Casting up a Storm

by Northlight Theatre

from Lynn Baber, Artistic Administrator

It has been a flurry of casting recently!

We cast The Marvelous Wonderettes as soon as we secured the rights to it back in April.  But in the past three weeks, I have scheduled ten or more auditions for the rest of Northlight’s upcoming season:

  • Souvenir :  I’ve been looking for actors who play the piano really well while talking to the audience, and actresses (40+) who are brilliant comedians and can also sing opera, both beautifully and terribly.   I hope that doesn’t sound like either of those roles would be EASY to cast, because neither is.  Talk about daunting.
  • Awake and Sing!:  For this one I need actors who are the right ages, ranging from 19 to 60, and have what BJ and I call “chops”.  Chops is what we call it when actors can really access deep emotional work, but make it look easy.  And make it look natural.  And make it believable.  And be able to do it eight times a week.   Most older actors have chops.  It is more difficult to find young people with chops.  Mike Nussbaum totally has chops.  Awake and Sing! director, Amy Morton, has chops ~ so she knows ‘em when she sees ‘em.  We saw about 40 people for the available roles and put another 15 on tape.  Well, actually, we didn’t use tape.   We have this little video camera that captures the audition, and then I plug THE CAMERA into my computer and it uploads the audition and emails it directly to Amy Morton, who is in New York finishing up the run of August: Osage County on Broadway.  Technology is amazing.
  • For A Life, BJ and I have been in auditions all week.  One day we saw older actors, the next day we saw younger ones.  In this play, there are two couples who exist in the play sometimes when they are older and sometimes when they are younger.  So we’re going to cast the four older ones first, and then cast the younger ones to look like younger versions of the older actors we cast.  For instance, we can’t cast some kid who is 6’4″ as the younger version of John Mahoney because John is 5’10”!  I’ve been feeling badly for all the young actors who have come in and are really good, but just too tall.
  • A few weeks ago I saw a few days’ worth of “general” auditions.  Any Equity actor who was interested could get an appointment to be seen for any of the shows in our season.  And we have called back many of them to read for specific plays!
  • During the first week of June, I got together with Casting Directors from Next, Writers, and Piven, and together we held our annual Unified General auditions for non-Equity actors.  We saw 254 actors in 2 days.  We always look forward to this time where we get to talk about casting issues and see a huge pool of Chicago talent.

I gotta run now.  There are two readings (table readings is what BJ calls ‘em) to take another look at a couple of Interplay plays, and I have to cast ‘em!  And I have to call directors Amy Morton and Steve Scott and see how things are progressing for casting Awake and Sing! and Souvenir, respectively.  Actually, I’ll email ‘em.  I love email.  And I have to find a specific song in the key of F for an upcoming audition for Souvenir.  See you at the Theatre!