Alberty's Blah Blah Blog

So, this weekend I ran the auditions for the next show I am directing: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There are about 28 roles.

The last play I directed had about 15 roles, and I had somewhere around 30 actors come out to audition.

Because we had 11 roles for kids we held our “Kids” audition on Saturday at 1:00. The artistic director told me we’d get “dozens” of kids out for this show. I guessed somewhere around 30 or so. When my scenic designer told me to expect 100, I told him he was nuts, and in a scary sociopathic way, not a funny-kooky Aunt Mildred way.

By 1:00 we had 193 kids. You read that number right. We were seven shy of two Benjamins, as they say on my side of town.

I was up in the rehearsal hall, which sits about 75 when one of the volunteers came up and said, “Can we start sending them up? We’re running out of room in the foyer.” My assistant director and I looked at each other. We knew we were in trouble, but we didn’t really know how much.

We moved through a swift succession of changing plans like … honestly I can’t come with an appropriate simile for this. The first thing I had to do was ask the parents to move so that we could give all the seats to the kids.

Then we had to move the whole audition to the main floor of the house and the stage, which still had a huge set on it (the final performance of Sweeney Todd was running that night).

Then we had to ask parents to move to the balcony. It was ridiculous.

One of our volunteers — who were rock stars, by the way, which I’ll get into later — anyway, one of our volunteers told me that her favorite thing was watching my facial expressions during the first fifteen to twenty minutes of this fiasco. I can imagine I was pretty comical if half of what I was thinking was getting out through my face.

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Part 2

There were two parts to the audition: dance and acting. My choreographer went through the audition steps several times for everyone then bravely took five kids at a time. We lined them up in twenties, according to their audition number 1-193. Five at a time, a minute or so dance. It took a while. I was a little bug-eyed by the time that was over. And I hadn’t even hit my part of the audition.

After the dance section concluded, I broke the kids into their parts, based on age: essentially girls under 12 and boys under 14, and their respective elders, fell into Lucies, Edmunds, Susans, and Peters.

Then, and this is where I thought I lost my mind for a second, I had them get into numerical order. I knew I might be in trouble when all my volunteers nearly snapped their necks looking up at me to see if I was serious.

The Peters and Edmunds were pretty easy, since there were eight and twenty-five. respectively. The Susans were old enough to get through it on their own.

But there were over 100 Lucies. It was like herding cats.

But it really did help with the decision process, that moment of insanity.

We started reading kids in a page-long scene with the four characters. I realized quickly that I had to cut it down considerably to get through the audition before Sweeney Todd’s curtain went up at 7:30.

We were zooming through it. I’m pretty sure I blacked out a few times, because I heard my assistant director pipe with my usual “Thank you, that was great. Next please.”

It really became mind numbing after a while. But I think that ultimately helped out. Because the kids that shined really shined and made you watch them. Harsh but true.

About an hour in we had kids coming up to me saying, “I have a dance recital (or music recital) at (such-and-such-a-time). Will I be done by then?”

I’d ask them their number. If they said anything over 70 I’d say, “You’re not going make it.” It was strange how that large number of auditioners gave me the odd ability to be blunt. That’s not usually one of my traits.

We began at 1:00. I finally left the theatre around 5:30. And that was to go to a bar to cull through the sheets to pull together Call-backs.

We left the bar around 6:45.

By the end of the night we had it down to about ten Lucies, eight Susans, six Edmunds, and two Peters. I felt pretty good about that.

We had twenty more kids show up to our Adult Auditions on Sunday and Monday nights.

I have never experienced anything like that Saturday audition.

The call-backs were nearly as difficult. But not from a logistical standpoint. It was emotionally gungabunga!

There was one point at the end of the night when I had seen everything I could from the five Lucies I had left. I knew I had to choose to one of them. I knew the two I were thinking about. I did not want to make that decision. All the girls had kicked that audition. They threw everything into it.

I pulled them together and said, “Tomorrow one of you is going be Lucy in this show. I want you to know that no matter who it is, you should each be incredibly proud of the work you did tonight. Promise that no matter whose name that is, you will be proud of yourselves.”

They all looked up at me with their huge beautiful eyes, each believing that they would be the one, and it broke my heart. I nearly lost it. That was a tough moment for me.

But the show is cast. The cast is a wonderful group of people. And this show that I was regretting agreeing to direct six months ago, has become an absolute joy.

I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

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Wow. If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that the end of last week was bereft of my writing. Not because of any apathy, as some of you who know me might assume. No, no, dear reader. I was pummeled by my own silly scheduling and my son’s sleeplessness.

My boy had two terrible nights where he was up between 1 and 5:30 or so. Thus my wife and I had two terrible nights. On Thursday night he and I had a car ride starting at 3am and ending a little after 4:30. I am not kidding. I did three circuits through my city. Usually about 15 minutes is all he can take until he is gone gone gone. But he was up and talkative the entire ride. I finally just gave up.

When we got home we snuggled for another hour talking about how everyone else he knew in the world was sleeping. How sleeping made the day better because you can play more and laugh more. I pleaded a little. He finally went down. And, thank god, my wife called in a sub so we could tag team during the day, because I was fried and had a rehearsal schedule to finish and a show to perform that night. It was an awful ending to an already stressful week.

On the positive end, my new cast for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is killer. I’ve got about 17 actors under seventeen years old. The rest is a mix of old hands and novice board-walkers, so it is what a community theatre experience should be. That makes me feel pretty good.

On the down side, so many people auditioned (240ish) that several good actors and many, many, good kids were cut. That hurt to do. But this city is so strangely filled with talent that it’s hard get everyone in a show.

This weekend was not the energizing respite that I was hoping for. Still working the music for the show. Still working the ridiculous rehearsal schedule. And — joy of joys! — we meet with our accountant for our taxes Monday afternoon. So all those receipts that I put off entering needed entering.

Oh, well. I have a good feeling about this week.

Wednesday I will finish my post about the kids’ audition. That was something!

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Rehearsal until 10:30. Kid woke up at 1:00am. Back to sleep at 5:00am. Up again at 8:00am. Fumes. Fumes. Fumes.

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