa as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, photo credit: Ken Jacques
How do you turn your dream of being a musical theater performer into an actual reality?
I could sit here and we could talk for hours and hours and hours about the nuts and bolts of auditioning, self-tapes, casting profiles, reels, clips, agents, unions—like, we could go through a whole spiel of all of that, the basic elements of how to have a career in this industry. But the number one factor that holds people back is a mindset shift that if you do not change, you are not going to move forward at a comfortable pace in your career. Because what you say to yourself matters.
Are you going to continue dreaming and saying, "Oh, my dream is to be a musical theater performer"? Or are you going to make that actual reality come true for your life? So let's talk about this mindset shift that you need to make right now.
I don't care what point of your career you are in and then also how you can navigate moving forward when all of these boulders— I don't even have a better word for it, right? Boulders because it feels like boulders come at you that are going to keep you from making your dream a reality. What you say to yourself matters, and I'm going to repeat that again because it is fundamentally the most important aspect of how you can shift the narrative in your mind from dream to reality. You cannot control what other people say to you, right? And how many times has someone said to you, "Oh, that's so cute, your dream is to be on Broadway," or "Oh, that's so cute, you want to be on stage for fun," or "Oh, wow, you want to go to college for that," or "Oh, you have a degree in that, oh, that's fun"? Like, we get told that over and over again a thousand and one times. I can't control what someone else says to me. I can correct them, I can set my boundaries, I can speak my boundaries to them, or I can say, "This is how I'd like to be spoken to." But most of the time, like, it's not even worth our time and energy to say that to someone unless there's someone that's in that is, you know, our family member—whole other conversation. But my point here is, all I can control is how I respond to them and what I say to myself. So here are a couple of things that you probably have been saying to yourself that you need to shift right now.
Rejection
We say this all the time. We hear this in college programs, right? Like, in the season where everybody's hearing what BFA or BA or boop, boop, boop, they got into, right? "I've been rejected from this school, this school, and this school." You are not rejected, you just didn't get that offer. That word right there is already setting your mindset that the dream cannot be a reality because of the negativity that's involved in it.
Opportunity
Every single time I get to audition, it is an opportunity for me to perform. It's an opportunity for my work to be seen. It's an opportunity for me to have a free class. It's an opportunity that may come back to me in the long time to be seen by somebody, and years later, that opportunity to perform for them or send them a tape or be seen by them or be considered by them or have a chat with them—that may come back to me later on in my career. And you don't know that until you've been in this industry quite a long time. So I want you to consider what you say to yourself, shifting it, not toxic positivity, but a way that we can navigate this career to go from dream being so far out there to like, this is a reality, I'm making this thing happen.
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Independence
You cannot live for your parents, for your family, for your friends, for your partners, spouses, relationships. You can't live for them. If you allow someone else, and I know this has happened to you because it happens to every single one of us in this industry, if you allow someone else to tell you what they expect you to do in this lifetime, you are not going to make that dream become reality. And I know this is going to resonate with you because I've had conversations that I can't even tell you how many times, and myself included.
People look at us and they do not understand how important this dream of being in musical theater is, right? And most of the time it's not even to be on Broadway. Like, yeah, of course, that's the, like, that would be amazing, or to be on the West End, but it's just to have a career in this industry and to fulfill this need to be a part of that world in many different capacities. And people outside the industry do not understand that passion, and they look at us and they laugh, and they say, "Oh my God, you're never going to support yourself. How do you know? How do you know?" Do we have to have other support jobs? Yeah, like, absolutely, 100%. But you are already keeping that dream at arm's length because you're letting someone else tell you what your reality is going to be in life.
And I can speak about this from personal experience because if I had listened to everybody in my life when I was really in my 20s, especially growing up, um, that's typically when it happens, right? When you're growing up, you're in junior high, high school, you're in college, and people are starting to tell you what you should do with your life because, you know, you're getting older and you've got to have your you-know-what together, right? And you're not living at home most of the time anymore, and so you're like, "I need to make some money. What am I going to do? This is not reality. Like, this isn't realistic." Nothing in this life is realistic. Yes, musical theater is unrelenting, unreliable, unrelatable, it can make you feel unworthy, absolutely it is. But tell me another job in this industry that does not have the same negativity attached to it. If your dream is to be in this industry, then why would you not give yourself the opportunity to make that a reality and to find out and to discover and uncover what's the next chapter for you?
Because the things that we dream young in our teens, even in our 20s, gosh, even in our 30s, that can shift and mold, and that's okay. I know so many people that went to college that have undergraduate degrees in musical theater, that have master's degrees in musical theater, terminal degrees, that I know very well that are doing a different job now. Great, you didn't waste your time, you didn't waste your energy, you just followed a dream that evolved over your lifetime. And I think that's what happens is very young at an age, we listen to what people tell us that we should do, and we really haven't figured it out ourselves.
So give yourself that permission to say, "I'm going to figure it out as my life moves on.”
Ashlee Espinosa is an accomplished theatre professional with a Master of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre. With her expertise as an experienced actress, passionate educator, and dedicated career advisor, she helps artists build fulfilling lives and careers based on their definition of success.
