Auditions

Yesterday afternoon were the first round of auditions for our Fall Play!  We have a new high school math teacher who has directed several plays, and he is helping me direct.  He has some really great ideas and is creative and excited about things.  He's also actually directed the play I chose to do this year.  And, he has been on board with my wanting to really stretch the kids and help them learn more about acting through the process this year.  

So, we decided, rather than holding the traditional 2 days of group auditions with everyone reading the same scenes from the show over and over, we would give the kids an experience more similar to any other kind of audition they would ever do!  We required the students to do solo auditions in which they had 5 minutes to present their audition application and perform a monologue in front of us in order to earn a callback.

I posted dozens of monologues online for them, and told them where and how to find the best monologues on their own.  I held a little workshop last week to teach the kids about how to choose, prepare, and memorize a monologue.  We also talked about auditioning and channeling nerves into focus.  And we learned about character analysis and method acting.  Even though I told the students I would equip them for their auditions, and we had 32 kids show up to the informational meeting 2 weeks ago, only 8 showed up for the acting workshop.  I was kind of disappointed by that, but those who did attend felt it was very helpful!

We had 12 students show up for auditions yesterday.  Some of them knocked our socks off, and some of them surprised us with their lack of preparation and focus.  We called back 6 for more today. 

Sylvia prepared a very difficult monologue about a homeless teen.  She performed it for her dad and brother and I in the living room last night too.  

I spent most of the day today trying to narrow things down as much as possible so that callbacks wouldn't take long.  There were 3 girls who could've done any of 3 parts we saw them for, and some of the guys I just wanted to ask if it was really going to work with their busy schedules to be part of the play at all.  We had a handful of scenes with the 6 called back in various roles, and it went quickly.  After we let them go, it took us just a few minutes to decide who should be in the remaining roles.  It was a really nice way to do auditions, and I'm so glad the kids respected us enough to get on board with it.  Other teachers told me they heard from some of the students that they really appreciated having a more educational type of audition experience, and that makes me so happy!

Here's our cast!  It's going to be a fun time putting it together!