Early Bird Gets the Fosse Worm

Shameless plug: This weekend, if you're in New York, go see my two lovely friends in Fashion: The Musical, at the West Village Musical Theater Festival at 13th Street Repertory (50 W 13th between 5th and 6th avenues). For more information & tickets: http://www.wvmtf.com/

Now on to today's topic! In what has become an increasingly more rare occurrence, the audition for Chicago, by Bob Fosse (to be staged in Vermont, intrigue) almost did not see any non equity ladies this morning, even though there were only 25 equity ladies total.

That's about equivalent to the typical size of one group of auditioning dancers. And it takes about 45 minutes at most to get through each group. The casting company had rented out the studios for the entire day, and started the call at 11:30am. The boys singing call wasn't until 2pm, so you'd think that they should be able to see at least three groups, conservatively, even if they took an hour to teach the combination and to audition each group.

Luckily a girlfriend was kind enough to sign me up, because she lived a block away and since it's increasingly difficult for me to get off work. I'm SO fortunate that she decided to wake up early this morning, because we were number 2 and number 3 on the non-equity list, and they only saw 10 of 50 non equity ladies.

Pretty sure Liz and I danced as closely to the "effortlessly sexy" request as we could ... and it was certainly nice to have a challenging combination! After today, I'm super bummed I didn't make it to Becoming Chaplin workshop audition. I hear tell there was a triple pirouette into twelve fouette turns into a double pirouette into a split to the floor - all in character heels! Now THAT'S my kind of audition routine... Sigh... those were the competition dance days :-)


Anyway, today's audition was a prescient reminder of the importance of being earnest AND early. Still slightly shocking because if they decide to see some nonequity girls, they'll often see all of us. The monitor (the guy running the audition) essentially guaranteed that they would see all non equity dancers. Yet in a quick change of fate, the company decided it had seen what it needed to see and let everyone else (aka the other 40 non-union dancers) go.

Crazy sauce! I'm continuing to count my lucky stars.