"Macbeth"

Recently I also auditioned for the Utah Shakespeare Festival's school tour. Christopher Clark is directing it and it looked to be a wonderful experience. I would get paid and housed for from January to April while touring schools and communities in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. My audition felt really good. I did my monologue from "Twelfth Night" that I used for grad school auditions in February, and I did a monologue from "King Richard II" that I have used before. Both went really well. I had a wonderful conversation with the director, Chris, and with the producer/artistic director, Michael. Both seemed to really like me and the conversation flowed quite nicely. However, it doesn't look like I got the part. They are only casting 5 men and 2 women to play all the parts and I know of one of my good friends who has been cast as Lady Macbeth. She heard over a week ago, so that's a pretty good indicator that I didn't get that part. Oh, well. We keep trying. That's how it goes in this business.

"The Foreigner"

I auditioned for "The Foreigner" at the Hale Center Theatre in Orem. It's being directed by Laurie Harrop-Purser and promises to be a great opening show for the 2011 Season. And I want to be in it! I love the characters. They are perfect for me. For my audition I did a British-accent monologue from the film "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World". And... I didn't do so well with it. I was pretty stiff (which kind of works if you are British) and I FORGOT SOME LINES! Ugh! That hasn't happened to me during an audition in a long time. I didn't miss a beat and kept going, but it really shook me up.

Fortunately, the next day I got called back! Hooray! After a very successful opening performance for "Uncle Vanya" (more on that later) I rushed up to Orem for call-backs. I was called for Charlie and Froggy and read mostly for Charlie. It went really, really well! I felt great! It was a very competitive call-back though and it will be tough. I heard that the director wants to single-cast the show which further decreases my chances of being cast. I'm still hopeful! I would love to do this show. I need the experience. I need the money. I need the networking and connections that would come from it. It would be an all-around awesome experience. I just hope I did all I could to get it. It's now out of my hands. And so I wait.

Auditon: "Hamlet" and "Dracula"

Last Thursday I auditioned for the productions of Hamlet and Dracula at the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake. Both plays will be directed by Charles Morey, Artistic Director at PTC. This was my first audition for an Equity theatre and I was pretty excited and pretty nervous. I prepared a monologue from Measure for Measure for the audition and was also ready to read sides from Dracula. I went up to Salt Lake with three other really good friends. They all had to go on the waiting list, but I had an audition slot at 3pm thanks to my friend Gary Reimer who had gone up to Salt Lake the week before and signed us both up. We arrived early and they all got on the list. We even ran into some good friends up there that I hadn't seen for a long time. It was really fun to see them all. Eventually all of my friends got to go in ahead of me. That was funny that the only guy who had signed up ended up going last. They had things moving along very nicely.

Eventually my turn came. I guess to get to the point of this post, my audition was terrible. I am honestly embarrassed by the work I did with the Measure for Measure monologue. I was nervous. I admit that, but that's no excuse for what I did. First of all, I hadn't given my monologue a shape. I had done a lot of emotional work with it, and it's a piece I've done twice before as a scene in classwork and for a competition, so I felt comfortable with it, but I hadn't given it a solid shape as a monologue. As a result I started just making choices in the moment. Now, I'm all for making choices in the moment. Some of the very best work comes from acting in the moment. However, if those choices are made safely and out of fear then it will stink. And that's what happened to me. My body was stiff and full of tension. My thoughts were in my head the whole time. I didn't go nearly deep enough for what the scene required. My emotions were pushed. My voice was okay. In essence it was an okay piece of acting, but it was a terrible piece of a human soul. I didn't bare any of my soul in the piece and it's no wonder that I didn't make call backs.

On a lighter note, I felt great about my cold reading for Dracula. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to salvage the damage already done by my awful monologue. Well, I got out of there and wrote down what I did wrong and what I did well. Then we went out for pizza. It was delicious. So, I'm embarrassed for the performance that I gave, but I learned a lot. I've got to push myself and go all the way. There's no such thing as playing it safe if you want to succeed in this art form and in this business.