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The Bachelor of Music in Music Theater is focused on training students with a high proficiency in singing for a career in Broadway-style performance. The degree is one of the most music intensive in the country and couples rigorous music training with equally rigorous courses in dance, acting, performance techniques, stagecraft, and general studies. The faculty is committed to training musical theater majors as professional musicians as well as highly skilled dancers and actors. Our graduates have experienced great success due, in large part, to the music training we provide.

Students in the musical theater program audition for all six of the Bass School of Music annual productions and are cast in musicals and operas alike. Our productions integrate the skills of the curriculum: music and text analysis and preparation, character analysis, acting skills, movement, dance, and diction. Students gain performance skills in not only musical theater but also classical and operatic repertoire. Each student must complete a junior recital consisting entirely of classical repertoire and a senior recital focused on music theater repertoire and related styles. This vocal cross training makes our graduates competitive and versatile.

In addition to the rigorous training our musical theater students receive, graduating seniors audition for a and have the opportunity to work with professionals in the field and audition for agents and casting directors.

Oklahoma Opera and Music Theater Company

ÀÏ˾»ú´«Ã½'s Oklahoma Opera and Music Theater Company is the world's oldest campus troupe dedicated to both opera and music theater and has won multiple awards, most recently at the 2017 National Opera Association Production Competition. Dr. David Herendeen, director of opera and music theater since 1997, won awards for three different productions in a single season — the first time one director has done so.

On April 4, 1930, ÀÏ˾»ú´«Ã½ presented its first musical production: Gilbert and Sullivan's "HMS Pinafore." As ÀÏ˾»ú´«Ã½'s talent pool and audiences grew over the next two decades, the university established the Oklahoma Opera and Music Theater Company. In 1951, it mounted the first of what has become 74 consecutive seasons of fully staged productions.

After hundreds of performances of 170 different operas and musicals, we look back in gratitude at the half-million people who have attended shows on campus or on one of our international tours. We realize that the best way to build on the successes of the past is to confidently embrace the future. Our audiences enjoy the nation's most dynamic young performers, innovative stagings, and a repertoire that combines the comfort of the familiar with the thrill of the unexplored.