Cry-Baby

Yesterday's audition for the Broadway adaptation of John Water's Cry-Baby (Hairspray 2, the audition monitor wryly called it) was actually fun. It kicked out booties, with running, jumping and quick writhing on the floor, leaving us sweaty and out of breath, but the motivation (we were breaking from prison) and peppy music kept us going, and the teaching associate choreographer had the cutest British accent and a hot assistant.

Perhaps the best part was at the end when they said "we'll call you if we need to hear you sing," prefaced by the usual "we're looking for something very specific." There has already been a workshop of this musical slated for Broadway, so we knew the open roles were few is any. Some dancers hate the uncertainty, but I prefer leaving with a modicum of hope to being rejected to my face.

When we came out in our staggered groups of four, I ended up dancing way to close to the auditioners, almost in their face, which was bad, but I don't think they were watching me anyway. They seemed most interested in the two African-American girls in the room (Theater is one of the last frontiers of legal and socially acceptable discrimination based on race, as well as gender, age, weight and just about anything else you want). I have not heard of anyone getting called as of yet.

Good Advice from A Chorus Line

Dance auditions for A Chorus Line, the dance audition musical, is very meta. The auditionees are portraying a dancer needy for a job, giving it her all, which is what you actually are at the moment. Baayork Lee, Connie in the famed original cast (the short Asian 'Peanut in Pointe Shoes') recreated Michael Bennett's choreography for the recent Broadway revival, and she enthusiastically leads the audition for the first national tour. Most of the dancers at this audition already know the choreography, from auditions for other productions or (in my case) from performing it at a young impressionable age for a musical theater revue. These jazz hands, jumps and pivots to the familiar pounding piano perch along side Jerome Robbins "America" from West Side Story as mainstays of musical theater dancers' vocabulary, feeders of our childhood dreams and reminders of past failures.

Baayork encourages us to cheer, clap, and call 5-6-7-8 as we feed in quick successions to do the short combination two at a time. Then we dance two at time with Baayork and her assistant sitting at a table watching us, taking breaks in between duets to whisper and point. At the end, as always, they name the few dancers that they want to stay.

Then Baayork leaves the rejected with some sage advice.

"Take ballet," she advises us despite the decidedly unballetic nature of this classic jazz routine. "and lose weight."

"It's important to be slim and svelte under the lights. Not all of you need to loose weight of course, but you know who you are. Just look in the mirror, you can tell."

While there are a few in the room that could use a little toning, especially when wearing the leotard-and-tan-tights standard uniform for this audition, there are also too-skinny, bony girls who already have confusing relationships with their bodies and can not 'just look in the mirror;' the mirror lies to them. The over-disciplined dancer is the prime demographic for anorexia. I hope this blanket statement didn't echo in the wrong ears.

The Joy of Typing - Gypsy

The next audition is at 2 pm, at the same location just a flight down. Gypsy, the great American musical is coming to Broadway starring Patti LuPone. The production had a three-week run last summer at City Center Encores!, which meant that all the parts are already cast. That morning I gossiped with one of the lucky dancers about to make her Broadway debut in Gypsy, and she said they were hiring one swing (the understudy for all the chorus roles). Look young she urged, and I felt confident I could do that better than I could look Scottish - I often get mistaken for a high school student though I've been out of school for a long time. So I decided to stay, despite my urge to go home, eat and take a needed shower.

Today they are typing, a process most dancers have a complex love/hate relationship with. We enter the room 20 at a time and stand in two horizontal lines. Two elderly men tell us they are looking for something specific, and it hurts their soul to do this, but they must ask most of us to leave. They then scan down the line, looking us up and down as they whisper to each other. Do we look back at them, smile, look natural? It is awkward.

A few girls are asked to stay. I get to go home, which is nice, but we are all baffled by their criteria. Was it the youngest? The shortest? Blondes and redheads? We can't determine the dividing line between those they like and us rejects, and we go home alternating between wondering if we should change something about ourselves and feeling frustrated that we probably can't.

Brigadoon and Bruises

Two auditions today (Jan 7, 2008). First one is for a choreography workshop for a possible Broadway production of Brigadoon. Growing up, my older sister and I went through serial musical obsessions, and this romantic tale of Scots who came to life once every 100 years and the New York cad who falls in love with an enchanted bonnie lass was a favorite. Viewings and reviews of the video were interspersed with lively song and dance enactments, our dad's plaid flannel shirts tied around our waists as kilts. And the choreographer of this production has several Broadway credits and a Tony award, definitely one to get to know. So I'm there.

At 10 am, the first 25 dancers enter the too-small, sweltering dance studio. Intrepid leotard-wearing spies peek though the curtained window and report to the 86 dancers waiting their turn.

"They're on the ground," they say. "Rolling around on their knees. And their elbows."

They add that a jaunty jig follows the floor work, ending in a jump split.

"I only get on the floor if I'm getting paid," declares a statuesque Rockette known to walk out on dance classes when confronted with knee spins. We debate ditching the audition or yoga, shopping, maybe margaritas at Arriba Arriba (it is only an hour until noon, after all - they're taking forever with the first group). But of course we all stay, we need a job and dancers love to suffer.

A few minutes after 11 the first sweaty group emerges. The jump split is dismissed as a rumor, though there is a turn-jump-land-on-your-butt drama at the end. My group enters the steamy room around 1 pm. The choreographer explains his concept - this production is not about jigs in kilts, but darker, more Celtic and earthy. Thus we begin lying on the earth, in deep sleep, until we raise our chest slowly wit a sustained breath (thank you, Pilates). We roll to our elbows and discover we can shake our butts. The choreographer urges us to feel - don't just dance, but be a real person. I'm a real person, I think, and I do my best to feel as we dance four at a time.

Then they read the names of those staying to sing, and it turns out 'real person' means skinny short red-head. I was neither short nor red-headed when I showed up at 9:30 this morning, and two elbow bruises and a bloody skinburn later, I am still relatively tall and brunett and thus rejected.