“What is your casting?”
The question you hear consistently throughout your life as a Musical Theatre artist, and the one that most student artists fear throughout their training.
Casting is critical to our understanding if we want to succeed in the industry, but it is also a puzzle that often feels like you are never given all the clues to solve throughout your professional life. Throughout my 20 years of experience facilitating, playing for, and participating in workshops with casting directors, I can honestly say I am still figuring it out myself.
As a teacher, I have found myself reflecting a lot on balancing the industry's commercial demands and ‘fitting in’ to a casting type, while allowing my artists to still have a sense of individuality. But what does this mean in reality?
Well, some of the unavoidable nuts and bolts of what we do are technical. By that, I mean the technical skills of being a singer, dancer, and actor. Commercially, the industry expects an extremely high standard of each, and the ability to do so even carries with it a special term – triple threat. This side of our artistry is always non-negotiable, and artists who fail to train effectively to meet these goals will rarely achieve the success they are seeking.
The best performers understand that the skills side is a marathon rather than a sprint, with achievable goals set in months and years rather than days and weeks. This can often be a pressure point for young performers who want the technical skills to fit into the casting of leading roles in their favourite shows, but don’t have the vocal dexterity yet or require more ability in a specific dance style. If you are reading this and thinking, ‘Yeah, that sounds like me,’ then please know that you are just experiencing a rite of passage for every young performer. The drive and passion you feel for this now are what you need to keep cultivating while you develop those skills, especially on the days when it feels too difficult.
These issues are often compounded by much trickier considerations, namely around age, gender, sexuality, race and physical size. We at Associated Studios openly encourage students to discuss these issues in our safe environment. It is important that we don’t pretend the industry at large has fully solved its historic issues around bias but also that we allow young artists to celebrate themselves in all their glory and make that part of their casting offer!
The other side of this coin, and the bit that casting directors love to emphasize, is the individuality and creative artistry that is required. The industry loves to talk about how young people should be individuals and not try to be like anyone else. You often hear the question (even sometimes from me) that asks, “What would the industry be like if Patti LuPone tried to be like everyone else?”
So, what do casting directors and creative teams mean when they ask for individuality?
CHOICES!
They want to see performers with such a high level of skill that they are free to make individual choices, based on a solid understanding of the world of the play, the style of the music and the context of the text being used. Rather than seeing ‘individuality and being yourself’ as being different from solid technical performance, think of them as being one and the same. Technique, after all, is just the ability to make choices to tell a story.
Know what story you want to tell and how you want to tell it, then work on your skills to make those choices with flair, passion and ease. When given direction by the artistic team in an audition, your skill should be high enough that you can fully engage in the notes given without losing the integrity of your own choices and approach.
So, what can you do right now to move towards this?
Stop reading this article and practice your singing technique, work on actioning your scripts, or get into that dance class you keep telling yourself you will take. Or take the plunge and apply for that full-time training at Associated Studios you’ve been looking at.
Become an expert at practice, and make it the core of your work.
But also, become an expert in yourself! Find out more about yourself than you ever thought possible, and spend time with yourself in celebration of all the factors that make up all that you are.
This industry needs more diverse voices, and your individuality is part of that. But don’t just be you, be the best version of you there can be!
