Chapter 8: Methods & Performance Styles

It’s the first day.

Not first day of your life—first day of this life: the one where you are asked to stand in a room full of strangers, warm your body, warm your voice, and then behave as though imagination is as real as gravity. The room smells like wood and sweat and the residue of a thousand rehearsals. Someone is already stretching in the corner like the floor belongs to them. Someone else is trying very hard not to be seen trying. You can feel it immediately: that wicked, familiar self-consciousness that lives just beneath the ribs.

A physical warm-up. A vocal warm-up. Exercises designed to sharpen everything the craft demands—concentration, listening, responding, memorization, scoring text, analyzing action, raising stakes, risking authenticity. The hour passes in a flash. Not because time is short, but because your nervous system is working overtime.

Then the chairs move. The circle forms. And the room changes temperature. Because now it’s conversation. Now it’s philosophy. Now it’s the moment where someone asks a question so simple it becomes dangerous:

What is acting?

Every year, the answers arrive like they always do—earnest, predictable, true enough to be incomplete.

• Acting is pretending.
• Acting is becoming someone else.
• Acting is emotion.
• Acting is imagination.
• Acting is performing in front of an audience.
• Acting is play.

And then—right on cue—one ambitious student, the one who did the reading before class, offers the line that has lived in acting studios for nearly a century:

“Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

It’s Sanford Meisner’s definition, and it’s a good one—clean, muscular, usable. But I’m going to do what I always do: I’m going to adjust one word. Not to be clever, and not to improve the master, but because verbs matter. Verbs are the actor’s allies. They are the handles we grab when the work becomes slippery.

So here is my version:

Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

Pause on that difference.

Behaving can be performed. It can be executed. It can be mimicked. Living cannot. Living implies risk. It implies consequence. It implies that the moment is not merely shown, but inhabited. Living implies that something is actually happening to you—and that you are allowing it.

You will spend years learning the difference. You will spend decades practicing it.

And then you will step into musical theatre.

Which is where the paradox begins.

Because musical theatre asks you to do something human beings do not typically do in real life—at least not in public, at least not with an orchestra:

• We do not usually sing our feelings at full volume.
• We do not usually dance our revelations.
• We do not usually modulate, belt, sustain, harmonize, and tap while making life-altering decisions.

And yet, musical theatre demands exactly this: that you live truthfully inside a form that is, on the surface, wildly unrealistic. That you inhabit emotional stakes while obeying meter and melody. That you remain present while repeating choreography. That you pursue impulse while respecting structure.

This is why you must remember something I have already insisted upon elsewhere in this book, because it belongs at the foundation of your identity:

It’s all of the things, all of the time. From Stanislavski to Lin-Manuel Miranda—and everything in between. Musical theatre does not allow you to choose a single lane.

It requires synthesis.

The Problem We Inherit

If you train long enough, you begin to realize you didn’t invent your habits. You inherited them.

• The way you believe acting “should” look.
• The way you believe emotion “should” sound.
• The way you unconsciously privilege spontaneity over precision—or precision over spontaneity.
• The way you separate singing from acting, body from voice, technique from truth.

Most of these separations are not personal failures. They are institutional habits. They come from how training has been built—historically, culturally, academically. They come from the way American actor training developed in the twentieth century: rigorous, revolutionary, and—depending on where you studied—sometimes dangerously narrow.

To understand your own craft, you need to know the lineage that shaped it. Not because history is trivia. Because history is architecture.

It determines the rooms you are allowed to enter—and the doors you will have to build yourself.

Before “Musical Theatre,” There Was Always Music + Story

The integration of music, storytelling, and dance is ancient. Human beings have always used rhythm and song to mark events, to transmit memory, to bind communities, to survive grief, to celebrate, to pray. But much of that history lives outside the neat categories of Western theatre documentation.

If we are searching for recognizable ancestors of the form we now call musical theatre—especially in a Western lineage—we land, inevitably, in the Renaissance and the emergence of commedia dell’arte, with its archetypes, improvisation, physical storytelling, and popular appeal. It isn’t Broadway. But it carries DNA we still recognize: stock characters, heightened performance, comedy rooted in human appetite, and a fusion of movement, voice, and theatricality.

From there the road becomes messy—because musical theatre’s history is not a straight line. It is a patchwork. A collision. A commerce-driven, art-driven, audience-driven evolution. Follies, revues, vaudeville, operetta—each brings a different emphasis: spectacle, variety, virtuosity, songcraft, dance, satire, sentiment.

And it’s worth saying plainly: for a long time, musical theatre did not demand “living truthfully” in the way we currently mean it.

It demanded presentation.

It demanded skill, charm, timing, stamina, shine.

And then American realism arrived like a storm—and changed everything.

Stanislavski’s Shadow (and the American Explosion)

Konstantin Stanislavski’s influence on Western acting is impossible to overstate. Even when teachers swear they are “not Stanislavski people,” their language often betrays them. Objective. Action. Given circumstances. The magic if. Psychological truth. Behavioral specificity. Emotional logic.

In America—especially as the twentieth century progressed—the demand for realism intensified. Film and television accelerated it. The camera is unforgiving. It does not tolerate generalization. It makes the small moment enormous.

Stanislavski’s American descendants—Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, Elia Kazan, and the larger constellation around The Group Theatre—began to codify techniques built on authenticity, immediacy, and human behavior. What emerged is often bundled under one name, sometimes accurately and sometimes lazily:

The Method.

But here is the important part for the musical theatre actor:

These methodologies were built primarily to serve spoken realism—to train actors for plays and, increasingly, for the camera. Singing was not the central problem. Dancing was not the central problem. The integrated musical-dramatic event was not the primary organism.

And yet, musical theatre began evolving right alongside these acting revolutions.

Which meant that a split developed—one that we are still living with.

Two Worlds That Rarely Spoke to Each Other

For much of the early twentieth century, musical theatre on Broadway still carried the residue of variety entertainment. Acting styles were often broad. The demands were presentational. The form could tolerate—sometimes even require—an externalized approach.

But as audiences began to hunger for more than diversion, Broadway writers began to reshape what the musical could be. You can feel the shift in the emergence of integrated storytelling: the musical as a serious dramatic vessel, not merely a parade of numbers.

The work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the craft of Lerner and Loewe, and the larger movement toward the integrated book musical changed what audiences expected to experience. They wanted entertainment, yes—but they also wanted to be moved. They wanted emotional architecture. They wanted story.

And here’s where something quietly crucial happened in the practical reality of the industry:

Musical theatre performers were often categorized.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

You could feel it in casting structures, rehearsal rooms, and expectations:

• Dancing Chorus — bodies hired primarily for dance ability
• Singing Chorus — voices hired primarily for vocal prowess
• Principals — actors hired primarily for acting ability (and often expected to sing and/or dance “well enough”)

This division made sense in an era of specialization. But it left an inheritance. Because what it implied was this:

Musical theatre is made by separate kinds of people. And that implication did not disappear. It simply evolved. Today, you can still hear the echoes in the ways young artists label themselves:

• I’m more of a singer.
• I’m more of an actor.
• I move well, but I don’t really dance.
• I can act, but I’m not a strong reader.
• I can sing, but I freeze in scenes.

These are not neutral self-descriptions. They are symptoms of a system that taught integration as an afterthought.

The Academic Era and the Age of Compartmentalization

For most of American history, if you wanted to train seriously as an actor, you did not necessarily go to a university. You went to a studio. You went to a conservatory. You studied in environments built like trade schools—intensive, daily, immersive.

Many of the great training institutions did not offer degrees. They offered discipline. They offered repetition. They offered craft.

And then the academy began to absorb the training.

In 1968, the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati established what is often cited as the first B.F.A. program in Musical Theatre. That moment marks a significant shift in how musical theatre performers began to be “officially” trained in the United States: under the umbrella of higher education.

This is not inherently bad. University training can be extraordinary. It can offer breadth, mentorship, time, and community. It can be life-changing.

But the academic model often came with a structural problem that musical theatre is uniquely vulnerable to compartmentalization:

• Acting in one department.
• Voice in another.
• Dance in another.
• Music theory somewhere else.
• History somewhere else.
• Production work somewhere else.

Four years pass. Your courses rarely meet. And then you are cast in a musical—academically or professionally—and are expected to synthesize everything instantly. You are expected to brew your craft into one coherent performance: singing, acting, dancing, style, story, rhythm, text, technique, impulse.

And on top of that?

Modern musicals demand absurd range:

• Can you write?
• Play an instrument?
• Rap?
• Sing tight jazz harmony?
• Roller-skate?
• Fight?
• Flip?
• Belt a high E-flat while flying to the rafters with a broom?

If the answer is yes—beautiful. If it’s no—welcome. You are human. This book exists because most training still assumes you’ll become integrated by osmosis.

You won’t.

Integration is not an accident. It is a practice.

The Real Question Beneath “What Is Acting?”

So when we ask “What is acting?” in a musical theatre context, we are not asking an abstract question.

We are asking:

• Can you live truthfully while obeying structure?
• Can you remain psychologically present while repeating choreography?
• Can you keep your voice free while your nervous system is on fire?
• Can you tell the truth in a form that is designed to heighten, stylize, and amplify?

Musical theatre is often treated like the younger sibling of “serious” theatre—lighter, shinier, more commercial, less rigorous.

This is a misunderstanding.

Musical theatre is a distinct discipline. It is not simply acting with songs. It is not simply singing with lines. It is a form that requires a total instrument—not because it demands more talent, but because it demands more synthesis.

Which means the musical theatre actor of the twenty-first century must reclaim something older than compartmentalization: wholeness.

You are not half-singer, half-actor, half-dancer. You are a musical theatre artist.

And that means your training cannot be a set of separate rooms. It must become one house.

A Practice for the Road Ahead

Before you move on, I want you to do something simple—not as homework, not as an assignment, but as a first act of self-inventory. A warm-up of attention.

Answer these quietly, in writing if you can. Return to them later. Let them change over time. Let them tell you the truth.

• Where did you learn what “good acting” looks like?
• Who taught you, explicitly or implicitly, what “truth” means on stage?
• Do you prefer structure, or do you crave freedom?
• When you sing, do you abandon acting? When you act, do you abandon voice?
• What part of the work feels safest—and what part makes you feel exposed?
• What do you imagine musical theatre training should include, if it were designed for wholeness rather than convenience?

There are no correct answers. But there are honest ones.

And honesty is the only thing that holds when the lights go out and the music begins.