In the School of Musical Theatre, the students allow the school's success. Dr. Greg Kunesh, the Interim Director and Regents professor of the School explained it this way.

"It's part of the school's mission statement. The first sentence of our mission statement is to identify, recruit and train talented and bright high school students. So that they are prepared to enter the musical theatre performance career in a highly competitive manner when they graduate. Down and dirty, that's who we are."

Dr. Kunesh and his staff travel around the country, from June to March to look at over 2,000 musical theatre student auditions. After that process, they invite 130-140 high school students to campus to audition in front of the entire staff of the school.

This year, they took twelve students- six men and six women.

Richard Taylor, the Dean of the Weitzenhoffer School of Fine Arts talks about what kinds of students the School of Musical Theatre and the other fine arts schools invite to attend.

"I think you look for a good grade point in high school. You look for someone that has really been involved in a lot of things. You look for a person that has natural talent, that we believe we can make better. And you look for scholars too.... (We look for) people that want to work hard..." Taylor said.

It seems over the past decade the schools have gotten the exact students they are looking for because with each year they have put on bigger and more challenging productions.

"You can only do what your student body is capable of doing... There is no way we could have done 'Rent' ten years ago," Kunesh said.

With the growth in production, the demand for flexibility also becomes apparent. The School of Fine Arts are always collaborative, with this week's U.S. premier of Andrew Lloyd Webber, it has never been more apparent.

"The collaborative nature of between the (three performing arts schools) is really driven by production demands- whether we are doing a dance production, just drama or musical theatre. But I would like to think the collaborative nature of the art form goes beyond just production demands."

But each student works with each school to learn each other's skill to become more skilled in the practice. Especially the Musical Theatre majors.

"All of our musical theatre majors, they have to take x number of years of acting, that's in the drama school. Our student's have to take production support classes like stagecraft and costume construction and stage lighting. Our students also have to take classes from our School of Dance- ballet and modern dance." Dr. Kunesh further elaborated.

The students of the School of Musical Theatre are special, with the tireless effort of the faculty OU has one of the more impressive powerhouse fine arts schools in the nation.