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Beauty and the Beast Casting
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| Written by lilygrimm128 |
Okay, so today I went into callbacks for Beauty and the Beast. For a while, me and Olivia (the two people called back for Belle) were kind of just sitting in the auditorium, doing nothing. Although I did receive a nickname from the artistic director. After a while, we got called up to do a scene with some prospective Gastons/Lefous. It was an early-ish scene, taking place just a bit after the opening number, Belle. We ran through it a few times with different set-ups of people. It was an interesting experience for me, as it's one of the first times I've had to read unfamiliar material on stage. It was pretty cool, though.
After that, we sat some more, and they they were going to have the Belles do some singing. The director sent everybody else out of the auditorium. We had to prepare "Belle (Reprise)" and "Home," the latter of which wasn't too difficult for us to remember because that was the song we'd picked to do for our initial audition out of the three possible songs they assigned us. After we'd run through the songs next to the piano and done them on stage, they asked us if we could do part of "A Change in Me" too, really quick. It wasn't a huge problem for me because I knew the song anyway. After we did that, we were basically done with callbacks for the rest of the day. All in all, I think I did fairly well. I put a lot of emotion into my singing, and did the best I could do with my reading, as it was a fairly new experience for me.
They were going to e-mail everybody the cast list later in the day, so I just got it. Well... I didn't get Belle. Instead, I will be playing Madame D'Arque. That's the guy who ran the insane asylum in the show, but they changed the part to a girl for me. And I'm really okay with that. This will be my first musical, so I'm not really ready to try and handle a huge lead role. I love Belle's songs, but I don't think I'm ready to play a character who has to learn that much material yet.
If you believe in the "paying your dues" philosophy of theater casting, then this is really the right way to go about casting Belle. Olivia has been in more productions than I have, including playing the title role in Annie (when she was in 5th grade) and playing one of the ugly step-sisters in Into the Woods just this past year, to name a few, so she is much better suited to handle so big of a role.
And I'm already thinking about some crazy, fun stuff I could do with this role. My character is in charge of a loony bin, right? And, if we're going by the age type of the character from the film, she's not exactly a spring chicken, either. So if you've been spending that much time around crazies... they're going to rub off on you, aren't they? So I could give her a nervous tic or something. And since she's such a small character, I really get free range to decide what she's like. I could create a whole history for her, give her a first name, etc. Insaneness! Literally! |
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