Auditions – Actor’s Edition

This particular blog post doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with production.  But I can’t help but think of how much I learned by being on the other side of the table and watching the actors for a change.  And since a lot of actor’s are reading this blog, I present to you a list of audition tips for actors:

1. Be on time.
2. Refrain from asking questions like “how much does this pay?” or “who’s going to be at the opening?”  We all know those concerns are in the back of everyone’s mind, but it’s a little insulting when someone’s more concerned with the business aspect as opposed to the creative.
3. Open yourself up when you walk in the room.  Give us a little bit of your personality.  We’re looking at who you are as a person and deciding whether or not that’s right for this particular role.  Chances are you have it in you, but if you don’t show us, we’ll never know.
4. If a scene requires kissing, don’t kiss the reader unless explicitly told to (yes, someone tried this).
5. Follow direction.  Even if that direction is totally wrong for the material.  If we give someone a direction, and they read it the exact same way, we instantly know that they’re capable of very little growth.
6. If you genuinely like the script, let them know.  And if you have an honest question about the script – please ask.  We want to cast someone who’s passionate about the material.  Just don’t do it if you don’t mean it.  If someone is blowing smoke up my boat, I can smell it a mile away.
7. Unless they say otherwise, take your time.  If you need a moment to do a prep then do it.  I respect an actor who’s unwilling to compromise where his craft is concerned.  You’re coming here to show us how you work.  Don’t let anything stop you from doing that.
8. If you’re given the sides a week or so in advance, don’t come in the room barely familiar with the lines.  Your competition sure won’t.  That’s for sure.
9. If you’re given the full script before the audition, you should read it.  And if you haven’t read it, and they ask, you should lie and say you have.  I’m dead serious.
10. If the playwright’s in the room, do not ad-lib your own lines into the script.
11. Please look like your headshot.  We’re all vain, and we all want to look like a cover model, but if you walk into the room and you’re someone else – you’re definitely not getting the role.  And most of the time we don’t even want a cover model.  Just be yourself, and be proud of who you are.
12. Have fun.  We want to work with people who are fun.  If we enjoyed working with you at the audition your chances of getting cast just shot up by a factor of ten. 

Marketing 301 – Website Design

                A good website should be at the cornerstone of your marketing campaign.  The amount of information you can provide is staggering when you look at the costs.  You can purchase a domain at GoDaddy.com for $10.  You can have it hosted for $50 a year.  Sixty bucks and you get to provide ticket buyers with unlimited photos, videos, press quotes, and most importantly:  a link to buy the tickets.

                So how do you go about building a website?  If you don’t have a friend who can build websites, I suggest you start looking for one immediately.  Or better yet, pick up a copy of Dreamweaver for Dummies and learn how to do it yourself.  The internet is the future for marketing and communications.  The cost savings of doing things online are through the roof.  Any time you invest in understanding the internet will not be wasted.

                With that said, here are a list of tips and guidelines to follow when creating your website: 

1. Please, please, please – make it look nice.  Make sure the colors match, and make sure the layout looks pleasing to the eye.
2. Make sure the website loads quickly.  I hate slow websites.  Flash-based websites are the worst because they take nearly a minute to load.  By that time I’ve lost interest. 
3. Do not have music play automatically the moment you open the page.  I cannot tell you how much I hate this.  Most people listen to their own playlist while surfing the web.  It's rude and disruptive to invade my space like that.  And what if I'm at work?  If something starts blasting over the speakers you just humiliated me in front of all my co-workers.  If you’re producing a musical, have a page where you can listen to the tracks, but give them a choice.  Don’t ram it down their throats.
4. Three things should be visible on every page.  The name of the play, the location of the theater, and a link to buy tickets.  This is common sense, but I am continually shocked at how difficult sites make it to find basic information.
5. Make it as easy as possible to buy a ticket.  An easy to find link that says “tickets” should be on every page.  When they make up their mind to purchase a ticket, you want that process to be as smooth as possible.
6. A picture is worth a thousand words.  Invest in great pictures for your website.
7. A good photo is more effective than a good illustration.  There is marketing data to back this up.  (but make sure they’re good).
8. People will assume that the quality of your website reflects the quality of your show.  So again – make it look nice.  It should look like a lot of TLC was put into it (which will give them the impression that a lot of TLC was put into the show).

Website Data

I'm looking at the analytical data for the website, and I figure I'd share a few things:

• The most popular page (other than the home page) is the cast page
• A very close second is the promotional photography

There is also something called a "drop rate."  Meaning the percent of people who leave the website after visiting a page.  You want a low drop rate.  The page with the lowest "drop rate" is photography.  Second lowest is the cast page.

What to infer from this?  People want to see photos and people want to know more about the actors that they're seeing.

If you want to see the website check it out at:

http://www.holeinhisheart.com

Script Development

                The script is the most important part of the show.  It serves as the foundation for everything that you do.  “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”  If you ever watch interviews with famous actors, you'll often see them talking about how long they worked on the characters (often times it's several years).  What they're really talking about is script development.  Good scripts take time to write.  In particular, this one took three years.

                A script is a story told through dramatic events.  The keyword here is dramatic events.  In a bad script the story is told through an exposition.  In a good script, the plot unfolds through the drama of the scene.  Expositions are boring.  Drama is not.  After the first draft of a script, I’ll go through each and every scene and ask myself the following questions:  What is the event?  What is really going on here?  What is happening between these characters that makes this scene exciting to watch?  If I don’t have a good answer to those questions, I’ll go back and revise the scene until I do.  Good writing is rooted in behavior, NOT dialogue.  Dialogue is a subset of behavior, and while it can add a lot to a play, a good scene can be acted without words.  If you need words to do the scene, there is something fundamentally wrong with it.

That’s not to say that words are not important.  Well written dialogue and alliteration can do a lot for you (like help the actors affect their scene partners, improve the tempo, etc), but the words need to be rooted in non-verbal behavior or they have no meaning.  After I feel like I have a strong event for each individual scene, I’ll go back through the whole play and re-work the dialogue – focusing on tempo and continuity.

After all that’s done, I’ll start to collaborate with other artists (like a director and actors), and do table reads.  It’s important to get good actors for the table reads.  If you don’t, the reads won’t do you much good.  You’ll just want to bash your head in from hearing a bad actor butcher your words.  Table reads do a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of the writing.  You’ll quickly find out what works and what doesn’t.  The stuff that works well - you keep.  The stuff that doesn’t – back to the drawing board.  Rinse and repeat until you feel the work is ready for the public.  Just to give you a benchmark, we did well over a dozen table reads for this project.

                This is a very basic overview of what script development is like.  The actual nuts and bolts of it is very complicated, and way beyond the scope of this blog.  You have to understand how to give a writer feedback that’s going to help him and not confuse him.  There’s a real art to that.  You have to understand the commentary on life he (or her) is trying to make, and help guide the script in that direction. 

Marketing 201

In my last blog on marketing (Marketing 101), I talked about direct marketing and how it can be a great tool to promote your show.  In this blog, we’ll take it a step further and talk about the cost and practicality of actually doing it.

First of all I’d like to link you to another blog written by one of my favorite Broadway producers (Ken Davenport).  In this particular post he talks about proofing a direct mail advertisement.

Godspell Blog

Direct mail is very effective.  Broadway producers wouldn’t use it if it wasn’t.  Now let's examine the costs and see how we can apply it to an off-off Broadway production.  A first class stamp is 44c.  A nice colorful direct mail postcard is going to cost between 50c to a dollar.  Let’s be liberal, and say the postcard will cost us 56c giving us a grand total of $1 per mailing.  Now let’s say we send this mailing out to 500,000 people who are active ticket buyers.   Think about the costs associated with that.  At minimum, we’re spending half a million dollars on supplies, and that doesn’t even cover the labor involved in executing such a feat (you can’t just walk into the post office and drop half a million brochures into a mail slot) or the costs of obtaining such a list in the first place.

A mailing like this, if put together properly, can give you a return of around 3%-4% (meaning 3% of the people you contact will actually buy a ticket).  If you do the math 3% is 15,000 tickets sold.  Now, if you’re producing on Broadway and you’re selling tickets for $100 a pop, that’s a potential $1.5 million return.  And if the show has a good word of mouth, the return will be even greater, making direct mail totally worth it.  But if you’re producing a limited run off-Broadway (and selling tickets for $25…) you’re going to lose a lot of money.  And most likely you won’t have the $500,000 initial capital in the first place.

What if I told you that you could send something out that was much more detailed and extensive than a postcard, and that you could send it out to 500,000 people at a fraction of the cost?  And by fraction I mean sub $5,000 range.  I imagine you’d sit up and listen!

First of all, use a website instead of a postcard.  A website will cost you $10 a month to maintain, and it can have as many pictures, videos, biographies, etc as you want.  Loads more information at a fraction of the cost.

Second of all, use email instead of direct mail.  Direct mail costs $1 per mailing.  Email costs $0 per mailing.  The only cost associated with email is buying the list.  Critics may argue:  marketing via email is bad because no one likes spam.  I disagree.  Email "spam" is no less intrusive than a hardcopy of "junk" mail.  And second of all, the companies that rent these lists only send emails to people who want to hear about new shows and events.  This means that someone had to subscribe to the list meaning it's not unsolicited.  So what you're sending is not really spam.

A $500,000 marketing expense down to $5,000.  Nice.  This is what off-off Broadway producing is all about folks.  Finding a way to get it done at a fraction of the cost.

Wardrobe

Wardrobe is usually an afterthought in Off-Off Broadway.  A lot of 99 seat plays just tell the actors to bring in clothes of their own.  Actors wearing their own clothes is not necessarily a bad thing (more often than not, they get it right), but as a producer you should be concerned that it's given proper attention.

Clothes are important for two reasons. 

1)      How you dress represents who you are, and how you’re perceived in the world.  Good playwrights write specific characters, and how they dress helps tell the story. 

2)      Clothing has a dramatic impact on an actor’s behavior.  Your body language is different in a fitted suit than it is in shorts and a t-shirt.  If want the actors to do good work, then you need to put them in the right clothes.

Now that I’ve established how important wardrobe is, I’d like to tackle the reason why most shows ignore it – money.  Good clothes are expensive.  Particularly in my play, one of the characters is wealthy, and he loves to flaunt it.  Clothes than emanate wealth and status can’t be faked.  The color palette and fabrics used by high end designers aren’t really found anywhere else.  And I don’t since I don’t have $6,000 to spend on wardrobe, this presented a real problem.  But as always, when you put your mind to it, you'll find a few ways around it:

1)       Get connected in the fashion industry.  I found someone who could get me top end clothing for dirt cheap.  I got a Gucci cashmere sweater for $40.  Probably retails for $800.  I got a Versace black leather jacket for $60.  Easily costs over a grand.

2)      Clothes can be dyed, and sometimes it’ll save you money.  We were looking for a burgundy leather jacket (burgundy is one of the hottest colors right now) for the male lead.  I saw a nice one at Prada, but with a $5,000 price tag I can forget about that.  My friend in the fashion industry got me something really nice by an Italian designer, but it was tobacco colored, and wasn’t much use.  However, there’s a guy on the upper west side who runs a leather shop and can dye leather.  I talked to him (he didn’t speak a word of English) and he agreed to dye it for $60.  Came out looking perfect.  $5,000 down to $120.  I’ll take that.

3)      Goodwill.  I’m serious.  A lot of incredible stuff can be found there if you have the patience to look.

4)      Sometimes you have to bite the bullet.  I paid $600 (ouch) to Versace for a pair of blue pants.  But they were perfect (wait to you see them, these are incredible pants), and I couldn’t find them anywhere else.

Callbacks

I saw some amazing talent at the initial audition.  It was such a good day, and I had so many good choices that I was honestly a little dumbstruck.  Afterwards, I was talking with my director, and I foolishly asked “do we even need to have callbacks?”  His response?  Absolutely.  Why?  It tells you who is capable of growth and who isn’t. 

There is an initial buzz you get at that first audition.  Seeing the work come to life with a fresh voice and a fresh face is very exciting for both sides of the table.  But what are they going to be like two weeks from now?  Hold a callback and you’ll find out.  Some actors get better, some stay the same, and some even get worse.  The ones who grow are the ones you keep.