What Is Sight-Reading, and Do Musical Theatre Actors Need to Be Good at It?

Sight-reading means performing music you have not had a chance to practice first. For singers, that usually means looking at unfamiliar sheet music and singing it. And this is where people tend to freak out.

Do musical theatre actors have to be amazing sight-readers? No. Would being a strong sight-reader help you? Absolutely. But there is a huge amount of space between “I cannot make sense of this page” and “I can sing this perfectly on sight.”

Spoiler alert: you are allowed to live somewhere in the middle.

Where might you actually have to sight-read?

Callbacks. Music rehearsals. New work readings.

Those are situations where you may be handed something with very little preparation time. Nobody is expecting you to have psychic knowledge of the melody, but they may expect you to pick it up quickly. That is the part I think performers should focus on.

Fast learning matters. If your sight-reading is not great, what happens after the first read? Can you hear the music director play the phrase and immediately connect it to the score? Can you fix the rhythm the second time? Can you retain the correction?

Those skills matter, too.

I would much rather work with somebody who misses something once and fixes it than somebody who can technically read the notes but never adjusts.

How do you get better?

Read music you do not already know.

If you pull out a song you have been singing since high school, you are mostly remembering it. Find unfamiliar music and see what you can figure out before listening to a recording.

It may be ugly. Good. That is practice. Just go with it! It's the only way to get better.