A note before we start: this week's piece is a crossover. It's running here and on the blog at MTCA, where I work as a song coach. MTCA walks high school students through the college musical theater audition process—picking the songs, building the book, surviving prescreen season with their heads on straight—and they do it by treating teenagers like artists instead of applicants. I'm honored to be on their team. If you've got a kid in the thick of it, mtca.com is where to look.
Every young performer, at some point, gets handed the same piece of advice:
If you can see yourself doing anything else, do it.
It usually comes from a teacher or coach or someone who loves you. It's meant as a filter. It's meant to save you from a life of more no's than yes's. It's an understandable impulse.
This business often requires a level of commitment that's hard to explain. The path is typically so non-linear that hanging on is sometimes half the battle. Which is to say, again, the advice isn't all wrong.
The trouble is the phrase anything else. It takes the entire rest of your life and makes one category out of it, then sets that category against the thing you love. That's an unfair fight in my eyes. And not wholly accurate.
That's what I want to get into this week—the word we use for "the rest of it", and what it costs us.
Here we go.
In 2016 a team at University College London ran a study where people learned which images predicted an electric shock. The researchers tracked stress three ways—what people said, how wide their pupils got, how much their skin conducted—and checked it against cortisol in their saliva.
The stress didn't track how likely the shock was. It tracked how unpredictable it was. The people who knew for certain they were about to be shocked were calmer than the people who had no idea.
Read that again if you've ever waited on a callback.
A performing life is a permanent toss-up. We live at the exact probability a nervous system finds hardest to sit with, sometimes for years at a stretch. Our bodies react, regardless of our level of commitment.
If unpredictability is the thing that wears on us, then a "backup plan" or "plan B" is an attempt to install some certainty. Reaching for a fixed point in a life made of moving ones.
And honestly, it makes sense. This path has no corporate structure to it. You aren't hired and then simply employed for thirty years; the work comes and it goes, some years you're busy and some years you're not, and even in the busy ones you often need something else to cover rent and groceries. That isn't a sign that anything has gone wrong.
The problem with a "backup plan" is that it makes a binary out of a life that is inherently gray. It sorts everything into succeeding and failing, and then it quietly files every stretch where you aren't onstage under failing.
A career that ebbs and flows is going to spend a great deal of time in that column. Which means the binary describes a career that almost nobody actually has.
For me personally, it's been a lot of gray.
When I toured the country in Company, I was also the company's social media captain, making content for the tour I was performing in. When I was nominated for a Drama Desk for BEAU, I was also working with the Drama Desk's marketing team that same season. And I watched the Tony Awards on television every year as a kid, dreaming about being there—the year I finally got to go, I went because I was working on the broadcast as a producer.
The work itself has been a mix the entire time—video editing, hosting, making content, graphic design, marketing, copywriting. I've gotten to fold all of it into one life, and every piece of it has ended up enriching the performing rather than competing with it.
I booked Hedwig because somebody had seen videos of me hosting red carpets and clocked that I could improvise. I booked BEAU because I was hosting a gig at a hotel bar and the show's writer happened to be in the audience. I got my agent because I was on a carpet interviewing her client, and she decided I seemed personable and genuine.
Not one of those was a plan. Each one happened because some piece of so-called other work put me in front of the right person on the right night, and not a single one of them announced itself at the time. The opportunities stack, and the stacking is almost entirely invisible while it's going on.
Which is the part I wish somebody had told me at seventeen. You don't get to know which thing is load-bearing. You only get to do it well and find out later.
I should be specific about where I'm standing while I write this. I haven't had a performance job this year. I've spent that time writing and graphic designing and coaching—work I love, and work I had to go out and find rather than wait around for.
Yes, theater school made me a better actor, singer, and dancer—but it also taught me a lot of skills that are universally transferable. Collaboration. Being prepared. Listening. How to work with enormous personalities and read a group's dynamics without getting flattened by either.
If you're a parent reading this, that's the honest answer to the question at your kitchen table. Those four things have come with me everywhere I've ever worked, including all the jobs with no stage anywhere near them.
A degree in one art form doesn't narrow the number of routes available to you. It only starts to feel that way once you've accepted that performing is the single route that counts, and that every season you spend doing something else is a miss or failure.
I don't believe that anymore. Finding other creative outlets—other crafts, other curiosities, other skills, other hobbies—is healthy. I'd go further than healthy. I think it's necessary if you want a whole life, and I think a whole life is what makes the performing better when it comes back around.
That doesn't mean the odds get any more predictable. But we're able to zoom out further, faster, and remember that our lives can be much larger, and our skills can reach much further, than the four walls of a theater.
So if you can see yourself doing anything else—do that too.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt