by Leah McLaren
The Toronto Globe
May 27, 2000

Last week I auditioned for RENT, the boffo New York musical. At least I think I did. At 8 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, I groggily joined a two-block lineup around the corner from the Big Bop, an indescribably ugly hangar-sized nightclub, where the casting directors were holding a Toronto "open call."

At the front of the queue, teenagers in glitter eyeshadow clutched sleeping bags around their shoulders and sang Whitney Houston gospel riffs in order to stay awake. Most of the kids in line around me were from smaller places -- Ontario towns like Kingston, Burlington and Goderich, where they don't hold regular RENT cattle calls. They'd all skipped something, whether school or work, in order to come to the city and take aim at Broadway stardom.

And most of us figured we had a shot. Why shouldn't we? The audition notice called for "hip, authentic . . . men and women of all ethnicities," and included the magic words, "No experience necessary!"

After about three hours it started to rain. By this time, there were 600 or so cranky, umbrella-less people loitering on the sidewalk. Standing there, cold, wet and nervous, I thought of an essay on the subject of fame by Cintra Wilson I'd read in Utne Reader magazine the day before.

"Most nonfamous people," she wrote, "are frequently in a state of dull torture from the lack of boundless international adoration in their lives, as if they lived with a constant low-grade toothache, which makes us all grouchy and unkind."

These words were still echoing through my head when I struck up a conversation with Julia Marie Dink, a giggly 17-year-old in a fuchsia GAP jean jacket who told me she would sing Take a Chance by Abba.

"If they ask my age," she confided, "I'm gonna say, 'I'll be however old you want me to be,' and then I'll show them my cleavage like this." She bent down and squeezed her boobs halfway out of her tank top.  It was right around that time, as they say in badly scripted musicals, that something began to smell fishy. Young women in black uniforms had begun moving through the crowd handing out coupons offering 30 per cent off RENT tickets. A touring production (already cast) just happens to be opening here in a couple of weeks.

A girl standing in line ahead of me, a former magician's assistant named Dayna, who claimed to have gotten seven callbacks the last time RENT came to town, groaned when she was handed a leaflet. "This isn't even a real audition," she carped, alerting a small crowd around her. "It's for publicity.

"Look around. One in three of the people in this line up will now come to the show. They do the same thing everywhere."

In the four or five years that the RENT touring company has been on the road, they have held open-call auditions in at least 25 cities on the way. Laura Matalon, marketing director of RENT for North America, admitted that the talent search is part of a marketing strategy.

"There is absolutely a publicity component to it," she told me over the phone from New York. "I won't deny that. But we have cast many roles from open calls." (This is more or less true -- she faxed me a short list of names.)

But another Toronto theatre promoter, who asked to remain anonymous, was skeptical anyone would be cast from the call I attended. His reason was simple: union regulations. According to him, the New York casting directors would have to jump through "unbelievable hoops" to cast a non-union Canadian actor in a U.S. production of RENT (at present there are no Canadian productions being mounted).

Publicity auditions, he said, are a "regular occurrence" in Toronto."They're leading these kids down the garden path. These events are primarily about creating buzz in the media."

That garden path looked freezing and wet as I sat in the cavernous Big Bop bar room, waiting to be called down the hall to sing my 16 bars. They had requested upbeat pop-rock-gospel. "Absolutely no musical theatre selections!" the press release said. I decided on a Gershwin song anyway.

When I finally ended up in front of what appeared to be a 17-year-old casting director, she interrupted me after a couple of bars and asked if Iwould mind singing Tina Turner's What's Love Got to Do With It? instead? "You do know that song, right?"

I nodded.

"Have fun with it," she advised with a winning smile.

Which is what I did, provided your idea of fun is watching a finger-snapping white-girl reporter warble out a song written for a middle-aged black woman in a leather mini-skirt.

Afterwards, on my way out, a publicist caught me and asked if I'd like to watch a few auditions. Sure, I said, horrified and delighted that they were actually letting journalists watch these humiliating exercises. She led me into a room where I was given a brief interview with the much-talked about New York casting director, a small, smiley woman named Heidi Marshall. (I hadn't made the cut to audition for Marshall.)

She was forthcoming about the publicity aspect of the tryouts. "Auditions are a good way to infiltrate a population," she explained. "It's also important to fill the audience with young people."

Over the next hour I sat on a couch, beside a couple of other reporters and a television camera operator, and watched a parade of nerve-wracked young hopefuls in K-Way pants and tank tops. First up was a teenaged boy in a jogging suit with violently shaking hands, who sang a verse of Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know.

When he was finished, Marshall thanked him warmly and impersonally. As he walked out the door the boy pumped his fist in the air and said to his friends, in a loud whisper, "I think I'm in!"