Not too long ago I had a third callback for the lead villainess in a major Broadway musical by Tony award winner Julie Taymor. It was a huge deal. I was totally psyched for the audition, excited about the material, and completely prepared to enjoy myself. I got there, sang the two songs they’d given me, and they said, “That was great! Your voice is beautiful.” Phew! Fantastic! And then they asked, “Can you be more foreign?”
I’m sorry, what? In relation to what, exactly? I take a breath and politely ask them what they mean, and she says something about not meaning an accent, really, but a sort of sound, maybe just ignore the sheet music… and I am startled to realize that they don’t know what they mean, either. The wheels in my head start spinning, trying to figure out what to do. I know they’re interested in a Celtic sound, maybe that’s what they mean? But the music isn’t written that way. It’s the New Broadway – or perhaps old, now – of pop songs and Top-40 hopefuls. I love what’s been written – it’s melodic and ethereal and clever – but it isn’t Celtic, particularly with a piano for accompaniment, which automatically makes anything from the seven nations sound like a deranged polka. They’re asking me to fix it, to rewrite the music right there, at the audition. I shoot a quick look at the local accompaniest they hired, and she turns towards me and rolls her eyes. Thanks. I say, “Okay,” take a moment, and give it my best shot.
As actors, we get asked this sort of thing all the time. It even comes up in our training. Yes, I absolutely ride horseback, scuba dive, speak fluent Russian, know Karate, interpret sign language, dance en pointe, parachute, sharp-shoot and race stock cars – who doesn’t? The answer is always Yes, even when it’s No. They expect it, and we deliver. There’s even a whole sub-industry of (expensive) crash courses we can take to become trained/fluent/belted in a weekend. You’ve got to give them what they want. It’s an accepted form of lying overlaying an art form already relying heavily upon imagination, invention and illusion.
You even lie when you’re late to an audition. You never say you were stuck in traffic, got a late start, or spilled your coffee on your shirt. You say you were coming from Another Audition that was running late, sorry! What audition? Oooh, can’t say, I’m superstitious about these things, wouldn’t want to jinx it! (wink) So when it comes time to perform aforementioned amazing feat of skill and daring, one that will indeed be asked of you, and you fail miserably and are outed, don’t worry about it because “if they like you, they’ll hire you anyway.”
If they like you. Does that mean if they don’t hire you, they don’t like you? Ouch.
Auditions for me are not the anxiety driven nightmare they are for a lot of actors, in large part due to a workshop I took a few years back by Michael Kostroff entitled “Audition Psych: 101.” I have learned to enjoy the entire process as an opportunity to perform, often for some great people, and the chance to work my chops. It’s a wonderful gift that certainly transformed what was once a time of fear to a time of fun.
But even if we’ve mastered a healthy audition mindset, we still have to deal with what the breakdown says is the description of the character. It might say they’re looking for a “hot blonde, big-breasted 25-35yo”, or “real to slight character looking”, or “geeky intellectual engineer/scientist”. We take that information and pick one of our many headshots with the right look, the right monologue, the right song, the right resume stressing the right credits (is the weight right?), the right clothes, the right hair, and transform ourselves into what we think they mean.
There’s a huge trap for us there, one that can degenerate into an endless mind game that we will always lose. Some of us try for a slightly healthier approach and go for a suggestion of what they’re looking for over the literal translation. If the character is a pirate, leave the eye patch, peg leg and parrot at home and just dress a bit rough around the edges. But what if even they don’t know what it is that they are looking for? How do you prepare for that?
Of course, you can’t. You could drive yourself crazy trying to second and third guess what they want, what they are looking for. So instead, we might be told to showcase Our Best Self, but that, too, is so often another lie. We leave out the day job, don’t mention how long it’s been since our last acting gig, that we’re on hold for a commercial that conflicts, or say we really do love opera. We edit our truth to, again, fit what we think they want. And they pretend to believe us.
What if we don’t pretend to be someone else, or show some pressurized and sanitized view? Does the audition change? Does the outcome change? I don’t know, but I sure as hell am more relaxed. Maybe it’s more important to know who you are and just be that. Maybe it’s time to show up and say, I realize that the breakdown said this, but I made it this far, and This is Me. The professional me, yes, but Me. Less crazy making. More honest.
If I had the opportunity to do it again I would take a longer moment, ask the accompanist to lay out, close my eyes till I could feel it, and then I would sing – a Celtic song. Would it have made any difference? In the end, it didn’t matter. A few weeks later, a friend emailed me a week-old article breaking the news that this particular production was shutting down: money trouble. That’s curious, I thought, as they’re still advertising next month’s open casting call at the LA Convention Center. And they continued to do so. Sometimes auditions aren’t even about finding talent, or even the charade that is the required local union call, but rather creating a relationship between a potential audience and a production in hopes of generating ticket sales.
BTW, my agent hadn’t submitted me on this one: they found me, my headshot and some mp3’s of my voice through a series of industry connections. This breakdown? It said, “Female, 25-35 yo with amazing rock vocals. Foreign world music types are great, foreign accents are great.” And they called me in. Three times.