How to Hold Auditions for an Independent Musical

First and foremost, you need to find a good, isolated yet public location and book it for the date you wish to hold your auditions. You want to make sure that you book it at least a good month, if not longer, in advance. This will give you proper time to advertise your auditions to help ensure a solid turn out. A suggestion would be a classroom on a Saturday at a local High School or College. Once you've found your location, you're good to go. Now that you've got your location, your next step will be to advertise! There will no doubt be local websites and forums where you can make posting about auditions in your area. A good one, for instance, is Mandy.com. I will link it bellow. Another great idea would be to use college message boards or sites, or even create a facebook event. You can also use the power of your feet to travel to local coffee shops and the like, where you can put up fliers with your audition information on community bulletin boards.

You want to make sure that you make no bones about your parts that you are offering. What I mean by this is: what parts are available, and who would you like to play them? What should actors/actresses have prepared/bring with them? And also: what kind of compensation can they expect for this project? College campuses are a great place to find actors who will work for free meals and a copy of the movie.

On the day of the auditions, be sure to arrive early. You want to bring your camera along with several other key members of the production crew, i.e. director, producer, casting director. Set up your camera in a good location where you can easily videotape every single audition. You will want to be able to view these auditions again later, to help refresh your minds as to how well a certain person did.

Once you're set up, bring your first actor in! It's always good to break the ice a little, introducing yourself and everyone else. Feel free to ask them a few questions, like their acting experience, and what they think of the idea behind your piece. Once they are ready to go, start filming! You always want to have each actor state their full name before beginning their audition. Then, have them read from a scene, and make sure that you have someone in your crew read along with them. Form there, you might want to have them read you a monologue as well. After that, you really want to hear them sing! Everyone auditioning, unless they are auditioning for a non-singing role, should come with at least one song prepared.

Once the day is done, and you have auditioned everyone who turned out for your film, it's time to watch them all again! Have an open discussion with everyone else on your crew who was there about the auditions. What did you like? What didn't you like? Who would you like to see fill each role? After that, review the auditions once more.

Once you have made your decisions, contact the lucky thespians and let them know they're in! Or, if you have to, set up a call-back for a second round of auditions. This round will run the same as the first, although you will want to make them act out longer scenes this time, and from several different parts of the script.

Once all of your actors have been chosen, the only thing left to do is to give them copies of the script, the music, and begin rehearsing the life out of them!