For community theaters, schools, churches and nonprofit organizations
Auditions are the part volunteers dread most, and the fear is rarely about casting. It is about telling people no in a town where you will see them at the grocery store on Saturday.
That gets easier with structure. Most of the discomfort comes from making it up as you go.
Announce it wider than feels necessary
The usual mistake is telling the people who were in the last show. You will get the same twelve faces and wonder why the cast never grows.
Announce it where people who have never done this will see it: the school, the churches, the library, the coffee shop, the town social pages. Be clear that no experience is needed, because the people you most want are the ones assuming it is not for them.
Name the dates for auditions, rehearsals and performances in the announcement. Somebody deciding whether to come needs to know what they are agreeing to.
Make it easy to walk in
The first ninety seconds decide whether nervous people stay.
Have somebody at the door with a clipboard and a smile. Have the forms already printed. Tell everyone what is going to happen before it happens. If people are waiting, let them wait somewhere with chairs and other humans rather than in a corridor.
Small things. They are the difference between a shy fourteen-year-old auditioning and a shy fourteen-year-old going home.
What to have people do
Keep it short and the same for everyone. Fairness is felt, and it shows up in your casting.
A page of dialogue from the script, given out on arrival rather than prepared in advance. If the show has singing, about a minute of a song they already know. They can bring it on their phone and sing over the speaker, or connect to the sound system. If children are involved, have them do what they will actually be asked to do on stage.
Cold reading is standard and it is kinder than it sounds. Nobody is disadvantaged by a script they have not memorized when nobody has.
Score as you go
Write it down during, not after. By the eleventh person you will not remember the fourth.
A simple sheet per person: name, contact, what they read, a one to five on voice, on presence, on taking direction, and a line of notes. Add one box that matters more than the rest, which is availability. The most talented person in the city is no use to you if they cannot commit to the rehearsals and the performances.
Cast the show you can rehearse
Two people can be equally good and only one of them can come to rehearsals. Take the one who can come.
This feels like a compromise the first time and stops feeling like one after your first production with a lead who missed half the schedule. Reliability is a skill, and in volunteer theater it is close to the most valuable one.
Cast widely while you are at it. Every person on stage brings an audience with them, and a cast drawn from across the town sells tickets in a way a cast drawn from the usual suspects never will.
Tell people the same day you said you would
Not later. The waiting is worse than the answer.
Everyone hears within the window you promised, cast or not, and everyone hears from a person rather than from a list on a door. A short warm email is fine. Silence is not.
For a no, thank them specifically, tell them what else needs doing, and mean it. Most people who audition and are not cast will happily run a spotlight or sell tickets if somebody asks them that night. If nobody asks, they do not come back next year, and you have lost a volunteer over an email that took four minutes to write.
The part nobody tells you
Auditions are the first impression your production makes on the town. Long before anybody sees the show, forty people will have told their families what the evening was like.
Run them warmly and you will have a bigger pool next year without doing anything else. That compounds, and it is worth more than any single casting decision you will make.
About this guide
Written by Curtain & Cause. We write original plays for community theaters and work with the nonprofit organizations staging them as fundraisers. Christmas on the Dial is an original full-length play staged as a live 1950s radio broadcast, with the audience as the studio audience.
Questions about any of the above are welcome, whether or not you are looking at this show. booking@curtainandcause.com
License the show · Book it as a fundraiser · Questions and answers
