A Few Words on AuditioningAuditioning is sort of like me hiring a lawyer after watching the way she washes my car.
joel fishbane
Winter is turning into spring which means it’s audition season in Montreal. Look to your left and you’ll see a fellow auditioning for the Fringe Festival; over on your right is a girl gearing up for her audition for Concordia Theatre. Centaur is already making audition calls and before long BTW and Geordie will do the same. So perhaps it’s a good time to discuss the Audition, the actor’s version of the job interview. Most people go on relatively few job interviews; most actors go on them their entire lives.
Everyone hates auditions, including the people who run them. Unfortunately, in four thousand years, no one has come up with a better system. For theatre schools it’s a necessary evil; for directors, it’s a last resort. Directors will always prefer hiring people they know and, barring that, people whose work they’ve seen. This is because auditions are a terrible indication of a person’s talent and everyone knows it.
