The Flip Side

Hey y’all! Welcome to my first ever TheaterMania University blog post. My name is Alexa Doggett, and I am a junior Musical Theatre major at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Beyond my performing ambitions, I am interested in casting, collages, cardio, and cats.

I am a born and raised Texas gal, having lived in Austin since I was less than a year old. While living in Central Texas I performed with Theatre Under the Stars, Zach Theatre, Summer Stock Austin, Salvage Vanguard, The Vortex, and many other community theaters or smaller professional theaters in the area.

I took classes in New York with Broadway Artists Alliance and was that crazy girl who auditioned for 20+ BFA programs my senior year. After all was said and done, I made the final choice and ended up at Coastal – and I am so lucky that my journey led me here. I couldn’t ask to fit in at a better place with any better people. I have since performed in 4 mainstage productions and 2 workshop readings at CCU, while pursuing my degree, and have made friends (both faculty and staff) who have changed my life and the way I look at the world as a person and an artist, not just a performer. And now, hopefully, as a writer!

During my first 2 years at CCU, I was also lucky enough to have been given many wonderful work opportunities within the theater department. Last year, I was hired as the Student Recruitment Coordinator. I schedule, organize, and run the auditions for the BFA programs at CCU. Subsequently I have become extremely fascinated with college theater programs and how the programs differ from one another. I also want to highlight the often discussed but rarely uncovered process of how college auditions work from behind the scenes of the departments that run them – the process of casting classes, what faculty are really looking for, what’s it like not only behind the pad and paper in an audition room but also during the final selection process. I know what it’s like to be a student auditioning, but now I hope to look on the “flip side,” and give a view from the college side of the audition process.

I do want to put a few disclaimers out there before beginning my quest as a TMU blogger. I am not a total expert by any means on the college audition process. There are so many wonderful teachers/coaches/etc. out there (including my former coach and now fellow TMU blogger Mary Anna Dennard– “Moo”!) who knows much more about this process than I do. But I think it’s important to look at the process from the inside out, and I’m hoping that as a current BFA student who just happens to work for the department, I can provide an interesting look on this ever-growing world of college auditions.

A lot of my blogs will probably focus on CCU, but that’s not because I think it’s the “perfect” program for every single person, but because it’s the most attainable and accurate information I can provide. No program is perfect for everyone, and although I often help people pick programs that might be potentially right for them, there are never any guarantees and there is always someone out there who knows better than I do.

In addition to that, I want my blog to be fairly freeform and based on what’s going on in my life as well. I have lots of ideas for things I’d love to write about that don’t necessarily directly deal with auditions for college programs- especially because those are so far in the distance for a fall semester blog. I have lots of snapshot ideas of “Day in the Life Ofs” and photo or video blogs I’d love to explore, but I also just want to bounce off of what I take in from the rest of the semester’s TMU bloggers… and my readers opinions! So please, chime in at all times. I know this blog will be a learning experience for me – probably more so than anyone who ends up following it.