What a weekend!
Well, it’s official folks, the audition season has begun. Despite rapidly falling freezing rain on Thursday, we headed to St. Louis so as not to miss a single audition. We began Friday morning at the Midwest Theatre Auditions (MWTA) on the campus of Webster University. Webster is my alma mater so I always enjoy spending time on campus, meeting with current students and faculty, and generally being reminded how long its been since I’ve been in college! MWTA, brillianty organized and executed by Peter Sargent and his crack team of stage management students, is an enormous cattle call that spans three days. I’m not wholly certain how many auditionees we saw, but I believe they were auditioning in two minute increments from 8:30 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon. You do the math! Following the auditions, there is always a massive dance call brilliantly taught by one of my former professors Ellen isom. Then, following the dance call, we hold callbacks for actors we’d like to see more from. On Saturday, those callbacks lasted until about 9:00pm. For brief intervals on Saturday, I met with potential members of our tech staff who had been brilliantly vetted by Royal Marty our 2008 Technical Director and long-time Lyceum costume designers Garth Dunbar and John Metzner. Long, but rewarding days yielded a great first round of talent and expertise–I’m sure this could only be a sign that we’ve just embarked on our most successful audition season to date.
During the course of the auditions, we saw wonderful young actors from many schools, but I need to make special mention of one school in particular: one other than Webster, which did have a very strong showing as I’ve come to expect. The MFA students from the University of Missouri Kansas City were amazing. Across the board I was impressed with all of their auditions and would encourage readers in the vicinity of KC to keep your eyes peeled for upcoming UMKC productions. I don’t know a great deal about the program there, but they are obviously providing some terrific training!
On Monday, we held our St. Louis open call and saw many familiar faces, but also were introduced to talent that was new to us. Kristen Nordstrom, our West Side Story choreographer, taught the dance call and both Steve and I were thrilled (though not at all suprised) to see what a wonderful job she’s going to do with that brilliant Jerome Robbins choreography.
In the midst of all of this wonderful and exciting work, I had the opportunity to spend brief time with friends and to experience the joy of being awakened every morning by my godson, Sam, yelling “Quin are you asleep!” But, perhaps the greatest experience while in St. Louis was seeing the Webster Conservatory’s production of Angels in America. I applaud our good friend and Angels director Steve Woolf and the outstanding cast for giving a lasting and important memory to all of us in the audience. I was deeply moved and was thrilled to see such strong work at my old school!
More auditions coming up this weekend in Columbia and Arrow Rock. We need lots of kids for Big the Musical so if you’re in the area, please tell everyone you know! After that, we have a full day in Kansas City and then we’re off to New York for the last and most significant leg of the audition tour.
I’ll keep you updated.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Wow. I’m terrible at math, but I’m pretty sure that’s an awful lot of auditions. I have a question: what do you look for during an audition? Two minutes is such a short time - what makes a particular actor stand out?
February 28th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
It is pretty funny–how many people do you know who do a two minute job interview? Though it’s brief, you can learn a lot in those initial auditions. It’s pretty easy to ascertain whether an actor is confident or not–usually before they even open their mouth. If they’re singing, you pretty quickly understand their voice type and their skill level and I always look at their resume to see the extent of their training and where they’ve worked before. Then there’s always that “it” factor that just draws you in to an actor’s performance–I really believe that the “it” is actually a combination of confidence, hard work and well applied technique, but it’s much more efficient to just say they have “it.” Appropriate attire and good audition selections never hurt either. Thanks for the question, sis.