We only had 8 people last night, 7 women and 1 man, but it was a lot of fun and almost everyone is talented enough to be a prospect for the show. Our pianist, who was supposed to come down from San Francisco, took a powder and not only didn't show up, but didn't even have the courtesy to call. Arrgghhh. Lesson learned: hire people you know and hire locally if possible, at least when it is a fundamental requirement like an audition pianist.
Then again, anyone who has done theater in the Bay area knows that there are only a handful of pianists competent to play auditions well in the area (unless you want to spend HUGE union dollars which means $200+ a session which is cost-prohibitive). We had one of them on Sunday, Ben Prince, who plays regularly at Martuni's in San Francisco on Friday nights. He knows EVERY song ever written (or so it seems) and you can give him almost any music and he can play it cold. Amazing talent. Supposedly we had another for last night and tonight, but he flaked. Two of my favorite pianists locally, Bob Sunshine and Jonathan Erman, aren't available because they are doing Passover (how in the hell did I ever end up scheduling auditions on the first two nights of Passover?!!! Some Jew I turn out to be! :-)
I stepped in and hacked through the music for the folks who came to try out last night. As I told them all last night, I greatly appreciate the handicap they were under, and as director AND fill-in pianist, I am at least able to make allowances for my own mistakes/limitations (which as an audition pianist could fill a large book especially when there are no chords written in the music or it is written in the key of G# or D-flat :-) To paraphrase Emporer Joseph II (if you know your classic movies, you will get this :-) "Too many black notes!"'
I hope I can find someone for tonight.
I makes it very hard as a director to play for auditions and watch the performers at the same time and that is important. Fortunately, my team watched for me and I think we still managed to make it work. If there is anyone we feel is "on the cusp" we will probably invite them to callbacks just to let them have another chance.
We have decided to extend auditions through our originally scheduled callback days (Wednesday and Thursday) and postpone callbacks until Barb and I get back from New York. That will give us more time to seek out people for various key roles.
We are going to try to see a rehearsal of Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party at Stanford University this weekend. One cast member can't make auditions at all because they are in hell week and she has the lead in TWP, so we are going to try to check it out. There may also be a few other people we might want to try to recruit because they didn't think they could audition due to the conflicts.
I heard from the director of Broadway By The Bay's Showboat, hoping he could give me a line on a really good Hud. He tells me that except for his Joe (the Paul Robeson part, who sings Ole Man River) he has no other black males in the cast.
Oops, someone already did that. ;-)
Also heard from the director of a local college production of Ragtime. This one is almost harder to understand than Showboat (the black chorus in Showboat actually has limited time in the show). She has only two black men in her Harlem ensemble. That has to be called REALLY alternative casting which is a concept I very much support, but I also think theater companies should consider their talent pool before choosing a show. Although the Bay Area isn't completely white by any means, in the South Bay (as opposed to Oakland) it is harder to find talented black actors. Fortunately, Hair only REQUIRES a few black actors, and alternative casting of other ethnic performers can be effective in most of the roles. But Ragtime pretty much requires 1/3 of the cast to be Afro-Americans from Harlem and that's a tall order if you only have 2 black people. Or a cast of 6 :-)
Ticket sales are now at 14. Its still REALLY early of course, but cool that people are seeing out ad (which is about the only way they can find out we have tickets on sale right now) for Nixon's Nixon and already going to buy tickets. We weren't sure if that would happen, but it is! The ad cost about $800 and with three more full weekends of their run to go, we have sold $280 worth of tickets. The ad may actually end up paying for itself out of direct ticket sales. And what it brings us in future sales (the old "saw" is that someone needs to see something three times on average before they buy a ticket, and this is getting us 15,000 first impressions!) is immeasurable. I'm not ready to declare it a perfect success yet, but I think it was a good decision to spend the bucks on that.
As I am writing, I got an email and it looks like we have a substitute pianist for tonight, we shall see how it works out. Keeping all my fingers and toes crossed.
More tomorrow...
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