From Broadway's Phantom to Teaching Theater with Katie Banks-Todd | Ep 66

In Episode 66, Samuel sits down with Katie Banks-Todd, a vocal and theater teacher at El Dorado High School and a former member of the Broadway and national touring company of Phantom of the Opera. She grew up in the front row of the El Dorado High School auditorium watching her mother direct every production. Decades later, she is back in that same building running the program herself, with a lot of ground covered in between. Katie's path started with voice lessons at Butler College and opera training at Wichita State, where she learned that Music Theater of Wichita had a reputation that reached well beyond Kansas. Three summers in the MT Wichita resident ensemble gave her a tight group of friends and a resume that turned heads when she moved to New York. She auditioned 13 times for Hairspray over the course of a year, got called back repeatedly, made it to the final rounds for the tour, the London company, and the Broadway cover track, and still never got the job. The feedback, passed along through a connection Wayne Bryan made at Music Theater of Wichita: she looked mean when she sang. About a year after relocating to the Twin Cities with her husband Patrick to build her resume at a lower cost of living, the same casting director who had turned her away for the Fairy Godmother at Disney tracked her down for the national tour of Phantom of the Opera. Patrick had been married to her for about three months. He told her she was going. A year and a half later, when her track opened up in the Broadway company at the Majestic Theatre, she made the jump. She ended up going on more as Carlotta on Broadway than she had on the entire tour, and her parents were there for her first time on for the role. After three and a half years with Phantom, she and Patrick decided to come home to start a family. Now she teaches at El Dorado High School, where this year she took a third of the student body to state music competition, had all three of her ensembles qualify, and is currently preparing a production of Peter Pan that involves a professional flying company coming in to teach students how to actually fly each other. Her select group is also heading to Disneyland to perform in the park and work with a Disney entertainment director on a full sound engineering workshop. Learn more at https://killergrowth.com