My piece on auditioning brought this from Brian12. I don't know who he is. Just Brian 12…
Have you ever had auditioning actors suggest a different interpretation in a polite, professional manner? And did you ever like the suggestion? E.G. after following the audition directions, "Could I present something different for your consideration?" I've seen stories about actors on the set asking a friendly director to try it a different way, but never at an audition.
You always let an auditioning actor do whatever he or she wants for their audition. Where you have to draw the line is when they're miles away from the character you're trying to cast. Suppose you were trying to cast Henry Higgins for a production of My Fair Lady. The character has to speak impeccable English because he's an expert in that field and a teacher of it. He has to be somewhat arrogant and, until near the end of the play, not particularly interested in having a woman in his life. And he has to be someone with whom Eliza could conceivably fall in love.
There are a number of ways to convey all that and the gent I saw in the recent Broadway revival achieved all that in ways quite different from what Rex Harrison did in the film and probably on stage. So you'd let auditioning performs offer different approaches and you might find one that gave you a valid Henry Higgins in a way you hadn't expected.
But where you have to cut it off would be if the actor said, "Could I present something different for your consideration?" and then he tried a Higgins with a thick Cockney accent who was always lusting after the ladies and coming off like a slovenly boor. The actor has been brought in to try out for a role, not to rewrite the play.
In the case of the actor I wrote about who started ad-libbing all over the room, he was not auditioning for the show we were doing. He didn't know the show we were doing because he hadn't read the script…just an audition scene I wrote to showcase one particular character. And he wasn't even trying to be that character.
He was trying (I guess) to do something so different and wild that I'd say, "My God! We should throw out the series idea we spent months developing and which the network bought and do something totally different!" The analogy in the My Fair Lady example would be if he came in and began doing Tevye in the hope I'd say, "That's brilliant! How could I be so foolish? We shouldn't be doing My Fair Lady! We should be doing Fiddler on the Roof!" And then I call the office and tell them to stop making the sets and designing costumes for My Fair Lady and start building Anatevka.
Don't count on that happening. I'm not saying it never does but don't count on it.
If an actor wants to do something with a scene or a line that you didn't anticipate, sure. By all means, let him or her do that. Often, I hear a "read" I never imagined and it's better than anything I imagined. Happens all the time. But it has to fit the purpose. As Stephen Sondheim once said about musicals, "The important thing is to make sure everyone's doing the same show!"
