Not So Positive Thinking

Two auditions at 10 am today - Sacramento Music Circus's summer season, and a 50^th Anniversary tribute concert of an iconic American musical. I go with the former because it's close, in Connecticut, and more suited to my the type than the singing heavy musicals like Sweeney Todd and Evita at SMC. But if things go quickly, maybe I can hit both.

I signed up a week before and I show up before 9:30 so I'm in the first group. It is a rare coed call, and surprisingly, there are more boys than girls, since many ladies chose SMC.

A few minutes after ten we enter the room. The choreographer explains that the director is in a production meeting next door, so after we learn the combination, instead of making cuts as usual, we will be sent out to wait while the other groups learn. Annoying.

Even more annoying 45 minutes later, after all three groups have learned the combination, we are brought back in and told the director is still in his meeting, so let's just run the dance a few more times to stall. Because we have nothing better to do apparently.

I'm sorry, but when you arrange for over 100 unemployed dancers to be at a certain location, dressed and warmed up at a certain time, you owe them the respect of pausing your meeting with your set designer that could be held at any time and walking a few studios over and not wasting our time.

But I am trying to be positive, so I patiently perfect my routine, and within ten minutes the director graces us with his presence.

We do the simple ballet, but I hop on the double pirouette, almost falling out of it. After they explain his is a concert version and we are looking for very specific roles (all the more reason not to keep us waiting), I am cut. So I could have been cut for not being the desired type. But I am furious at myself for biffing the pirouette. The floor was slippery and the step into the turn awkward, but come on, I've been doing double pirouettes for like 20 years now, I take ballet multiple times a week where I execute them without a problem, so why do I screw it up now when it matters?

In the elevator, a fellow dancer is fuming. He complains about the wasted hour. I join in, condemning the director's rudeness. He notes the kept dancers weren't great anyway. I agree. Now I am angry at the director and not at myself. And that's okay. Lesson for the day: If you can't be positive, blame someone else, or the screwy system. I'm not lazy, and I shouldn't beat myself up. I wouldn't want to work for that jerk anyway.

Positive Thinking

Someone recently advised me to try to keep control of my audition experience. Which means focusing on aspects of the audition than other getting a job, which I can't control. Then I can decide if I was successful whether or not I get cut.

Yesterday I had two auditions to try out this new strategy out. Why do I go to auditions?

- Number one reason: To get a job

But this doesn't happen that often, so to keep up my morale, I try to accomplish the following:

- Practice my audition skills
- See my friends
- Get a work-out
- Be a positive influence on the other auditionees who are often also miserable

And , more recently

- Get material for my blog

The first audition was for Surflight Theater's summer season. It doesn't pay too well, but it's on the beach and not too far from Manhattan. The call time was 9:30 am (9 am to get your audition card), which is odd, usually auditions are at 10am, and though it was only a half hour difference it felt early.

Having signed up a week earlier at the Equity building, I was in the first group. Which is good because it was a long audition. First a ballet combo, and not across the floor we-can-explain-it-in-two sentences ballet, but a fairly complicated, long, big movements-in-a -small-crowded-space combo. We do that in groups of six groups of five - I think the choreographer wrote something on my card, hopefully something good - then we change our shoes and learn a fairly long tap combination. We do that in groups, then change our shoes again for a swing combination. (Most regional theaters produce a whole seasons of shows in a summer, so they're looking for performers that can be in musicals ranging from 'Will Rogers Follies,' to 'Swing.')

Over an hour later, we go outside, the next group goes in the room to learn the audition combination, and we wait outside while the director and choreographer talk about us. I get cut (they seem to be taking shorties for 'Swing' and tallies for 'Producers' and 'Will Rogers Follies,' but who knows), but I feel okay because in the two hours I was there I accomplished all my other goals. I did some serious dancing, including tap which I don't take class of as often as I should, I am sweaty and exercised , I caught up with some good friends, and I complimented two girls whose dancing was amazing but got cut.

At 3 pm (another odd time, usually afternoon auditions start at 2), I audition for a White Plains (very local) production of 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.' The combo is a fun , sassy, we-are-secretaries-of-the-early-sixties-who-revel-in-our -sexual-power-but-we-have-control to 'A Secretary is Not a Toy.' We are encouraged to play it up. Along with the friendly assistant choreographer, our audition is watched by the female choreographer and director, along with two men in suits (the producers) who are having the time of their life watching sexy girls in leotards shamelessy flirt.

I am cut, but again, I feel okay. They only want sexy blondes, a fellow rejectee in the tiny dressing room complains. She is not doing so great. Is there something wrong with my face, she asks. Would someone just tell me. I commiserate over the not knowing, the always wondering if it's you or them. She's had a terrible few days, and this weekend is going to be awful. Working, I ask? No, a funeral, she replys.

In the elevator another dancer is crying because she lost her make-up bag, which will cost over a hundred dollars to replace (serious make-up is a job requirement). She also recently lost her iPod and a ring her grandfather gave her. I have similar problems with losing things, but not recently, and my iPod (which I think was stolen at an audition) was replaced at Christmas with a snazzy iPhone. At least we get to go home now, I suggest. And my roommate's crap is probably all over, she notes, still crying. I say goodbye to her and the girl preparing for a funeral and decide things could be worse than two rejections in one day.

So not a bad day.

Errors on the Equity Website

8:30 am on Valentines Day, and I just want to stay in bed and snuggle with my honey…but I am a dedicated dancer so I get out of bed and head down to Chelsea Studios for an audition for the workshop for Leap of Faith, based, like everything coming to Broadway, on the movie.

I double checked the Equity website last night to make sure I had the time and place right. But after I trek through the cold morning to 26^th street, I am greeted by the following flier on the door:

Due to an error on the Equity website, Leap of Faith will beheld tomorrow 10 am men, 2 pm women

Sort of annoying (besides the unnecessary abandoning of my cozy bed, I teaching Friday afternoon) but even more so because this is the second error this week.

On Tuesday I went to an EPA listed at 'Shetler Studios, 939 8th Avenue (Between 55th and 56th).' I show up there a little before 9 am, and find a man in an official looking office for 8^th Avenue Studios, who tells me the audition is on 54^th street.

So I walk down to 54^th (it's another cold New York morning) and discover that although this is the new location of Shetler Studios, and hence the audition, the monitor is signing people in at 939 8^th Avenue, on the second floor (I was on the third before). About ten young women say they have been there since 6 am and were told to stay there. I wish them luck and head back to where I came.

There is a line snaking around the 2^nd floor. I get one of the last available time slots for 4:50, which doesn't work for me. In protest at the confusion and incompetence, I don't show up. Maybe one of the actresses who showed up at 6 got my spot.

Equity dues hard at work.

Equity Calls and Logistics

Equity, the stage actors union, runs the open auditions for most professional theaters. Productions also hold invited calls, where actors get actual appointments, usually through agents. Most casting is done from the invited calls. But Equity requires union productions to audition Equity members whether they want to or not. Long running Broadway shows have to hold open calls even if no roles are actually available.

Do people get jobs out of open calls? It's rumored to happen on occasion. And since I don't have an agent and rarely get invited to the closed calls, I go to lots of open calls I can. Plus you get to see your friends and catch up on industry gossip. There are two types I attend, Equity Principal Auditions (EPAs) and Equity Chorus Calls for dancers (ECC).

Today a Shakespeare Festival was holding an EPA. The audition started at 10 am, but you can sign up for a time slot starting at 9 am, and I've heard stories of hopefuls lining up outside in the snow at six in the morning.

This audition was at Nola, the crappiest Equity-audition studio in Manhattan. Over half the times I've been there the toilets were not functioning, and the owner likes to yell at auditionees. A theater that holds its auditions there is likely to be cheap and not pay actors well. Plus there was a big emphasis on "any ethnicity" in the breakdown, which usually means any ethnicity but Caucasian. But I have some new Shakespeare monologues I am excited to try, and a free morning, so I decided to go. But I wasn't motivated enough to get out of bed when my alarm went off at 8:15. I snoozed until 9:15. I got to Nola a few minutes before 10, and all the audition slots (about 130) were full, so I signed up as number 23 on the alternate list, which means I can sit in the overcrowded audition room all day, and if 23 actors with slots don't show up, I'm in. So I'll go back after a dance call this afternoon and bring a book and maybe I'll get to audition before it ends at 5:30.

I walked over to the Equity office in Times Square to sign up for upcoming dance calls. The lists are posted a week before the audition. I signed up as number 247 and 243 for two auditions for regional theaters tomorrow. Not every dancer on the list shows up at the audition, but then some show up who never made it to the Equity building that week, plus there are usually over 100 non-union dancers trying to be seen also. That's a lot of competition, and we’re not even counting the invited calls for the people they're really interested in.

I know I should get out of bed early and sign up right at 9 for EPAs, and head down to the Equity office promptly one week before a dance call to sign up, but it's hard to motivate, since sometimes you can show up late or not sign up and still get a slot just fine, so why make the extra effort? I wish we could sign up online or via phone or something to reduce this unnecessary schlepping around the city.

Sometimes I feel like someone sick of dating too cynical to give a relationship a chance. But with dating, at least the numbers are somewhat plausible. Auditioning is like being on The Bachelor, but with 246 other contestants, plus the guy's probably already married.

A typical holding room at a dance call (the first thirty girls are already in the audition room, and there are oodles out in the hallway):

What not to say on a first date…

Dancers don't get paid much, but we do have good stories, some of them unrelated to auditioning/performing. For example, my friend R went on a date last weekend with a guy P who asked for her phone number on the street a few weeks ago. They met at Angelika Kitchen, as R is vegetarian. She didn't recognize him at first, he wasn't as cute as she remembered. An excerpt from their conversation as they waited for their table in that awkward small doorway, they had the following conversation:

R: So you're from Colorado? Do your parents still live there?
D: (In a flat monotone) Yes, but they did a really bad job raising me.
R: Yeah, you know, parents do the best they can.
D: No, but they really messed up.
R: What do you mean?
D: I'm really weird.
R: Ha ha, we're all a little weird.

She waited for him to break out of his deadpan and say just kidding, but he was serious. She knew she shouldn't ask, but she was too curious.

R: So how are you weird exactly?
D: I have a lot of health problems.
R: Oh, are you okay right now?
D: Not really. I have this problem where all the time I cough up chunks of congenital mucus

And it was downhill from there. At the end of the date, he confided that he was on a lot of (prescription) drugs, then was quite surprised when R rejected his invitation to come over.

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.