A Conversation with Ryan Scott Oliver
on Actor Therapy with Lindsay Mendez & musical theatre education
It was a real pleasure to sit down with composer-lyricist Ryan Scott Oliver, hailed as “the future of Broadway” by Entertainment Weekly. Along with Tony Award-winning Broadway star Lindsay Mendez, he co-founded Actor Therapy, an influential training program that helps performers navigate the challenging path to a professional career. In our conversation, Oliver shares insights about theatre education, mentorship, and his own artistic evolution as both teacher and creator. Our conversation begins below:
It’s so great to meet you. Sondheim famously said that teaching is the sacred profession, and that certainly seems to be something of a creed for you and Lindsay Mendez, in amongst all your other creative activities. For readers who might not be familiar with your Actor Therapy program, could you introduce us to it?
Yes, absolutely. Lindsay and I have been best friends since we met in 2009, and in 2012 we were both getting approached a lot for private coaching. We both acknowledged that private coaching wasn’t so much our thing, but we had this idea to do a group class. We did not fully expect it to be as vital as it became.
We realized over the first couple of years that there was a niche missing around musical theatre education that was not so much about learning the craft of musical theatre as it was about the immensely difficult skill of just breaking in and breaking through. So many people wrote to Sondheim wanting to break through. And it was this feeling of opening doors that we realized we could offer, that even college programs weren’t really offering. They purport to offer it, but there is a lot of misinformation.
When you think of Forum, we’re seeing Sondheim’s lyricism breaking through, but musically, you can still feel Bernstein’s influence on him. By the time we get to Company, he had really identified who he was. That’s the same mentality we’re approaching with our students. Yes, you want to honor your industry. You want to think about what is happening, what has just happened, how you fit into what just happened.
But at the end of the day, the thing that is going to break you through is being entirely your strange, subversive, peculiar self—with everything that you’ve learned and been through up to the point that you’re making this art. That’s the thing that chips away at you and shapes you into an artist that has something very singular to offer.
That’s really beautiful. And if you’re a performer who didn’t grow up well-connected, or in a big theatre city, so much of that journey must seem overwhelming. In developing Actor Therapy, was it very much a deliberate choice to address those sorts of gaps? And more broadly, how much has the program developed from the first time you had students in a room to today?
Great questions with lots of answers. For the first part, everyone comes to the room having a general understanding of how to tell a story and what they should sing, and all of that is great. We find that actors deeply underestimate how important and beautiful it is to walk into an audition room, sing a little song, not do too much, not go too far, but deliver the assignment, which is a job interview. A job interview or even a first date are two metaphors we often use when talking about auditions.
You’re not there to tell them your life story. You’re there to tell them the information they are asking for, that is appropriate for that moment. You’re hopefully not going to cry in a job interview. You’re not going to scare your prospective date away by telling them really interesting facts about your life that are better suited for a later date—whether it’s people you’ve lost in your family, how much money you make, or any other fact that might be a little off-putting on a first encounter.
What we realized is that so many actors do the extra credit, thinking that no one can truly see them unless they give 150%. It’s great to give all that energy, but you don’t want to scare people away. You want to actually draw people into you. So much of the gap we’re trying to fill is encouraging students to think of each of these moments as: it’s nice to meet you, this is who I am, this is a little bit of what I have to offer, this is my personality, and that’s it. They don’t know you, they want to know you, and all the other information you could share will be shared at another audition or callback.
The Sondheim material is so challenging, and I think our students understand that. A song like “Soon” in A Little Night Music—that’s like the soprano Olympics, because it’s an incredibly difficult song to sing, and you don’t have to add anything to it. Just do the song, understand who Anne is, and you will impress.
For the second part of your question, I’ll start with Sondheim. This is actually something that has shifted over the last six months, a micro thing before I get into the macro. We’re very big on making sure that all genres of musical theatre and radio music are represented. Sondheim, of course, has his own category, and before his passing we would say that the point of Sondheim’s category was to show how you handle deeply complex lyrics, stories, and music. And we would say certain Adam Guettel pieces, certain Jason Robert Brown pieces, certain pieces by contemporary musical theatre composers and some things that I’ve written, could qualify. But we’ve now decided that only Sondheim is Sondheim. We’re cutting the genre off: you have to have a song specifically by him. That’s one thing that’s changed.
The big thing to change—and this is really speaking to the heart of your interest in musical theatre education—is that when you think about how Oscar Hammerstein talked to Sondheim in those famous early days compared to how Sondheim spoke to so many young writers, you notice a softening and increase in empathy. Oscar Hammerstein was certainly empathetic, but there was a sense of “This is the right way to do this.” And you see this really warm, encouraging tone in Sondheim’s letters.
So many people teaching musical theatre were taught by people who were really tough love. There were a lot of teachers, especially before the 2000s, who were brutal and vicious, with a performative nastiness in the way actors were taught. I certainly experienced that as a student and watched it happen to other people. It was all fun and games until you read back the transcript and think, “Did they really say that to that poor girl?” Then this idea of “you’re too fat to play this role” or “you’re not the right skin color for this role” or “you're not good enough to do this”—that this show is kept only for the most beautiful and fit.
We saw it soften as the decades went on. But Lindsay and I were part of a last generation of people who experienced that kind of performative viciousness by our educators. Especially when you are not successful yet as a teacher, you can inflict some of that resentment onto impressionable actors. We see it with casting directors all the time. What shifted in the last several years—Lindsay and I talk about this all the time —is our empathy has really skyrocketed. The pandemic was a huge turning point for us. You can be a great teacher without hurting someone’s heart.
And when Sondheim asked Hammerstein to inscribe his picture, he wrote, “For Stevie, my friend and teacher.” I’d love to explore this notion of “by your pupils you’ll be taught,” itself a Hammerstein lyric. How has Actor Therapy, and teaching more generally, informed your own working practice?
I started teaching writing in around 2013, and I still teach musical theatre writing in addition to teaching actors. Every time you write something, especially when you're young, chances are it’s going to be riddled with clichés, not really work, possibly fall apart. Every time you do that you think, “I’m never going to do that again”—but you’re going to make a new mistake the next time.
One of the most beautiful things about teaching is that you get to experience so many writers’ mistakes without having made them yourself! You absorb it and go, “I see why that doesn’t work,” and that improves my sharpness and taste in the kind of things I’m making. I absolutely think my students have shaped my creative voice over the last ten years, because you notice patterns that you yourself are at risk of taking.
Another thing, and going back to that theme of empathy, is that around 2009 I wrote a song called “The Ballad of Sara Berry” about a murder rampage at prom. When I wrote it I thought, “This is so fun. I love horror movies. This is a gag.” When I think back to that song now as an older person, I think it’s so sad. She killed all those kids. Even though I’m still deeply attracted to Gothic and horror pieces (and Sweeney Todd will always be my favorite thing in the world) I’m much more interested now in acknowledging the darkness and cruelty of the world but also reminding people that there is hope, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. If you do good, you can make yourself good and make the world a better place. As I get older, I feel that more and more infusing my work, wanting to create pieces that touch people, even as they dive into the darkness.
When you think about your writing now, are there things you still learn from Sondheim that might not be so obvious? Perhaps about craft or structure, or little ways of solving problems?
I have, as so many of us do, all of his scores from every single show he’s written sitting on my shelf. In the eighties and nineties, we saw every musical theatre writer coming around writing in the musical style of Sondheim. We certainly see moments in Rent where Jonathan Larson is writing in the style of Sondheim. Then we went away from that in the 2000s by looking at Jason Robert Brown, and in the 2010s with people wanting to sound like Lin-Manuel Miranda.
That’s the more obvious way everybody is inspired by Sondheim. But his ongoing inspiration, and why he truly had such an impact on the form, is the way he broke rules. Lehman Engel tells you that you’ve got to open with a big chorus number, then you have to have an “I want” song. Very few Sondheim musicals follow any of those patterns, and that’s why they have such staying power. That’s why with every single revival or amateur production, people find more and more in it.
I’m always interested in the ways we peel away the surface layers of Sondheim. What’s so fascinating about him is that we think of his music as so complex—and it is—but he will frequently have the same bass note or baseline for, like, 64 bars, and you don’t even notice it because of what else is going on. I would say that in all my work, I can point to an element—whether it’s a lyric or a structural thing or a harmonic thing—where I think, “that’s from Sondheim.”
Another thing that stays with me: no matter how complex the work is, you can always boil Sondheim down into something quite simple. Too often, people immediately think, “This has to be crazy complex, oppressively detailed,” relying on the idea that Sondheim wasn’t writing catchy radio tunes, so I don’t have to either. But when you really break it down, “Not While I’m Around,” “No One is Alone,” and “Johanna” are essentially two-chord songs, no matter what else is happening. They’re actually quite simple. That is a constant inspiration. I’m always getting up from my desk, going to one of these scores, opening it up and thinking, “What did he do there?” It’s a constant thing.
If someone’s reading this and they’re keen to find out more about Actor Therapy, how would you encourage someone to apply? Who’s the ideal person that you’re looking for?
We’re looking for actors who are looking for direction, whether they went to college or not, actors who feel like they’ve gotten a little lost in their twenties, or actors who have left the business and are looking to come back, who are a little bit older. Our students are not all college age. We have students anywhere from 18 to 40 and even older sometimes.
You can find us at our website. We offer a variety of classes including our core audition techniques class, but we also have rehearsal and performance classes. We do a class around a theme—often it’s Sondheim, and it will be Sondheim in our next session. You get to work on this material with fantastic guests as though you are in the show, working with a director, versus our audition techniques class which is much more about presenting yourself in the job interview and getting your foot in the door.
We offer summer and winter intensives for anybody really looking for a major reset, or if you skipped college—which is great, if you skipped college!—and you want to get a massive foundation. As far as I’m concerned, these two weeks feel like one full year of college and maybe more.
Find out more about Ryan Scott Oliver & Lindsay Mendez’s Actor Therapy by visiting their website: https://www.actortherapynyc.com/