Auditions coming up!!!

Wow, I am NOT keeping up with the blog! Work has been crazy. We just shipped 4.8.0 of our Coral8 engine and that kept me busy every day this week until midnight. Barb went off to Las Vegas for a fun trip including shopping for HAiR costumes and a little gambling and sunning, to recharge her batteries for the upcoming event of HAiR. She got some REALLY cool things for the show, too!

And auditions are around the corner... Tomorrow, we have our first audition and it is very exciting. We have 33 people signed up in advance for auditions, and we expect more will show up unregistered. Metro Silicon Valley ran a small audition calendar listing on Wednesday and we have been sending out mailings like crazy to everyone we have ever worked with before. Bay Area Theatre Bums (BATB) also provides us with good access to actors, as does craigslist. I perused the Theatre Bay Area resume listings and picked some people to mail to as well. We shall see, we shall see.

Of course, the biggest problem that always seems to plague smaller companies is getting men to audition. Women are always interested, but men are harder to get. Our ratio of preregistered men to women is about 3:1 which means we should have enough talent to pick and choose among the women, but unless every man who tries out is great, we are going to need to do some more recruiting.

Another show that is in preproduction, Insignificant Others, written by Jay Kuo, is having a similar problem (see Jay's blog for his ruminations on the audition process too). So its nice to know we aren't the only ones!

I am most worried about finding a really good black male performer to handle the role of Hud. Hud needs to be a kind of cross between Huey Newton and Sly of Sly and the Family Stone. A sensitive, fun-loving but deep-down very politically aware young black man. He hangs with the hippies, but inside, I sense a real need to express his feelings about the oppression his culture has experienced. And he has to sing in a great Paul Robson-type voice! Yikes! (Fortunately, Broadway By The Bay is doing Showboat right now and I expect they may have one or two cast members who might fit ;-) )

I have two really good audition pianists lined up (that was a concern until this week, as it always is). We have all the forms, scene cuttings, CDs, etc., ready to go.

Bring on the actors!