Hi. Ow. Hi.

Greetings from the Unified Professional Theater Auditions in Memphis, Tennessee! I spent the weekend eagerly following the news from NYCC in between auditions, and enjoying a flurry of excited text messages over Yen’s acquisition of Yotsuba&! So exciting! I also have a review in today’s Manga Minis for volume five of Shugo Chara! which is a series I have been enjoying very much. Be sure to check out Deanna’s latest post, too, where she talks about Wild Adapter!

On another small note, I’ve added a sidebar widget here that displays my Twitter updates for anyone who is interested. I’m not much of a, uh, tweeter, but frustration over my hotel’s painfully slow internet service drove me to find a way to make small updates with my phone, and this seemed like the easiest option. So there they are, near the bottom of my sidebar. You may choose to read or ignore as you please. :)

I am currently waiting on the little pot of watery hotel room coffee that is brewing in my bathroom, and attempting to find a way to soothe my aching back. For those of you who have never been to group auditions like this (which I’m assuming is most of you), the way it works is as follows:

A whole slew of young actors and a whole slew of theater producers meet up in a single location. The producers fill up an auditorium/theater/hotel banquet room (in this case it’s Memphis’ Playhouse on the Square), and the actors come up one by one and perform for a minute and half each. The producers note who they’d like to call back for a second audition and give a list to the conference organizers. This goes on for hours (and usually days). The actors are subsequently informed of which companies would like to see them, and they trot around to the callback spaces for each of these to check them out. If they decide they want to audition, they sign up for a time later that day.

Here’s where my role comes in. We have a guy sitting in the general auditions, picking out who he thinks is appropriate for our shows, and I (along with a reader and our assistant production manager) sit here in the callback space aka my hotel room (and for those who think it’s creepy that the callback spaces are hotel rooms I must tell you that we all *agree* but for some reason that’s the way its done) and await the onslaught of actors who are kind enough to attend our callbacks. The callbacks generally run from noon to around midnight or 1 am, during which time I am seated on the cheap hotel couch we’ve moved around in order to create a decent “stage” area. After two days of this, my back is not doing so well.

Back pain, aside, these auditions are a real boon for small companies like ours, and we’ve seen a lot of fantastic people this year!

I’ll be back in Massachusetts sometime tomorrow, madly scrambling to finish upcoming reviews. See you all then!

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