This past Tuesday, I was going to help a director that I’m really close with, with casting for this year’s production of Christmas Carol. So, I have been in Christmas Carol for five years in a row as an actor playing Ghost of Christmas Past, Pageant Girl, Boy on The Street with Newspaper, and Belle, who is, like, Scrooge’s girlfriend that breaks up with him. But I’ve been playing these roles. And I can’t be in the show this year because I’m off at college, but the director’s like, “Yeah, you can come in and help cast the show. You can virtually assistant direct. It’ll be fun!”
So, I come in for the auditions and the director is, like, late. He’s not there, and there are already people coming in, so I’m kind of like telling them where to go. And I’m not, like, an official member of the production team for this just because I can’t physically be at a single one of the rehearsals. I was just helping with the casting decisions and a little bit of virtual consulting here and there. So I’m, like, introducing myself and telling people, “Just wait for the director.” So when the director gets here, he’s like, “By the way, the vocal director dropped out, so I’m gonna need you to run all of the auditions for the choir. And, also, we don’t have a piano.” So, I do have a little bit of experience vocal directing for this Christmas Carol show because it seems like every single year we have an issue with the vocal director not being able to be at a performance or not being able to be at the parade, and I just get stuck doing it.
So, I had to redownload the phone piano app on my phone so I could run these vocal auditions, but it was a little bit hard because people were, like, coming in before their time and after their time, so I had to keep redoing parts of the audition. And most of the people auditioning for the choir–there’s kind of three categories of people auditioning for the choir: people who are under the age of ten, people who are over the age of sixty–and some of them have lovely voices–but people who are auditioning for the cast that think their chances would be better if they also audition for the choir. Which is not the case at all, like, it’s a completely separate audition.
So, we didn’t have, like, a ton of really great people. So, I recommended for whoever the poor choir director was going to be, told the assistant choir [director], and I made the casting decisions, which–I basically just put everyone who, like, wasn’t overly off-key and loud and obnoxious. But yeah, I made the best out of that situation, and I kept everything fairly organized, and I’m really proud of it.