The World's Worst Audition

(From the Janesville Messenger, 4-27-08)

About ten years ago, at an age where most people start to grow up, I found my inner child. I finally let loose the stage actor that was buried within me and let him come out to play.
Oh, I had done some goofy cable TV commercials before, but what I really wanted to do was Shakespeare. I would practice lines for no reason other than the sheer joy of doing it.
A chance meeting with Edie Baran, then the director of SpotLight on Kids, turned that dream into reality. She told me her adult troupe was going to do "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Rotary Gardens, and encouraged me to audition. I jumped at the chance and ended up getting cast.
I loved every moment of that first stage experience. Making your stage debut with live Shakespeare at Rotary Gardens was like hitting a hole-in-one on your very first golf swing. (In fact, if you're listening, Rotary Gardens...how about bringing it back?)
After that experience, I was hooked. Since then, I've been fortunate enough to play roles like the Cowardly Lion in "The Wizard of Oz" and Cogsworth in "Disney’s Beauty and the Beast," as well as another "Midsummer Night's Dream," this time as Bottom, the bad actor turned into an ass.
The only downside to doing community theatre is the time commitment. It means I'm rarely home in the evenings and even on weekends. Lately, as both my family and I have gotten busier, it's been increasingly difficult to find the time to do a show. In fact, I haven't done a play since January 2006 and I'm getting very itchy to take the stage again.
So when JPAC announced they were doing a Nathan Lane comedy called "The Frogs" this summer, I jumped at the chance to audition.
There was only one problem with this plan; the play was a musical, which means singing and dancing. I like to think I'm a decent actor, but that's about the extent of what I can capably do. Alas, when it comes to my vocal abilities, the notes are often as flat as Old Milwaukee Beer. Pair that with the fact that I am as coordinated as a cow on stilts, and that does not exactly make me ‘musical material.’
However, despite those limitations, I had managed to make my way through "Wizard Of Oz," though choreographer Donna Berg may still be having nightmares about my learning curve on the “Jitterbug" number.
So I went to the audition for "The Frogs," confident I would somehow fit in on a show that sounded like it had the potential to be a lot of fun. During the audition, we were required to sing a song from a Broadway musical. I chose a hilarious, politically incorrect song called "If You Were Gay," from the Sesame Street parody "Avenue Q."
As I rehearsed the song in the days prior to the audition, I discovered that I really couldn't sing it very well. But I was pumped to do the song, so I decided to just affect a character voice and fake my way through it, the way I had as the Lion and Cogsworth.
I did the song as best I could, which wasn't good. Before I left the stage, the vocal director asked me to sing some scales so he could find my vocal range. He might have had better luck finding D.B. Cooper. I tried, but I have no idea if anything I sang was in the general vicinity of where it was supposed to be. When it comes to my own voice, I have more of a tin ear than the woodman in "The Wizard of Oz."
That was probably the point where I should have admitted I was in over my head and made my exit, stage left. But unfortunately, I didn't.
I and the other hopefuls were called back to the stage to attempt to learn a dance number. Panic gripped me. What the choreographer wanted us to do was eons more difficult than anything I had been asked to do before. I must have looked as lost as Rush Limbaugh at a Greenpeace meeting. Fearing that it would look unprofessional, but unwilling to further embarrass myself, I opted out.
Amazingly, I still was cast - in the only non-singing, non-dancing role in the show. Next time, before I go through the stress of an audition, I will keep my strengths and weaknesses in mind. Because as Jack Handey once said, “If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength...I hate to tell you, but that's another weakness.”