AUDITIONS FOR FALL DRAMA PROGRAM PRODUCTIONS OF
INTIMATIONS FOR SAXOPHONE, AWAKE AND SING! and CABARET

Auditions are scheduled for April 28, 29, and 30 from 6:00 PM until 10:00 pm. Callbacks will be May 1 and 2 times TBA.

PLEASE READ ALL REQUIREMENTS CAREFULLY. YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO PREPARE SPECIFIC AUDITIONS FOR EACH PIECE. YOUR AUDITIONS WILL BE TIMED SO YOU MUST STAY WITHIN TIME LIMITS!

Auditions for INTIMATIONS FOR SAXOPHONE

The production will use masks and actors will double and triple, playing a variety of characters. Women’s roles include a French maid; a tough cook; an older, domineering mother; a haughty middle aged female English intellectual; et al. Men’s roles include a mature novelist; a compassionate, but conventional husband; a train conductor; an upper class heavy social drinker; a violin playing gypsy et al.
The production is currently planned for 6 men and 6 women to play about 30 roles. One male actor must be (or learn to be) an exceptional dancer. The one major role (not masked) is Lily, a 20-year old girl at the beginning who ages and matures anywhere from five to ten years and about whom the play revolves.

PREPARE TWO ONE-MINUTE (OR SHORTER) MODERN MONOLOGUES and do them in extremely contrasting ways. Try to find vocal and physical characteristics different from your own. These can be funny, grotesque, intense, Give your impulses free rein. Stretch and exaggerate the believable.

INTIMATIONS FOR SAXOPHONE is by Sophie Treadwell, the author of MACHINAL. The play portrays a young woman’s dreamlike quest for maturity, sexual fulfillment and self-realization in a clueless, alienated and ingrown world. Written in 1934 by one of America’s first major female playwrights and produced only once in 2005, INTIMATIONS FOR SAXOPHONE was hailed by many leading theatrical figures of the period as an artistic breakthrough. Robert Edmond Jones, the foremost stage designer of the time, called it “the germ of a new theatrical idiom … a bold step into a new dimension, full of power.”

Auditions for AWAKE AND SING!

PREPARE ONE TWO-MINUTE REALISTIC, SERIOUS MONOLOGUE from an American playwright—preferably someone from the 20s or 30s, although it could also be from Arthur Miller.

All of the characters in Awake and Sing! share a fundamental activity: a struggle for life amidst petty conditions.

BESSIE BERGER, as she herself states, is not only the mother in this home but also the father. She is constantly arranging and taking care of her family. She loves life, likes to laugh, has great resourcefulness and enjoys living from day to day. A high degree of energy accounts for her quick exasperation at ineptitude. She is a shrewd judge of realistic qualities in people in the sense of being able to gauge quickly their effectiveness. In her eyes all of the people in the house are equal. She is naive and quick in emotional response. She is afraid of utter poverty. She is proper according to her own standards, which are fairly close to those of most middle-class families. She knows that when one lives in the jungle one must look out for the wild life.

MYRON, her husband, is a born follower. He would like to be a leader. He would like to make a million dollars. He is not sad or ever depressed. Life is an even sweet event to him, but the “old days” were sweeter yet. He has a dignified sense of himself. He likes people. He likes everything. But he is heartbroken without being aware of it.

HENNIE is a girl who has had few friends, male or female. She is proud of her body. She won’t ask favors. She travels alone. She is fatalistic about being trapped, but will escape if possible. She is self-reliant in the best sense. Till the day she dies she will be faithful to a loved man. She inherits her mother’s sense of humor and energy.

RALPH is a boy with a clean spirit. He wants to know, wants to learn. He is ardent, he is romantic, he is sensitive. He is naïve too. He is trying to find why so much dirt must be cleared away before it is possible to “get to first base.”

JACOB, too, is trying to find a right path for himself and the others. He is aware of justice, of dignity. He is an observer of the others, compares their activities with his real and ideal sense of life. This produces a reflective nature. In this home he is a constant boarder. He is a sentimental idealist with no power to turn ideal to action. With physical facts-such as housework-he putters. But as a barber he demonstrates the flair of an artist. He is an old Jew with living eyes in his tired face.

UNCLE MORTY is a successful American business man with five good senses. Something sinister comes out of the fact that the lives of others seldom touch him deeply. He holds to his own line of life. When he is generous he wants others to be aware of it. He is pleased by attention—a rich relative to the BERGER family. He is a shrewd judge of material values. He will die unmarried. Two and two make four, never five with him. He can blink in the sun for hours, a fat tomcat. Tickle him, he laughs. He lives in a penthouse with a real Japanese butler to serve him. He sleeps with dress models, but not from his own showrooms. He plays cards for hours on end. He smokes expensive cigars. He sees every Mickey Mouse cartoon that appears. He is a 32-degree Mason. He is really deeply intolerant finally.

MOE AXELROD lost a leg in the war. He seldom forgets that fact. He has killed two men in extra-martial activity. He is mordant, bitter. Life has taught him a disbelief in everything, but he will fight his way through. He seldom shows his feelings: fights against his own sensitivity. He has been everywhere and seen everything. All he wants is HENNIE. He is very proud. He scorns the inability of others to make their way in life, but he likes people for whatever good qualities they possess. His passionate outbursts come from a strong but contained emotional mechanism.

SAM FEINSCHREIBER wants to find a home. He is a lonely man, a foreigner in a strange land, hypersensitive about this fact, conditioned by the humiliation of not making his way alone. He has a sense of others laughing at him. At night he gets up and sits alone in the dark. He hears acutely all the small sounds of life. He might have been a poet in another time and place. He approaches his wife as if he were always offering her a delicate flower. Life is a high chill wind weaving itself around his head.

SCHLOSSER, the janitor, is an overworked German whose wife ran away with another man and left him with a young daughter who in turn ran away and joined a burlesque show as chorus girl. The man suffers rheumatic pains. He has lost his identity twenty years before.

AUDITIONS for CABARET

ANYONE INTERESTED IN AUDITIONING FOR CABARET MUST SIGN UP FOR PRELIMINARY AUDITIONS ON WEDNESDAY OR THURSDAY AND BE AVAILABLE FOR DANCE CALL ON FRIDAY.

PREPARE 32 BARS OF A MUSICAL THEATER SONG WITH SHEET MUSIC. Accompanist will be provided. Please do not sing anything from CABARET. Everyone will be asked to learn a basic movement routine on Friday. Actors called back for Sally and most ensemble will be asked to learn a more rigorous routine.

CAST NEEDS

MEN:
EMCEE Singing Role
CLIFFORD BRADSHAW Singing Role
HERR SCHULTZ Needs to look older Singing Role
ERNST LUDWIG

WOMEN:
FRAULEIN SCHNEIDER Needs to look older Singing Role
FRAULEIN KOST Singing Role
SALLY BOWLES Singing Role

ENSEMBLE:
These roles will come out of the ensemble…
MAX
BOBBY
VICTOR
TAXI MAN
GERMAN SAILORS
NAZI GUARDS
CUSTOMS OFFICER/MAITRE D’
KIT KAT KLUB WAITERS
TELEPHONE GIRL
TWO LADIES
KIT KAT KLUB GIRLS
GORILLA (Yep…a gorilla)

SPECIAL NEEDS:
The production calls for women who play Tenor Sax, Trombone, Drums, Piano, and/or Accordion, however the director is interested in men or women who play instruments of any kind.

NOTE: BFAs are required to audition for all productions.