San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
First impressions
At the All Cities Auditions in Coronado, theater hopefuls return to the stage with nerves and big dreams
Over the years, musical theater performer Kylie Young of San Diego has auditioned four or five times at the San Diego Performing Arts League’s annual All Cities Auditions. But this year was different. For Young and most of the other 101 hopefuls who sang and performed monologues for nearly three dozen local casting directors on Monday at the Coronado Community Center, this year’s auditions were their first time onstage since the pandemic began in March 2020.
“I like being in front of an audience again after so long,” said Young, who impressed the audition auditors by belting out the song “Screw Loose” from the musical “Cry-baby.” “I’m always nervous before I get here, but as soon as I’m onstage and the music starts, all that go away.”
Originally produced for more than 15 years by the now-defunct Actors Alliance, the All Cities Auditions have been produced for the past three years by the SDPAL. League members who pay an annual fee to be in the Cast and Crew division are eligible to sign up for the auditions, which are held every summer (in 2020 they were conducted via Zoom). During the daylong event, each auditioner had just 150 seconds to impress the 35 or so casting directors in attendance. They include agents casting for TV work and representatives from more than 30 San Diego County theaters, ranging from small community ensembles to the city’s oldest and largest companies, the Old Globe and La Jolla Playhouse.
Standing outside the audition room moments after her performance, Young said she usually gets a handful of calls and emails afterward from theaters about possible roles. But she’s not sure what to expect this year. When the state reopened in mid-june, many of the county’s theaters optimistically announced plans for their 2021-22 seasons. But since then, the rapidly spreading COVID-19 Delta variant has forced theater leaders to rethink their seasons, delay reopening and develop new plans for vaccine and mask requirements.
“It’s been really difficult,” said Jill Townsend, artistic and casting director for San Diego Musical Theatre, which recently pushed back its reopening date to 2022. “Luckily we’ve been able to pivot a lot over the past year and a half, do some backyard shows and our audience has stuck with us. But it’s been a hard time. We’re in uncharted territory.”
Jacole Kitchen, director of arts engagement and in-house casting for La Jolla Playhouse, said trying to keep up with fast-changing COVID-19 news has been a big challenge this summer. Just days before comedian Hasan Minhaj’s show dates and midway through its DNA New Work play series in July, the Playhouse had to contact all ticket holders to announce a new mask mandate. Fortunately, the requests were “extremely well received” by audience members, Kitchen said, and for anyone uncomfortable with the rule, a noquestions-asked refund policy is now in place.
Jacquelyn Ritz from Scripps Ranch Theatre said that many of the All Cities casting directors — who hadn’t been in the same room together for two years — were talking Monday about surviving the “second pandemic,” which was the extended layoff from their work.
“The separation from theater crushed us psychologically,” Ritz said.
Besides recovering from a global pandemic, theaters are also returning to production with new policies for equity, diversity and inclusion, spawned by last year’s Black Lives Matter movement and an artist-driven list of demands known as We See You White American Theater.
Jay Henslee, president of the SDPAL board of directors, said the league made it a priority to better diversify the talent pool for this year’s auditions. This involved reaching out to community groups and schools serving diverse populations and reducing the financial barrier to auditioning by offering scholarships to cover Cast and Crew memberships for a year.
Seeing so many new faces on the audition stage Monday delighted Kimberly King, managing director and dramaturg of TYPA Theatre Co. (Teenage Youth Performing Arts Theatre Co.).
“I’m really excited at the people who have been coming out today,” King said. “They’re part of the ‘this is me’ era. They’re so brave in getting up on that stage and sharing what they’ve got.”
Casting for the Lgbtq-focused Diversionary Theatre, new company associate artistic director Frankie Alicea-ford said Monday that he’s excited by the attention now being given to inclusivity, and he’s proud to be part of making change.
“Access is critical,” Alicea-ford said. “We need to ask, whose stories are we telling? It’s hard and expensive to do this work, but the pandemic has given us the time and space to focus on this important work.”
One of the youngest auditioners Monday was 13-year-old Lexi Lees of Scripps Ranch, who was making her All Cities debut. She’s newly enrolled at the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, and her dream is to be on Broadway someday.
“I was a little bit nervous going in, but it was fun and I think I did pretty well,” she said.
The SDPAL committee volunteers who organized this year’s auditions — Jena Joyce, Alyssa Austin, D. Candis Paule and Kitchen — run the event with military precision. Although auditioners have just 2 minutes and 30 seconds to impress the auditors, Paule said she and her colleagues can usually spot what they’re looking for much quicker than that.
“We know in 25 to 30 seconds,” said Paule, a commercial casting agent.
During one 90-minute morning session, 28 performers auditioned with a song and a monologue. Some were stronger actors than singers or vice versa, but a handful had both talents in abundance. As a rule, auditors don’t clap or react during auditions, and on Monday, even their smiles were hidden by face masks. But some of the actors’ comic monologues were delivered so well that the auditors burst out laughing. Some performers auditioned with their face masks dangling from their wrists, and one man came onstage wearing his mask before dramatically ripping it from his face and launching into a Shakespeare soliloquy.
Auditioner Brian Evans has been doing All Cities for five years and said he was excited to be back in front of the casting directors on Monday, where he sang a song from “Into the Woods.” During the pandemic, he kept busy doing Zoom cabaret shows and a fundraising concert for an Alzheimer’s charity, but he recently did his first show for a live outdoor audience in Escondido.
“It felt great,” Evans said. “There’s nothing like moving around on a stage and being able to sing full out again.”