Well yesterday was the day! I finally made it in to audition for Cibrian and Mahler's Dracula el musical.
It was...
interesting.
SO unlike any other audition I've ever done. First of all in the States normally your asked to come prepared with a few bars of a song or monologue or something, especially in massive open calls where there's lots of "Oh I think I wanna be an actor today!" people to weed out. But not in Argentina.
Our initial audition process was somewhat more of a call back from my point of view. We were asked to come in rehearsal clothes, which to the portenas meant fishnets and bootyshorts, and greeted by the eccentric and flamboyant Pepito Cibrian, the Elton John of Argentina of sorts. He speaks with a soft high voice, wears giant circle sunglasses, and had his enormous white dog in the theatre, just wandering the aisles and the stage!
They split us up into groups to learn a few phrases of the love balad. It was pretty but fairly simple, not Sondheim by any stretch that's for sure. So we gathered around this piano in the theatre lobby with this curly headed cute but nerdy lookin guy about 30 years old at the keys... the composer! No big deal, we're just singing Mahler's own music back to him and hoping we're not slaughtering it! After we each took a turn he wrote down who he liked and passed us along to the next level.
Inside the theatre we stretched and warmed up on the stage (OOH it felt so good to be on a stage again!!) until the choreographer, also wearing booty shorts, called our attention and started to teach us the audition dance. Now, I did as much research as I could through Youtube to get an idea of what I'd be asked to do for this show. The only dancing I saw was a party waltz with women in huge hoop skirts, Les Mis wedding status. But for reasons I still have not deduced, we were dancing to an 80's pop song by Madonna! The first move was a bunch of shoulder and hip bounces and the last was a backbended pelvic thrust. You can fill in the rest of the dance from point A to point B with your own imagination... and it probably still won't come out as ridiculous as in reality.
After we shook our groove thangs, Pepito called up individual numbers at random and asked them to sing the whole love ballad, and more! Along with having them do strange adjustments, like having a girl tie up her shirt and sing it really seductively, or a guy sing the leading lady's solo. Needless to say... everyone waiting in the wings were shaking in our boots, me probably more than anyone being that I only memorized the few stanzas from the one love ballad and even cold reading them off a page would be difficult for me! Unfortunately (or fortunately, whichever way you look at it) he only called about 10 people up out of the 100+ who were there and I wasn't one of them. The majority of us were then released and given the "Muchas gracias." One of the girls from my initial group was called back, and I remember thinking she was alright but definitely not spectacular. So in all honesty I have no idea what they were looking for! I asked one of the my fellow auditioners if that's how they all go, and he said yes almost exactly.
But hey! I did it. I sang my Spanish for Angel Mahler and danced my little heart out for Pepito so what more is there? All in all it was an exhilarating, harrowing, hilarious, and helpful experience that I'm really glad I had. After that ordeal, I should be able to walk into any audition confident and nerve-free right?
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