“I’ve been singing since I was out of the womb,” says Bethel Elias, a musical theatre major. “Acting came a little bit later.”

Since getting her first taste of acting in a seventh-grade class, this sophomore student has aspired to Broadway stardom. Last year, when she and some classmates took a weekend trip to New York to see a show, Elias discovered what she hopes might be the perfect role for her some day.

“The focus here is more on the music aspect, making sure we have really good music theory training and making us well rounded, and I found that really important.”

“I’d love to play Celie in The Color Purple,” she says. “When I saw it on Broadway, I became obsessed.”

Elias hopes to make several more trips to New York to see theatre in the future, and also to spend time exploring the active theatre scene in Washington, D.C. She’s a mezzo-soprano who happily made use of her full vocal range while working at her summer job as a singing server in an ice cream shop on the Jersey Shore.

“I think my strong suit is belting,” she admits, “but I like singing high, too.”

She looked at several programs when she was applying for college, and was impressed by what she learned about Catholic University’s musical theatre program.

“I applied to seven or eight schools,” she says. “I didn’t know much about Catholic University before applying, but I did a little research and found out that here, I would get a bachelor of music, instead of a bachelor of fine arts, and that got me interested. The focus here is more on the music aspect, making sure we have really good music theory training and making us well rounded, and I found that really important. I’m thinking about getting my master’s in vocal pedagogy. So having the music theory training and being surrounded by strong musicians is something that I was interested in.”