Disclaimer:
This story is being told more or less as it happens, and as such, the twists and turns will not be perfectly orchestrated into a beautiful narrative. Realizations will occur in real time and will highlight my less admirable qualities and my honest hurdles that I either dismiss or overlook in other pieces.
This portion of this saga definitely highlights some of my faults. My frustrations. My fears. My woes. I have attempted to present the facts as unbiasedly as I can. I have not made excuses for myself or others.
Here’s to some rough edges.
I had my team. My amazing fierce female team. And as I had hoped, we gelled together and to this day have not had any drama unfold. These women are amazing, talented and so knowledgeable that I could not wait to get in the room with all of them and to start making theater magic!
But of course, the fires that pop and and need to be put out are never ending when it comes to theater. And that didn’t matter, we had auditions scheduled and a plan! I had been hesitant to announce auditions until we had a choreographer, but once we had Julia on board I was full speed ahead! We announced auditions on April 8th and we were all super pumped!
The day after we announced auditions, I got word from the theater about a big problem (and what turned out to be our longest running problem). A giant burning fire in our production that we needed to put out with all due haste!
What I had been told in my interview about the music for the show was incorrect. I would not be using prerecorded tracks provided by the publisher, because the publisher does not have prerecorded tracks for this play. And while this oversight on the theater’s part was unfortunate, it now fell to me and my Music Director, Amanda, to solve the problem. Luckily, we work not far from each other so on a nice spring day, we ducked out of our respective jobs and met in a park to discuss this startling new development.
A couple of things were confirmed in this meeting: 1) Amanda is amazing, talented and up for meeting challenges head on and I could not have chosen a better person to be my music director, 2) We were going to be ok. Both of us were master problem solvers, as we had managed to build a game plan and strategy for the music of the show in a matter of minutes. We went back to our separate jobs, and I sent our plan to the theater and our stage manager. From the time we got the email with the bad news to the time that I emailed back with a solution was less than 90 minutes (told you we were amazing). And then the hunt for a pit director began. This hunt lasted for over two months, and let me tell you, it was not fun. More on that later.
For the moment, the fires were at bay, and being handled and I was getting excited watching all of the names get added to the sign ups for auditions. But I slowly got a bit disheartened. The theater had only made one post about the audition sign ups. And while I kept sharing the post on Facebook and telling everyone I know, and my friends and team were doing the same, the theater didn’t seem to be pushing the auditions. I was a bit concerned, after all, we had huge show to cast, and I needed a large pool of people to pull from to fill all of the roles.
The closer we got to auditions, the more my excitement and anxiety built up, and then I got a call from the theater board to ask about my audition posting. It turns out that normally the board votes on the ages allowed for auditions, and they had not done that for my production prior to the audition posting. They were asking to change it. The audition age was set at 18 years or older, as the show did not call for anyone younger, but the board wanted to lower the audition age to 16. I was a bit thrown off by this but ultimately was happy to open up the audition age range. (And I’m really glad I did because I got some amazingly talented people to come out and audition!)
Another hiccup, and another solution. I was on a role, but was now tasked with holding a production meeting with my assembled team so that everyone could be on the same page of what the vision, story, feel and plan was for this production. A friend of mine had offered to assist with this, and while I was grateful, they did not handle it well. I had to “redo” the scheduling and, all of this added to my stress on the lead up to auditions, as well as putting a large amount of stress on my relationship with that friend.
While this entire experience was becoming more stressful by the day, my outside stressors refused to take a rain check. Two days before my first production meeting I got some extremely unsettling news.
My cousin had been hit by an SUV while out riding her bike. She was training for a triathlon. Within thirty minutes of the accident, she was pronounced dead. I cannot even begin to describe what a loss I feel over the lack of her presence in the world. At the time I found out, I couldn’t even process it. The stress an anxiety I was feeling from the show made me shove all of the grief, anger and disbelief aside to “handle later”. As much as I wanted to, I was not able to fully succeed in doing so.
“The show must go on” they say, and so does life. But when I found out that her funeral was the same day as my auditions, I crumbled and sobbed in my apartment for what felt like hours, right after I signed off of the production meeting.
I picked myself up and I moved forward. I went to work and coordinated with my team, and we managed to get everything ready for auditions. The first day of auditions happened, and we were blessed an honored with so many talented and amazing people who showed up. The second day proved to be an abundance of riches and made the production team’s meeting after we finished a very difficult one. As the auditions played out on stage and I got to watch all of these artists show off their skill, presence and talent I struggled to keep myself present and in the room as my mother sent me updates of my cousin’s funeral.
While I will do my best to continue to process this grievous loss, and likely write about it in depth, that is not this story.
After the production team managed to develop our list of actors we wanted to see at callbacks, and invites to callbacks went out, I was informed again by the theater board that a deadline for the virtual/video auditions had not been posted with audition listing, and I need to consider those people who still wanted to submit for consideration.
I will admit that my stress and frustration at this point had almost peaked. I had already gotten into a fight with a dear friend earlier in the week and seeing this email made me want to scream.
Why was this overlooked? Why couldn’t people understand that videos were due by the day auditions ended? Why did the theater think it was ok to keep pestering me with the balls they dropped? Did I want to even continue with directing this show? Was all of stress, frustration, grief, anxiety and tears going to be worth it?
I swallowed all of this outrage and anger and allowed the theater to extend the video auditions for two more days. I am glad I agreed to this as the submissions we got ended up bringing in some great auditions and we added even more talent to our callback list.
And a week after finished auditions, callbacks commenced. Any director, well actually anyone sitting on the other side of the table from the actors auditioning will tell you that they want you to be good. They want you to be the best person for the role. It makes their job easy. And unfortunately, everyone who arrived and auditioned at callbacks did not make it easy for us. Everyone proved more talented than we remembered or could have hoped for. As such the casting process was a difficult one.
Once we had solidified who we wanted to cast, and potential back-ups in case someone declined an offer (although there were not many options for several roles), I sent out offer emails to our chosen cast. Fortunately several people accepted immediately. Unfortunately, we had some people decline. And as we did not have as many people audition as I had initially hoped, our “roster” wasn’t deep enough and we didn’t have enough back up options for some of the roles. As such, the production team and I had to go on a hunt to fill some very important roles for our cast. After all, we started rehearsals in a week…