1. You have to learn how to “breathe.”

Anyone who has been singing or performing knows that breathing correctly is the most important thing to help carry your sound and protect your vocal cords. We can all attest that we have spent countless hours laying on floors with our knees up and our hands on our stomachs learning how to extend our diaphragms to their limits to take in as much air as possible.

2. Vibrato is everything

In order to produce a beautiful and healthy sound while singing, you need to have vibrato, the vibration of your vocal cords. We all remember standing at a piano with our vocal coaches and music teachers doing exercises making our voices shake in weird ways trying to produce that beautiful sound that we all crave as musicians. Figuring out how to make it work and finally hearing the vibrato coming from your own throat was the most exhilarating sound in the world.

3. Throat coat remedies and cough drops are sought after drugs.

When show time comes around, everyone is trying to preserve their voices. Everyone will be walking around with cough drops or a travel mug full of disgusting throat coat remedies (usually consisting of lemon, honey, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and other unthinkable ingredients). Some can even be seen downing “honey shots” as a last-minute protection before heading on stage to belt their hearts out or scream their lines to the heavens.

4. Water is your new best friend.

If you do not have water with you at all times during a performance, your vocal cords will hate you. Staying hydrated is the most important thing for any performer pushing their voice to the limit multiple times in a short amount of days. Reusable water bottles are the way to go, and any performer will have a cabinet full of them.

5. Your fellow performers and crew are your second family.

Being in shows requires a lot of time and energy, meaning you will be spending a lot time with the people with whom you are working. The actors become your siblings, with whom you’ll share countless inside jokes and your directors and the technical people are your distant cousins who you see between scenes. The stage managers become the parents of the group, constantly telling you to put your stuff away, hang up your costumes, and they always cover you when something goes wrong during a run, even though there’s always that one director who is more childish and goofs off more than most of the actors.

6. Tech people are the real heroes.

The people who put together your lights, sound, costumes, props, and all other technical parts of the performance are the underdogs of the theatre world. They put in countless hours to make sure we don’t end up performing on a dark stage with no sound, pantomiming the environment around us and wearing black shirts with our character names on them. They are the reason the script goes from words on a page to a brilliant performance that an audience can get lost in.

7. Opening night is a special kind of exhilaration.

The feeling you get when Friday night rolls around and you know it’s time to start the run is like no other. Waiting in places and hearing the audience in their seats, just as excited to see you perform as you are to perform for them, makes you feel like you’re on cloud nine! There is no greater feeling than nailing every cue, delivering every line with emotional perfection, and rocking the high note in your show-stopping musical number and hearing the audience react with cheers and applause. It’s like sky diving without ever leaving the ground. There’s no feeling in the world quite like this.

8. Watching a show become reality is magical.

Seeing your hard work pay off from the first read-through to the final run is amazing. The feeling you get when the audience laughs, cries, claps, and cheers as you do what you love to do is the greatest feeling in the world. Looking at the set, the lights, and hearing the preshow music makes it all come together. And any performer would be lying if they said they haven’t cried at least once while looking around the room at their fellow cast mates holding hands and reciting preshow rituals to get everyone in the mood for an epic show.