Auditions for Tokyo International Player's May 2020 production of Rodger and Hammerstein's Cinderella begin tomorrow evening. This beautiful adaptation
of their classic musical opened on Broadway in 2013 and contains songs such as "In My Own Little Corner", "Ten Minutes Ago", "There's Music In You", and my current favourite, "Loneliness of Evening".
While attending an audition requires preparation there is even more work involved in running them. At this stage I have read the script more than ten times, and analyzed every character and all the music. I'm putting together sides and songs for the auditions and the callbacks and trying to work out how best to use the limited amount of time we have. I won't be running these by myself, I will also have my assistant director, stage manager, ASM, producer, assistant, and a representative of TIP to help out.
Each auditionee is only given 15 minutes to present their monologue and song, and for the production team to work with them. This really isn't that long, but it means we can only see 4 people an hour, and at the minute we are having to hold the auditions over 5 days as we are struggling to fit in everyone who is interested. The prospect is exciting and nerve-wracking. According to John Frankenheimer "casting is 65 percent of directing" so naturally I want to be as prepared as possible. Though I also need to leave room to be surprised. I don't want to have such a fixed idea of what I'm looking for that I rule out something wonderful that happens during the auditions. This happened last year, while running the auditions for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. An actress I had worked with before came in and was much funnier than I expected and ended up being cast in a role that I hadn't anticipated.
I'm looking forward to meeting the cast!
