Academics

A College-Level Musical Theater Curriculum

The Rising Artists Pre-College Musical Theater Intensive offers a rigorous, immersive curriculum designed to mirror the expectations and experience of college-level theater training. Like all Sarah Lawrence programs, it is rooted in close faculty mentorship, small-group instruction, and dialogue-based learning, where students are active participants in shaping their growth as performers.

Over three weeks, students engage in an intensive daily schedule combining acting, vocal performance, movement, and rehearsal. The program emphasizes storytelling as the foundation of all performance, training students to ground their artistic choices in text, character, and intention.

Students exploring top musical theater colleges often look for precollege experiences that reflect the expectations of professional training programs. Rising Artists is designed to provide that level of rigor and creative engagement.

What Will I Learn?

Students will learn acting techniques to bring their characters to life. Students will learn how to craft a set of given circumstances and to make playable choices and objectives based on the analysis of their performance text to create a truthful performance. We will focus on how to unlock the layers and complexities of any character they play.

Students will work one on one with a music director. They will bring a solo or duet as well as be assigned one solo or duet that they will learn and rehearse with a music director. They will learn how to care for their instrument, specifics of vocal production, and vocal style, as well as how to communicate effectively with a music director in the rehearsal room.

Students will hone their ability to take direction from a director. Students will learn foundational skills through theater games, script scoring, and script breakdown techniques. They will learn to implement this work in the rehearsing of their solo, duet, and group scenes and songs in daily one on one and group work with the faculty director.

Students will work with a choreographer daily. A teaching assistant will act as the choreographer for the review. Students will work with this choreographer on musical theater dance skills as well as to learn and rehearse the choreography for their revue.

Students will perform an original musical revue. Collaborating with faculty and the teaching assistant to construct and rehearse their original musical revue featuring the material from the musical theater cannon that they spent the previous three weeks working on.

A Fully Integrated Approach

Unlike traditional programs that separate disciplines, this musical theater intensive integrates acting, singing, and movement into one cohesive practice.

Students learn that musical theater is not about mastering separate skills, but about bringing them together in service of storytelling. Each rehearsal, exercise, and critique reinforces this holistic approach.

Through script scoring, song breakdown, and ensemble work, students gain tools used in both college programs and the professional theater world.

Daily Learning Experience

Students spend five hours each day working directly with faculty, plus additional time with a teaching assistant mentor and weekly sessions with a music director.

The daily structure includes:

• Faculty-led instruction in acting, voice, and performance
• Small-group and one-on-one coaching
• Rehearsal and collaborative work
• Peer feedback and critique sessions

This intensive format allows students to move beyond surface-level exposure into deep, sustained artistic development.

What Will I Create?

Over the course of the program, students will produce several monologues, solo, duet, and group musical numbers.

Class studio hours and homework hours will be devoted to memorizing and completing script breakdowns and script scoring.

Students will complete the intensive by performing in an original musical revue open to parents.

The program culminates in an original musical revue, presented to family and invited guests. Students also leave with recorded performance material that can be used for audition reels and college applications.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the program, students will:

• Develop text analysis skills
• Develop the skills to craft a set of given circumstances
• Hone their ability to take direction from a director
• Learn how to work one on one with a music director
• Hone their skills in choreography
• Discover the role of actor as a collaborative individual able to make choices and advocate for their own boundaries
• Gain familiarity with different genres of musical theater and what each requires of the actor
• Sharpen their ability to collaborate with their colleagues
• Build confidence in performance
• Develop the ability to learn how to choose material that best suits them
• Learn how to give productive critique to others and to themselves, an essential step in a collaborative art form
• Learn how to participate in an artistic community in a productive, generous, and joyful way

Most importantly, students leave with a deeper understanding of themselves as performers — and what it means to work as part of an artistic community.

A Sarah Lawrence Approach to Theater Training

At Sarah Lawrence, theater education is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and deeply personal. Students are encouraged to take risks, explore ideas, and engage fully with the creative process.

The result is a program that not only builds technical skill, but also develops thoughtful, expressive, and confident performers — prepared for college-level study and the evolving world of theater.

As a performer, Lauren has performed in several countries, including Scotland and Greece. Selected performance credits include: 4.48 Psychosis, Crave, Midsummer Nights Dream, The Bakkhai, Three Tall Women, and her solo show, All the Tiny Pieces. She has been a choreographer/movement director for shows such as Bat Boy, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, and Queen Bee and the Boss. Her plays have been produced at Sarah Lawrence College and around New York City in venues such as Dixon Place and ART/NY. Her writing has been published in Hot Rot among other literary publications.

Lauren is the Theater Program Manager at Sarah Lawrence College and is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. She serves on the executive board of the acting focus group for the Association for Theater in Higher Education. She has served on the advisory board of Rapscallion Theater Collective and as Director of Development for TheaterRats. Lauren is an audition coach in Manhattan, has worked in casting for Horizon Theater Repertory, was a 2018/2019 member of The Midwives, and is a member of the Magdalena Festival, an international network of women in theater. Lauren is the founder of Lauren Reinhard Performance Works. She teaches Directing, Musical Theater, Acting, Devising and Theatrical Pedagogy at Sarah Lawrence College.