Recent North Fort Myers High theater graduate Mia Zottolo lives to challenge herself. This past October, she tackled two difficult roles at the same time: Catherine Howard in “Six the Musical” and Eurydice in “Hadestown Teen Edition.” But recently, playing Judas Iscariot in “Jesus Christ Superstar” took her acting to another level.
“I’ve never played a character this emotionally broken,” said Zottolo. “I’ve always played a villain or some random girl, but this character, who’s mostly just suicidal, I’ve never played a role like that before. It was a tough task to do.”
In spite of her onstage success, Zottolo was not a lock to get into a choice college musical theater program.
“I applied to so many and got so many ‘no’s,’” Zottolo acknowledged. “No one prepares you for the amount of no’s that you get, and it really opened my eyes because I didn’t know where I was going to land.”
To complicate matters, her crazy schedule caused her to become run down and get bronchitis just before her audition to her dream school, the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
“For NYU, I was sick with bronchitis, and I had to ask them to move my audition a week later, but I was still suffering with this bronchitis, and I was really upset because to me, that was one of my worst auditions that I had.”
She was driving to a rehearsal for “Jesus Christ Superstar” at Arts Bonita when her mom called on the day that Tisch sent out emails to applicants who got in and those who did not. At first, she couldn’t make out what her mother was saying.
“She starts screaming, ‘You got into NYU.’ Like my mother pulled over on the side of the road to tell me that I got into NYU. So I called everybody I know after that and I told them about it and I waited to get to rehearsal to tell [director] Kody [Jones} about it. It’s just a surreal moment.”
Rather than being intimidated, Zottolo can’t wait to embark on Tisch’s notoriously difficult curriculum and intensive training. But while she relishes the journey, Zottolo has one goal in mind. She wants to perform on Broadway. She’d love to play Satine in “Moulin Rouge,” but that’s not her dream role.
“Whatever show I’m in, that’s my dream role.”
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As Mia Zottolo acknowledged, the top three musical theater colleges in the U.S. are widely considered to be NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Michigan. These institutions are known for their rigorous conservatory training, strong faculty, and connections to the Broadway and professional theater worlds.
“When you read ‘Playbill,’ you see a lot of U Mich, NYU and Carnegie Mellon in there,” said Zottolo, who keeps track of the colleges from which Broadway’s top performers graduated. (“Playbill” is a trade journal that reports on Broadway shows and news, auditions and job opportunities and Tony Award nominations and wins.)
Zottolo began applying to theater programs in October. Her initial list included 20 schools. In addition to the application and an essay, she had to prepare a “pre-screen” consisting of two videotaped songs and a monologue.
“Mia prepared about 30 pre-screens,” Zottolo's mother reported. “You couldn’t do just one video either. Each school has their own requirements for the songs and the monologue. Some require a modern monologue. Some require a Shakespeare monologue. Some required songs from before 1970. Some tell you sing whatever you want. There were so many videos that she had to record just for the pre-screens.”
Some schools also required a dance video.
“They might send you a combination on a video that you had to learn and videotape,” Paola Zottolo continued.
The goal of the pre-screen was to get an audition.
“If they like what they see enough, they schedule a ‘callback,’ which is your formal audition, after which they either offer you a seat, tell you no thank you or put you on a wait list.”
Some schools require in-person auditions. Others permit auditions on Zoom. While most Zoom auditions are scheduled on an individual basis, many schools participate in “consortium auditions,” like Pittsburgh Unified, where applicants sing and perform monologues live on Zoom in front of 50 or more schools.
A number of schools that Zottolo didn’t have on her original list invited her apply following Pittsburgh Unified. So she sent out another round of applications to another three dozen schools.
The application fees began to mount.
There was an application fee for each college, but the vast majority of schools added an artistic application fee to cover the cost of reviewing the pre-screens and auditions. And then there was the cost of videotaping and sending out all those pre-screens.
Most schools gave applicants the option to do auditions virtually, and to avoid incurring the cost of travel and hotels, Zottolo opted to do her auditions by Zoom whenever possible. However, a handful of schools required in-person auditions, which meant airline tickets, hotel rooms and meals.
Five schools that participated in Pittsburgh Unified gave Zottolo a seat in their musical theater programs right off the bat. That took a lot of pressure off Zottolo because she already had offers, even though they weren’t from her top choices. In fact, some were from schools that Zottolo hadn’t even heard of before Pittsburgh Unified.
“We didn’t know there were so many programs out there either,” Zottolo conceded.
“Because she already had offers, Mia was more relaxed as she auditioned for other schools,” Paola Zottolo said.
Late in the application process, Zottolo got sick. After doing "Six" and "Hadestown" at the same time, she did "Pippin" at North Fort Myers High within weeks of "Jesus Christ Superstar" at Arts Bonita. It was a lot. She caught a respiratory infection and was in no condition to do her auditions, Zoom or otherwise.
A couple of schools declined to reschedule Zoom auditions, so she was denied admission into their programs. NYU proved to be more flexible.
Paola Zottolo was impressed by just how flexible NYU is.
“NYU is one of the only schools that does not require pre-screens,” Paola Zottolo said. “They see everybody who wants to audition. The only thing they ask you to do is videotape your songs and your monologue and send them beforehand in case on the day of your audition you have technical problems or are sick. But they prefer to see everybody who applies even though there are thousands of kids applying.”
The one-week postponement didn’t help much. Between her rehearsal schedule for “Pippin” and an online news segment she’d agreed to do, her respiratory illness improved only marginally. She came out of the Zoom call feeling as though she’d bombed her audition.
“I wasn’t 100 percent,” said Zottolo candidly. “I’m really hard on myself like that. If it’s not 100 percent, I get really upset with myself. But I discovered that sometimes 100 percent isn’t what they’re looking for. They just want to see a real person.”
In NYU’s case, the interview counted for as much, if not more, than the audition.
“No other school did such a big interview,” Zottolo said. “I had an entire Zoom session with one of the staff members there and they asked me all about what I like to do besides theater. So I told them that I vocal directed a show at my school. I like designing tee-shirts and I did some set design, and I guess it worked, and they liked it.”
Paola Zottolo agrees on the importance of the interview during the application process.
“The level of talent outside of Southwest Florida is incredible,” she said. “Therefore, colleges have the pick of the best. But they only have 10 to 20 openings per year in their musical theater programs. I think at that level, it comes down to what kind of cohort they want to have, what kind of kids. Sure, the audition is important, those two minutes of your life. But after that, it’s about what they’re looking for, what mix of boys/girls, different ethnicities. And the interview is important because they want to find out what kind of personality you have since they have to work with you for the next four years. It’s also important because it gives the applicant the opportunity to decide if they want to work with them. Mia took some of the schools she applied to off her list because of that. ‘I don’t see myself there,’ she said. They weren’t her vibe. She knows exactly what she wants.”
Paola Zottolo describes the day that NYU sent out their acceptances.
“On the day the emails went out, Mia was in a rehearsal so she couldn’t check her emails at the time NYU sent them out,” Paola Zottolo recalled. “I was driving my dogs to the day care because that weekend we were going to New York to visit a school that was at the top of her list that she had an acceptance for. I was refreshing the email because I knew she couldn’t check it and then the email comes up and I open it and it says 'welcome to Tisch' and I was like, I couldn’t contain myself. I had to pull over and call her on the phone. I started screaming at her and she didn’t know what was going on. I’m like, ‘Mia, you got it. You got in!’ So I was just screaming in the car, crazy. So that’s how we found out.”
That weekend, Zottolo and her mother indeed flew to New York to tour that other school. As long as they were in New York anyway, they swung by the NYU campus. Nothing much was open because NYU was on spring break, so they opted instead to visit the merchandise store.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I have to go here. If I don’t go here I’m going to be so upset,’” Zottolo recalled.
But there was still the matter of expense. NYU is very expensive. It wasn’t clear that she and her mom could afford the tuition, room and board and other expenses she’d incur living in New York.
“But the week after I got the acceptance, luckily, they gave me a pretty hefty Tisch scholarship for my tuition, so I’m able to go.”
Zottolo thrives on structure. She flourishes in any environment where she’s wanted, respected and treated as a professional. Those were the conditions that Kody Jones created during her acting lessons and the shows in which he cast her both at Naples Performing Arts Center and Arts Bonita. It's what she experienced during shows like “Hadestown Teen Edition” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
She expects to find a similar environment when she arrives at Tisch in the fall.
“I love being in a professional environment where everyone there wants to be there and they show up early to warm up or practice before rehearsals even start,” Zottolo shared. “That’s my favorite thing. Like going to Bonita, there’s always a ton of people there early just because they want to be there, and that’s the kind of environment I like. I like when we’re treated like professionals and not children, because we all have so much potential. I really saw that at NYU with all their curriculums and all the teachers that I met through my audition. They just seemed so … they all believed in us a lot, and they wanted to work with us and the kids around us all want to be there.”
There is one thing that concerns Zottolo, and that’s moving to the city by herself, where she only knows four or five other people.
“The first year she is going to live in the dorms because she’d need three or four other girls to afford splitting an apartment and they all separately have to qualify for the apartment,” Paola Zottolo pointed out. “So you have to find the right people. So she’ll have other kids who are doing the same. She’s been to New York a few times and she’s comfortable with it, but she’s never been by herself. So it’s going to be a big change.”
Undaunted, Zottolo looks on the positive side.
“Going to a school in New York is such a good thing for musical theater or acting because New York is like the [epicenter] for everything theater, TV and movies,” said Zottolo. “I’m excited to go there and meet new people and make new connections with people in New York because you wouldn’t really get that anywhere else.”
Always forward looking, Zottolo sees a long-range benefit to going to school in Manhattan.
“In addition to the experience and connections, you get to know the city so if you ever do end up on Broadway, you already know how to get around the city, which is a great advantage to have.”
While Zottolo expects to apply herself to her studies 100 percent, she acknowledges that she might test the waters early by auditioning for some Broadway shows. In fact, she already did an open call audition for “Lost Boys.”
“They gave me a callback,” she mentioned. “I mean, I haven’t even gotten to New York yet, so I thought that was really, really cool. Even if nothing comes out of it, just getting a callback from a Broadway show is insane to me. So I’m hoping when I get to New York, I can get more auditions.”
For Zottolo, Tisch is a stepping stone on the pathway to Broadway. When asked why Broadway is so attractive to her, she provides a heartfelt answer.
“Live theater in general has always been something special to me,” Zottolo explained. “Getting to tell the audience a story like right in front of their faces and being able to watch people discover new things about themselves or just enjoy the story really changes something in you. Like when you’re onstage and you’re singing that one ballad where you’re just standing and singing and there are people crying or sobbing in tears, that changes you. Someone coming up and saying, ‘You changed me, like your story onstage changed me,’ that is truly like the best feeling in the world. It changes something in you where you have to keep doing it. That’s what I do it for. I do it for everyone in the audience.”
Zottolo also treasures the people she meets and the lifelong friendships she forges through theater.
“It’s something you can’t get anywhere else. Because of theater at school, I have some of the best friends in the world. I’ve learned so much, and people coming up to you and telling you how much you changed them is something you could never experience anywhere else.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.