For most of the schools on my daughter’s list, her first audition didn’t happen in an audition room. It happened at home, in front of a camera, before anyone at those schools had ever heard her name.
That’s a prescreen: a video round that comes before the actual in-person audition. Your kid records songs and monologues, uploads them, and the program decides whether to invite them to audition live. At the majority of BFA programs there’s no way around it. If your kid doesn’t make it past the prescreen round, they’re not going to be considered any further for that program. Nobody hears her in a room, and nobody finds out she’s better in person.
The reason prescreens exist is basic math. A popular BFA program can draw an applicant pool in the hundreds or low thousands for a class of a dozen or two, and there aren’t enough faculty hours in a season to see every one of those kids live. The video round is how programs decide who gets one of the limited audition slots. For most schools, this is where the largest cut happens (maybe going from 2000+ applicants down to 300-500 for live auditions, or less).
What’s Actually in a Prescreen Package
For an MT program, the core package is usually two contrasting songs and one or two monologues, each usually recorded as its own video, plus a dance video at many schools. You upload it through Acceptd or through the school’s own portal, by that school’s deadline, in that school’s format.
“That school’s format” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. When we went through this, one school wanted waist-up framing while another wanted full body. One capped the monologue at 30 seconds, another allowed 60. Some schools wanted a spoken slate at the start of each video, and each had its own opinion about what belonged in it. None of this is hard by itself. What’s hard is that it’s different at every school, times 15 or 20 (or more!) schools, and getting one detail wrong means re-editing or re-shooting.
The deadlines are just as scattered. The earliest are in early October, and the big pile comes due through November and December. We publish the actual dates from last season, free, if you want to see what your fall is going to look like.
MTCP, in Plain English
Spend any time in the MT parent Facebook groups and you’ll see the same question every week: “Does [school] accept MTCP?” Here’s what that actually means.
MTCP is the Musical Theater Common Prescreen, a standardized set of prescreen requirements, coordinated through Acceptd, that a group of programs has agreed to accept. The idea is simple and genuinely helpful: your kid builds one pre-screen package instead of a bespoke video shoot for every school.
For the songs, an MTCP school picks one of three options:
- Option A: one song written before 1970 and one written after 1970, in contrasting styles.
- Option B: one musical theater song from any period, plus one song in any style at all that suits your kid (pop, folk, rock, country), contrasting with the first.
- Option C: the school leaves it up to the applicant. Any two contrasting songs.
Monologues work the same way. Option A is one monologue from a published play or a professional writer. Option B is a contemporary piece plus a classical one with heightened language. Option C is no monologue at all. There are also options for dance: Option A wants choreographed movement with at least one turn, one jump, and one kick; Option B just wants your kid’s best movement; Option C skips dance entirely.
The video specs are standard across all of it: 60 to 90 seconds per piece, waist-up framing for songs and monologues, full body for dance. There’s also an optional “wild card” video where your kid can show anything they want. Personality, a special skill, a third song that didn’t fit anywhere else. This is a great opportunity for your kid to stand out in some unique way. Don’t be shy about this.
Two warnings: First, not every school uses MTCP, and each school that does picks its own combination of options, so the same package may cover one school completely and another school not at all. Second, even MTCP schools sometimes bolt their own extras on top. You still have to check every school on your list, one at a time. You can do that checking early or you can do it in a November panic, but you can’t skip it.
Why “Prescreen-Safe” Matters
Choosing material for a prescreen is not the same as choosing material for a live audition. The person evaluating your kid is watching a stack of videos, sometimes dozens in a sitting, and your kid’s 75 seconds lands somewhere in the middle of that stack. This is like reading thousands of college applications - they are looking for a reason to not move your kid forward at this stage, because they have to cut aggressively.
That has two consequences. The first is the overdone problem. Some songs are so popular with auditioning seniors that program faculty publish actual do-not-sing lists. I’ve written before about the risk of being one of 80 kids singing the same cut at Unifieds. The prescreen version of that problem is worse, because on video, the reviewer has a fast-forward or reject button.
The second is the cut itself. A 60-to-90-second cut has to establish voice, style, and acting almost immediately. A song that builds beautifully over three minutes can be exactly wrong for this format, even if it would be wonderful in a room. This is why our song library tags every song with a prescreen-safe rating and its MTCP option fit, alongside voice type and era. The tags are a starting point to work through with your kid’s voice teacher or coach, not a replacement for one. But they will keep you from discovering in November that the song your kid has been drilling since August sits on three schools’ overdone lists.
The Recording Is Harder Than It Looks
Here’s what I’d tell a family starting now: whatever amount of time you’ve budgeted for recording, it’s probably not enough.
The first version is never the one you submit. Ours certainly wasn’t. You watch the playback and the framing is off, or the sound is thin, or the take with the best singing is the one where the acting went flat. So you set up again, and you record again, and each session gets a little closer. This is normal. It’s also why a weekend is not enough time, and why the families recording in a panic three days before a deadline are having a much worse October than they need to.
But there’s an important caveat to all this! Perfection is the enemy of success! What I mean by that is that while you want to make sure your kid has nailed all the major parts, it’s never going to be perfect. A note may be off, an acting choice may not be exactly right, etc - and that’s ok! Even though reviewers are looking for a reason to move on, they’re used to seeing past these minor imperfections to what the talent and growth potential is. So, do a few takes to get it good, but don’t do 50 takes to get it “perfect”.
For Annika, the songs were the manageable part. She’d been singing for years, and she picked her cuts with her vocal coach. The monologues were brand new territory: finding pieces, understanding them, and rehearsing them to the point where she could act to a camera lens instead of a person. If your kid is a singer who has never worked a monologue, budget real coaching time for this.
What saved us was a deadline we didn’t control: Pittsburgh Unifieds, in early October. Registering meant a complete package had to exist by the first week of October, and so we got it done. Then PUA gave us the thing almost nothing else in this process gives you: early feedback. Annika didn’t submit that same package everywhere afterward. She knew what she wanted to change, and the next round of prescreens was stronger for it. Yes, there was more than one package over the course of the season. Plan on that too. We did three rounds: The first one was for PUA, the second was for the majority of remaining schools, and the third was for a couple of extremely selective schools that had later pre-screen deadlines.
Recording Tips
Here’s a few recording tips to hopefully make the whole process smoother:
1) If you can, use an iPhone or android phone that can record in 4K / 30Hz. That way, you can record landscape (horizontally) full body, get the take you all really like, then crop that down to smaller shots (e.g. chest-up, waist-up) and still have enough resolution. 2) The background doesn’t matter much, as long as it’s reasonably monotone. 3) For audio, a separate mic (e.g. a Shure MV51) does make the audio sound better. Schools are used to viewing pre-screens and can hear past the recording quality of phones, but if you can afford an external mic, it’s worth it. That mic can be on a tripod next to he phone. 4) Follow your kid’s lead on whether they want you in the room while performing or not. It’s ok to press “record” and leave the room for them to perform, then come back to review the shot. 5) Pick a naming convention for files, and use it consistently. E.g. “Song1_OnMyOwn_WaistUp”. It’ll make keeping track of different files easier. 6) Double check requirements before uploading!
The Timeline
Work backwards from a November 1 deadline. The final recording sessions need to happen by mid-October. For that, the material has to be performance-ready in September. For that, the songs and monologues need to be chosen and cut over the summer, which means the school list needs to be roughly settled first, because until you know the schools, you don’t know the requirements.
None of those steps compresses well, and September is the worst month to try. School has started, the Common App is demanding attention, and the early academic deadlines are warming up. This is the point I keep making in the timeline post: the summer is where a not-crazy fall gets built.
If you’re reading this in August with nothing recorded, you’re fine. You’re also exactly the family this post is for. Start this week, with the school list and the song choices, and let everything else follow from there.
What a Prescreen Pass Means
A prescreen pass is not an acceptance. It’s an invitation to the real audition, nothing more, and plenty of kids pass prescreens at schools that later say no. A prescreen that doesn’t pass isn’t a verdict on your kid’s talent, either. It’s one program managing an impossible ratio of applicants to slots in one particular year, and I’ve written before about how much luck lives in these outcomes.
Nobody gets into a program at the prescreen stage (although direct accepts at PUA are a real thing), and a lot of kids are out of one there. The audition is where your kid can win over the room. The prescreen decides whether she ever gets a room to win. Treat it with that level of seriousness, and give it the time it actually takes, and you’ll have done the single most useful thing a family can do before senior year starts.