Friday, April 17, 2015

Auditions.

I've been feeling slightly sick all week. A cast of three have got to be pretty good, right? So the audience don't utterly sicken of them prancing and look at me strutting about the stage. 

Lots and lots of strangers had got in touch to say they wanted to audition. Including people from RSAMD / the Conservatoire, the Welsh equivalent and a handful of people who purport to be professional. 

74 people accepted the facebook invite to the auditions. But as people invariably accept event invites without the slightest intention of attending, I didn't read too much into this. 

I took early excellent auditionees. I took many excellent auditionees on Sunday just gone. And more more more excellence came pouring out of the woodwork on Wednesday night.

The only thing I'm glad about? That I didn't have seventy four auditionees. In total, I saw twenty one. And that was traumatic enough.

Twenty one people is eighteen people who can't get cast. Misery! 

Eleven girls for one girl part!

And the trouble was the eighteen were all really good. Very experienced people from the group. People I've worked with lots of times before and are wonderful. New people who were surprising and delightful and all did something quite different with the lines. And owwowowow, why can't I cast them all???

I sent out a misery batch of emails yesterday morning. I confess to not quite having the stomach for 18 calls of rejection as I usually masochistically make myself phone the rejected as well as the cast. 

And I got nothing but loveliness back. Which made me feel WORSE. If people had only maintained a haughty silence, I could securely occupy my role as villain. But lovely graciousness - oh we understand, oh you did the right thing - confirmed that I was kicking puppies. Lovely soft loving labrador puppies (not those horrible hairless breeds or yowling as yet toothless but still savage rottweilers). 

And the killer: "thanks for such positive feedback".... I'VE REJECTED YOU. THAT'S THE WORST KIND OF FEEDBACK. DON'T BE NICE TO ME. I'M A BEEYATCH.

The consequence of all of this is that my cast is exceptional. 

The trouble is I could have cast it three times over and it would have been most likely just as good. 

Man I hate having to sit in judgement.

A short note of reasonableness. Many many thanks to Ross for sitting patiently throughout the frolics as a sounding board / second opinion / runner / time keeper / wise thought haver / moral supporter. I loved having him there. Two minds, for sure, are better than one. 

And the thing that makes me most happy, setting the misery to one side for a second, is my goodness me, don't we have a theatre group to be tremendously proud of?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home