BSC Address

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

TWELFTH NIGHT

The BSC has been invited by The Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation to present a brand new production of TWELFTH NIGHT at their 2010 March Festival in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Al Ain, followed by a visit to Damascus. The production will open at The Old Rep Theatre in Birmingham before its international tour.

We are very excited to welcome Andrew Normington to the company, whose directing credits include productions for The Lord Chamberlain's Men, joined by designer Norman Coates (She Stoops, Oleanna, Speed-the-Plow, Othello) and lighting by Jason Taylor (er, everything BSC has produced for the last six years!)

Casting details will be posted on the Casting page shortly.

An exciting Spring lies ahead!

11 Comments:

At 10:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Neal,

Have you cast this yet?

Best

Rose

 
At 5:54 PM, Blogger Tikaz Nevis said...

I would love to audition, when is the casting?

 
At 4:20 PM, Blogger Neal Foster said...

It's casting now, so send in your details!

 
At 8:29 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

How exciting, I cannot wait to see!

Tanya

 
At 5:24 PM, Anonymous Louie Mckenna said...

I noticed on the casting page that you are still casting for parts. Myself and a couple of other actors saw your ad on casting call pro and sent applications by post. None of us received auditions or a reply yet the parts we applied for are still advertised. We are wondering what requirements we didn't meet for us not to even get an audition. It would have been nice just to have been given the chance without been dismissed before been seen. Anyways good luck with the show.
Louie Mckenna

 
At 7:01 PM, Blogger Neal Foster said...

Hi Louie

I can perfectly understand your concern and can hopefully explain the process to your satisfaction.

What sometimes happens - and happened in this case - is that we received a large amount of suggestions from people we already knew - some of whom we'd seen in other shows or worked with ourselves. So for our first round of auditions we invited these people to the auditions, through which five of the roles were cast. Two of the roles were cast from people we invited to audition. The roles cast from people we didn't previously know, one of whom submitted himself without an agent, were Feste and Antonio.

The BSC is one of the few companies that will see anyone for a role, whether they have great or little experience, trained or untrained, representation or not. We are proud to have given many excellent actors their theatre debut. We are always looking for unknown talent and have often auditioned over 100 people for just one part.

The fact you didn't get seen is simply because of the huge amount of applications we received for this production, which simply reduced your chances.

The two obvious things that will rule someone out of being seen are: not looking right for the part as we envisage it; and not presenting themselves in a professional manner. After that, it's simply a process of reducing 3000 applications to the 200 or so places we have available to audition people, which based upon our opinion of how close we think you fit the part, how good we think you might be (based on your photo, letter and experience) and what sort of company member you are likely to be.

I hope this helps. I know from experience how disappointing it is not to get seen for something you know you could do. Sadly, within this over-crowded profession, that is something that will happen time and time again. There are too many of us chasing fewer and fewer jobs and good people will always miss out as a result.

 
At 7:35 PM, Anonymous louie.mckenna said...

I appreciate you taking the time to give me a response. Your explanation is fair so thank you. Good luck with the show and i will try again next time.
Louie

 
At 1:56 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is there anything in the pipeline for early 2011? I am incredibly fortunate to have work up until the end of the year, but like a lot of actors, some of it has been taken out of neccessity as I have a young family to support and need to know I have the income. I would love to have the opportunity to work with the Birmingham Stage Company but Casting notifications are always too late for me and I wondered if you ever keep CV's "on file" to consider for future productions or do you require actors to send in a new CV for a specific part each time? I'm sure I'm far from being alone in having this "catch 22" situation.

 
At 7:39 PM, Blogger Neal Foster said...

We wouldn't usually cast anything that far in advance because most actors would be reluctant to commit. We will be casting our Christmas show and its subsequent tour, plus another different tour, in June, but that's probably the earliest we cast.

We don't keep CV's on file because we need to be sure that an actor is available for a particular job. The process of choosing people from CV's takes many days and it would be very difficult if half the people we chose from older CV's were not available for the dates of the new show. So sadly we have to ask people to submit anew every time.

Hope this info proves useful.

 
At 12:51 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for taking the time to explain this. I do understand the difficulties. Ah well, I'll just have to keep a close eye on the casting notifications and send a CV if I'm available. I hope all goes well with this and all your other productions. I'm appearing as Toad in a tour of a 4-hander adaptation of Wind in the Willows next, so life ain't so bad!

 
At 4:40 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Same as before i apply for a role in horrible histories and dont get an audition. Then on spotlight breakdown comes through for mixed race, mediteranian actor for part i applied for when i have played both types in the past. You seem to have a sort of click and just employ the same people. without giving people like me a chance. Funny how you always cast yourself in productions, how convenient.

 

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