T Minus 78 Days: Decisions, decisions!

We finished three days of callbacks on Wednesday, and I haven't blogged since the beginning of the week because I have been caught up in the process of trying to figure out how to best use the people who have come out to be in the show. It is difficult to write about this while the process is ongoing, because there are issues that arise in callbacks which effect each individual actor in different ways, and it is almost impossible to talk about how the director views these situations without publicly "undressing" each of the people who are hoping to get into this tribe, and that is something I am very reluctant to do.

However, I do want to document this process and so I am going to take a somewhat obtuse approach. I am going to write about the issues that we are struggling with as anonymously as possible, without naming any names or even revealing too many details about the parts under consideration. I expect those of you who are involved in the process, if you are reading the blog, will try to identify individuals, including yourselves, from these comments. I hope that you don't because I promise you that you are just as likely to draw incorrect conclusions as correct ones.

The biggest initial dilemma we faced for callbacks is how to view the over-all tribe casting vs. potential audience expectations with respect to age and appearance. This is a very important issue for a director. We have a number of very talented actors who tried out who might not normally fit someone else's definition of "young hippie" but who showed such passion for the show, as well as their talent, that we are very reluctant to let them go.

A mentor of mine once gave me a good piece of advice. We were considering casting a boy in the role of Peter Pan, which as you probably know is traditionally played by a woman (such as Mary Martin). He said,

It is always a director's option to defy audience expectations when casting a show. However, if you do that, you had better be damned sure you are right!

An audience will accept an average performance from someone who meets their expectations, but if someone who is so unexpected based on their experience appears, that person has some serious hurdles to overcome.

Advice for actors: Please try to keep this in mind the next time you aren't cast in a part you want and you believe that the director is "prejudiced" about your age, look, height, weight, whatever. It may not be the director's personal prejudice that is involved at all, but only his/her understanding of what the audience's expectation will be, and an unwillingness to take that risk (and thus put the show itself at some level of risk).

In light of the good people who came to auditions, the question immediately came up: do we consider casting some of these people in the tribe despite the fact that they are obviously not in their early 20s? We don't have the benefit of a large "gulf" between the audience and the stage, either, as might be the case in a big theater. At Theatre on San Pedro Square, in particular, the tribe will pretty much be in the audience's lap.

Barb and Dudley and I struggled with this question for several days during auditions and callbacks. We decided to call back people based purely on talent, not on age or appearance, because we wanted to give ourselves the option of making that decision later. Now that we are done with callbacks, the question remains, will this work or not?

Barb and I discussed this at great length and we kept coming back to some of the productions of HAiR that we have seen. One of the most sincere productions of HAiR we ever saw was a small production in an open-air theater which included a cast of a variety of ages, shapes and even talent levels. However, the entire tribe had so bonded and was so committed to doing the show well that it worked and completely defied any expectations one might have had. On the other hand, a recent commercially-staged production in Los Angeles, with probably a million-dollar-plus budget and Equity talent, was, in our opinion, almost totally without any real meaning. It certainly didn't work for us and that seems to be the consensus in the HAiR community. We would much rather have a show like the former than one like the latter.

We started to identify the people who are clearly committed to this production. They tried to come to all of the callbacks unless there was no choice because of outside commitments, they have worked hard to study the materials in advance and prepare themselves and they did anything we asked them to do without objections.

After continued back-and-forth about this, the decision finally became clear for us. We might not have a tribe that is the ideal age or size or shape, but we will have a tribe with great talent, and a passion to do this show the way it should be done. We will trust to the magic of theater to overcome any audience expectations. What really matters is delivering the message of HAiR with heart and soul and we just don't see why that mandates that only a group of 20-year-olds be involved.

We made our final decisions on Thursday night and invited the selected tribe members to participate on Friday. However, we still postponed principal role casting because we had some concerns in that area as well.

We considered doing a supplemental callback but after trying to arrange it for the appropriate people, we had problems making it work. Maybe that was a message from the stars telling us that we should go with our instincts and stop trying to use too much logic.

We ultimately decided to use the same philosophy for casting the principals as we have for the overall tribe and we will cast our fates to the wind. Making the right choices based on talent and heart and desire should trump any specific "look" we thought we might have wanted.

I probably should have known this is the way it would end up because I have been burned by making mistakes before. Once, when directing The Fantasticks, I cast a man in a role that he really didn't want (he was hoping to get El Gallo) because he "looked" the part and was a slightly better actor, rather than casting another man, whose look concerned me despite being only marginally less talented and much more passionate about the part. Although the chosen actor ultimately did well, it clearly was not the best performance he had ever given (his heart simply wasn't in it), and he also made the directing job extremely difficult. I expect that had I chosen the other actor, despite his look being somewhat unusual and his somewhat lesser ability (but not by much), he would have given me the performance of his life and it would have shown in the final production.

In this case, the decisions are even clearer. And so, we reached the end of the first part of the journey. Casting decisions have been announced and we are ready to start rehearsals on Tuesday...

Look out San Jose, here we come!