Over in the far corner was the same piano accompanist from last time. Thankfully, the audition materials were the same for everyone, so there’d be no last-minute song selections for him to worry about. As soon as I took my spot at the center of the space and gave him a clear nod, he started to play the first song, the tempo of the music just as quick as it had been on the bootlegged YouTube version I’d been rehearsing from. Though I’d been worried about stumbling over the lyrics at such a breakneck pace, all of my hours of rehearsal paid off when I hit every note and articulated every syllable in perfect time with the music.
I could see smiles and enthusiastic nods firing around the room as others were fiercely scribbling notes on legal pads.
One of the producers leaned forward in his seat. “That was lovely, Ms. Lawrence. Let’s do the scenes you prepared followed by the ballad, and then we have some new pages we’d like you to take a look at.”
We worked through the scenes I prepared, one going better than the last. The director provided notes and adjustments along the way, all of which I tried to implement to showcase how well I could take direction. When we finished that part of the audition, I knew in my gut it was going well.
The ballad, however, was a slightly different story. Although I managed to hit most of the showstopping notes and express the emotionality of the piece, something just felt a bit off. I didn’t know if it was nervous energy or maybe the excitement from the audition having gone better than expected up to this point, but I could actually feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, making me a bit shakier than normal. It took everything I had to hold on to the final note of the song, my voice falling off at the very end. It wasn’t a complete disaster, and certainly not the moo-numental mishap that had been my Wicked audition, but I could’ve done better. I knew it and sensed the room did too.
When I finished, Joanna handed me the new scenes and told me I had fifteen minutes to look them over. I accepted them with trembling hands and headed to a bench outside to prepare. I slipped on my coat and made my way through a group of actors taking a cigarette break, the plume of smoke wafting through the temperate March air. I nodded a quick hello and moved to a bench along the sidewalk.
Part of me wanted to just keep walking, right past them, down into the subway, and forget about this whole damn dream. I mean, what business did I have being at a callback for a show heading to Broadway? I was over the hill （in acting years, anyway）， out of sorts, and out of practice, the ballad certainly confirming at least that last point. But at the same time, I’d made it this far. So many hours of practice and even more years of failures, and here was a genuine opportunity just an arm’s length away.
But then I started to wonder if the possibility of actually getting the role was more nerve-racking than even the audition process itself? Stop it, Avery! I was psyching myself out, like always. I needed to get out of my head, set my mounting doubts aside, and just follow through for once. Just once. And if I crashed and burned, so be it. There was too much time to make up for and there were too many times I’d opted out. But this time, I was in for a penny, in for a pound.
Exhaling a deep breath, I shook the negativity from my mind and gripped the pages with renewed vigor. I read the top of the script, noticed the scene was from the first act of the play, and scanned the paper for a description.
Act 1, Scene 2: Marley, at the gates of Purgatory, meets an angel there who porters the gateway to Heaven or Hell. Marley is disoriented, unsure of where she is, and the angel explains that Marley cannot proceed into either Heaven or Hell until she returns to Earth to revisit three individuals from her life who she wronged and sets things right for them. This scene rockets Marley back to the home of a longtime friend she’d betrayed for the love of Scrooge.
A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. There was something so hauntingly familiar about the scene’s description. As I continued to read through the back-and-forth between the characters, their conversation felt more like a memory than fiction, my mind swirling with my last encounters with Marisol before I cut her out of my life for the love of Adam. I wasn’t just pretending to be Marley; in so many ways I was Marley.
Joanna came jogging up to where I was sitting. “I know that wasn’t a full fifteen, but the team’s anxious to move on. Could you be ready to come back inside now?” she panted.
My thoughts flashed to Marisol and to our epic fight that last night in Montauk. To Adam in his orange jumpsuit, bound in handcuffs behind a wall of solid plexiglass. To the house of cards he’d built so carefully that all came crashing down with a forceful wind Christmas Day. To everything I’d lost in the wake of his lies and deception, and the fact that though Adam once dangled a shiny carrot （carat?!）， I was the one who ultimately accepted it at the expense of everyone and everything else in my life. Filled with overwhelming regret and emotion, tears stinging my eyes, I managed to choke out, “I’m ready.”
I marched back into the studio and, with nothing left to lose, laid myself bare. I used the pain of my own experience as fuel to ignite the words from within, displaying a vulnerability that left me emotionally raw and exposed. By the end of the scene, I had tears streaming down my face, and so did many of the producers watching. There was a hushed silence in the air as the scene closed, and it took a full ten seconds or so before anyone said anything at all. I wasn’t sure how to read their expressions, but right, wrong, or indifferent, I’d given it everything I had.
Not wanting to break the spell of the moment, I waited for some sort of instruction or dismissal. Finally, the director cleared his throat and said, “Well, congratulations, we’ll see you at the final callback in a few weeks. Joanna will send you all of the details.”
I clamped my hand over my mouth, unable to believe I was moving on to the last round of auditions. “Thank you so much. I cannot tell you how much this means to me.”
He closed the binder in front of him. “You did a really great job, especially for a cold read. I’m eager to see what you do with the material when you actually have some time to prepare. We’ll have most of the show’s big investors and all of the producers at the final audition. You’ll perform this scene again, but this time with the song that follows. You can grab the pages from off the top of the piano on your way out. Contact Joanna if you have any questions, and we’ll see you in about a month.”
I managed to squeak out another gracious thank-you to the group, before giving my old friend at the piano a wink as he handed me the sheet music. I hurried out of the room, practically floating three feet above the floor, until I was outside in the fresh air and able to take a deep breath that brought me back to earth.
I could barely wait another second before glancing down at the music to see what was in store for me at the final audition, and when I did, the name of the song, “No Space of Regret,” jarred me so forcefully, the air I’d just drawn in heaved back out with such ferocity I almost collapsed onto the sidewalk.
My eyes darted down to the first measure and accompanying lyrics, and though I knew what they would be before I even read the words, the hairs on my head still stood on end and a hot flash slammed into me, countering the cool March breeze. It felt like what I imagined it’d feel like to get struck by lightning.