"God I Hope I Get It!"

June 27, 2025 by Mark Cuddy

“God, I hope I get it
I hope I get it
How many people does he need?
…
I really need this job
Please God, I need this job
I’ve got to get this job!
…
Who am I anyway?
Am I my resume?
That is a picture of a person I don't know

What does he want from me?
What should I try to be?
So many faces all around, and here we go
I need this job
Oh God, I need this show!”

—I Hope I Get It from A CHORUS LINE

Actors need to act.

The brilliant musical that debuted in 1975 still captures the excitement and anxiety of actors auditioning. Yikes, what other industry outside of the performing arts puts their job applicants through this kind of naked vulnerability for a short-term gig! And yet…

…actors need to act. And directors need to see who is best for each role. Finding the right actor can make or break a production and make a director’s work succeed or fail. That’s why we are so painstaking about the process.

Since we just completed several weeks of auditions for our inaugural season – and I can’t wait to unveil our inaugural casts of talented actors over the next month - let’s pull the curtain back a little bit and talk some theatre terms.

I used “Character Breakdowns” to guide the audition process.

These are short descriptions of the roles in a show, and also any particulars that a director might be looking for in actors. For the over 40 roles in the three Chekhov plays, I used character breakdowns such as these:

In The Seagull:

Madame Arkadina – 40s, The center of the universe, a famous actress, and a mother - in that order. Holding tightly to her ego, which masks her terror at ageing. In a relationship with the younger writer, Trigorin.
Sorin – 50s/60s, Arkadina’s older brother. Retired Govt worker, single, prone to cliche, big heart, frustrated with self but socially conscious, in failing health. Owner of the estate.

In Three Sisters:

Natasha — 30s. Andrei’s fiancée, and then his wife, mother to Bobik and Sophia. From a lower social class than the Prozorov family, Natasha is initially intimidated by the three sisters and subject to their ridicule. However, after marrying Andrei, Natasha gains and enjoys complete control over the house and the sisters. She is having an affair with Andrei’s boss, Protopopov, who runs the District Council.
Masha — Middle Sister, 20s — Unhappily married to Kulygin, the schoolteacher, whom she originally revered. Masha is witty, short-tempered, and critical of the world. She has a passionate affair with the Battery Commander, Colonel Vershinin.

You get the picture. I am not strict about the age ranges posted, some actors present younger or older than their real age, but it gives actors some sense of how the characters fit together in relationships.

Directors set up certain amounts of time for each actor’s audition.

Often for the first audition, it might be a five-minute “audition slot” to hear a memorized monologue and say hello. Because I wanted to make sure I had enough time for conversation in my first auditions for The Classics Company, I set-up half hour group slots for up to five actors. A little different approach.

For “callbacks”—cut-downs for second, and sometimes third, auditions—these are longer and require actors to prepare scenes from the play (let’s keep to plays and not musicals for a moment; musicals have separate singing and dance auditions). I decided to have actors at callbacks come in for 1–2 hours to act with other actors who are auditioning for characters in the same scenes.

These are actually called “sides.” The word comes from the time before Gutenberg when scripts were handwritten. To save time and paper, actors only got their parts and not the whole script: their “side” of the dialogue. The term is now used for any excerpt of a play or movie script used in auditions.

“Casting Directors, Offers, Agents, Contracts”

In the professional theatre world that Geva lives in, we had a consistent Casting Director to manage actors submitted by their agents in New York City. They would set-up all the auditions and we would go down to NYC for 3–5 days of casting. The Theatre would then make a salary offer to the actor’s agent, and then an Actors Equity Association standard agreement would be signed between theatre and actor.

Here in Rochester almost every actor is non-union and has a regular job during the day unless they are retired. Small theatres such as The Classics Company will have to rehearse outside their work schedule, and so we only offer stipends for expenses.

“God I hope I get it!”

So there you have a snapshot of how actors audition and theatres cast them. It’s time consuming making sure the right actors are in the right roles so everybody succeeds. I have promised those who auditioned for me that I would let them know around June 15th what I can offer them….

Classically Yours,