Monday, August 8, 2011

Hopefuls Sing Out From Afar as Broadway Scouts Go Online

Julia Tan, a 10-year-old actress who dreams of belting like Barbra, auditioned for her first Broadway show last month — 2,500 miles away, in her family room in Kuna, Idaho. As her older sister fumbled with a video camera and her mother beamed nearby as a cue (keep smiling!), Julia performed “Born to Entertain” from the musical “Ruthless!” for one of the three-minute audition tapes that little girls worldwide are sending in to the online casting call for the 2012 revival of “Annie.”

“I did two takes,” Julia admitted by telephone, “but only because the camera cut off my head and then my feet the first time around.”

A rite of passage for young actors — waiting in long lines to be seen by Broadway casting directors, clutching head shots with I-hope-I-get-it fervor — has faded, as more producers and directors have abandoned the long-held assumption that they need to be in the room to assess stage presence and other qualities. While some casting directors have looked at audition tapes here and there over the years, the advent of YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Flip cameras and widely available video equipment has recently given technology a greater role in theater casting, providing a foot in the stage door for the technically savvy.

So far 320 young actresses have auditioned by video for “Annie” and 20 of them have been picked for in-person auditions by the casting director, Bernard Telsey, who has shepherded countless careers in the theater. (The online call for Annie and her fellow orphans is open through the fall.) While those numbers are smaller than the 1,250 girls who jammed the June open auditions in Manhattan and the 140 who received callbacks, Mr. Telsey said the taped auditions, which he collected with the aid of a specialist agency, ActorCast, were nevertheless a growing way for actors to become breakouts stars.

Another major musical revival, of the Streisand vehicle “Funny Girl,” also held an online call this summer and received 308 videos from women in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, Vietnam and elsewhere, though the title role ended up going to the television and stage actress Lauren Ambrose, the producers announced last week.

Such formal casting searches are still rare online compared with the hours that casting offices and some directors spend surfing the Internet nowadays for fresh faces. While no breakout theater star has been discovered solely through online auditions, several casting directors said it was only a matter of time. Mr. Telsey recently helped cast an inexperienced actor, Derek Klena, in the coming Off Broadway revival of the musical “Carrie” after Mr. Klena sent in a video for another job, as an understudy in “Catch Me if You Can.” The “Catch Me” creative team liked his tape, so he flew in from Los Angeles for a live audition; while he didn’t land the understudy part, the process led to a plum supporting role in “Carrie.”

“Many talented and hardworking actors, people we want to cast, are increasingly shrewd about using technology to get in front of us,” Mr. Telsey said.

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