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[0:00] Charlie Murphy: Hello, hello, and welcome to the Summer Break series of Mapping The College Audition. I'm still Charlie Murphy, director of MTCA. That's Musical Theater College Auditions. Check us out at mtca.com. I hope you're all having great summers as you listen to this and that the world is still going okay, unreacted to by me here in the past. Today, I'm going to dive into our second of our four audio blogs that we're going to do. Again, these will all be newly audio blogs, newly recorded audio blogs, as you say, meaning they weren't yet released on the pod, but you may have read them already if you're a fervent subscriber to our sub stack. And again, if you haven't checked that sub stack out, please do.

It's available at mtca.com. All right, here we go. The second of these two blogs is called Sharing, Not Hiding. Wow. Is it October already? Now, of course, it's June as I record this, but I'm going to stop commenting on the time when I get it wrong. Wow. Is it October already? Time for another MTCA director blog from yours truly. This is another one I've been teasing for a while on the podcast, since I think it's such an important mindset unlock for young actors, and it's never been more relevant than it is to young people today. And that concept is the idea of sharing yourself in the room, as opposed to hiding. It is very important in your live auditions, but it's also important to think about it this time of year as you're filming and submitting your pre-screens.

What is that active process of sharing yourself? And of course, choosing what feels like positive attributes that you want to share about yourself, rather than trying to hope that the people behind the table don't see your weaknesses or flaws. You often hear us talk about the idea that auditors aren't looking for perfection and that they're opposed to shellacked or rigid performances. This act of hiding can be a big part of what leads to that shellacking. We often see young actors doing the equivalent of like, look over here, not over here, hoping we won't find them out for what is missing in their audition package. The fear being if you relinquish control, you might be truly seen and be found lacking.

That is the most natural human instinct. It is our defense mechanism to hide. It's like an internal fight or flight where we are fleeing inside our own performances. If they just reject my performance, then they won't really be rejecting me, right? If I can just hide behind my tricks, I'll be safe. But if we're worried about not making mistakes, not being found out, our auditions will end up feeling anodyne, safe, and ultimately forgettable. If the event in the room is you meeting a college and going on a very specific kind of speed date, which it is, that's the goal, right? Then by playing it safe, you will have left the room having never really introduced your real self. So what do we do instead?

Our goal is to lean forward and to focus actively on sharing ourselves the same way that when we feel a room rushing, we need to have that conscious counterbalance effort that tells us to slow down. When we feel that instinct to hide or protect ourselves or play it safe, we need to put the pedal to the metal and leap into sharing. The goal should be to leave every audition room smelling like all kinds of you. It's figuratively smelling, not literally, of course. You want to have shared so much of you in that room that the next auditioner will have trouble clearing out the resonance of it. And finding that lean forward place can lead to all kinds of great things. It leads to risk-taking, a sense of fun, a sense of play, and even a bit of danger in the lack of control that you'll have.

In the comedy world, we often talk about the speed of fun, which is not about something just being fast. It means you're letting something out of the tight grip of your control and challenging yourself to see what you can do when there's real risk of failure. This is true on camera and over Zoom as well. There's an active skill of forcing your face and eyes to be viewable and letting the camera take you in. That's a vulnerable feeling when you do it on Zoom, but especially hard to do when you're in person. To get to that place where you feel comfortable with being seen, with truly being seen by the people behind the table. Truly being seen means being seen warts and all, not just from the perfect Instagram angle of yourself or of your best self, to let them in with the oddness and quirkiness and messiness that might be you at 17 years old right now.

And as an actor, I like to phrase it that way, in being seen rather than to show them, which can lead to like you showing them a different kind of mask. As much as we don't want to show them a mask of perfection, we also don't want to show them a mask of false vulnerability. To genuinely share yourself is an allowing and not a forcing. This is really hard to do, especially when you're nervous, but it is doable. It's allowing your actual authentic light to shine rather than shoving in their face a certain kind of light that you think they want to see. We recently talked about this on the podcast with one of our MTCA alums, Molly Griggs, who talked about being comfortable with the embarrassment of it all.

That sometimes we're sharing moments of people's lives which are not camera ready and easy to present. It takes a real comfort and confidence as an actor to be able to go to some of those vulnerable and embarrassing places, to explore things comedically and dramatically that don't come up on an everyday Tuesday for most people, and certainly aren't shared publicly. To be able to be private in public is a difficult and beautiful thing. For young auditioners, The Slate can be a great opportunity to practice this idea of sharing your genuine self actively. Of course, this is just one small part of the audition, but it's a great example where so many of our students approach it like a beauty pageant.

They've got to say exactly the right words and don't mess up the playwright's name or forget the musical, which sure, of course, learn your playwright's name and the piece your song is from. But in actuality, that's just not the right focus. If you're worried about getting it right, then that's the event of your slate, getting it right, and we miss the introduction of you. Instead of getting to share this incredibly important information of who you are and what you've picked out of the entire canon of monologues and songs to show me who you are. In that moment, I'm not just learning about the choices you've made. I'm learning about you, the actor, and your POV, your point of view on the material that you've hopefully joyfully selected with conscientiousness.

I'm learning how you feel about what you're doing. Let that slate moment be an opportunity. Let it be loose and playful and you. Let it be interactive. If they comment on a piece that they're excited to see, let yourself be able to listen to their reaction and respond. Now you're showing them you, the student actor, in a real moment. I'm not against slates that are creative if that feels like you, but they also don't have to be overly innovative. The simple script can remain the same or similar to what everyone else says. It's just about going beyond the script and what you bring to it. Even the phrase, I'm Charlie Murphy, can be radically different if I'm pronouncing information versus sharing myself with people behind the table.

And while we're on slates, please don't forget to take that time between your slate and beginning your pieces. If you're going to go to some of those most vulnerable places that we talked about in your material, take the time you need to do to do that great work that you've been practicing in your bedroom. If you've been working with coaches on a moment before and objectives and obstacles and all that great stuff, it's all for naught if you forget to actually bring that work into the room with you. Now, when you think about slates and really all aspects of an audition, they really are all opportunities to learn about who you are. When I'm debriefing mock auditions with our students, I often ask about what the criteria students think they might use to select the class based on what they saw today.

So what would you, if you were a student watching this for the first time, who would you be interested in inviting into your class based on what you saw? I invite students to think like faculty members and imagine themselves putting together a class of people they would want to work with for four years that they would want to train. Now, of course, talent is going to be a large factor in those decisions and the work that's done in the material itself, of course it is. But I invite them to actually think through how much is shared from the moment you walk in the room, from your intro to your slate, to the way you talk to an accompanist, to the way you prepare yourself to do your work in your transitions between pieces, how you answer interview questions, how you take adjustments, what questions you ask, how you leave the room.

All of those things which have nothing to do with your songs and monologues, and they're all opportunities to share. As of course is true in the material selection, which we've talked about previously on blogs, and the work itself that you're doing, that you want to be sharing and letting yourself be taken in. But if you think on the faculty end, what are those final factors? I promise you it's not just the 20 most talented students numerically who get into each school. There are so many factors in what can lead to an acceptance, and it's not just how loud you can belt and if you can kick your face. And I think when students think through that, having just met actual other human beings, that feels patently obvious.

But it's not always how they think walking in. They think for them, it will be a question of whether they nail the high note, or whether they crack, or whether their comedic monologue gets a laugh or not. But when they're looking at others, they can see how charmed they were by a simple and honest interview answer, by the way someone gamely navigated a tough adjustment, or dealt with a flub in their monologue. And if you think from this perspective, in the way colleges are evaluating those factors, I would care much more about adding positive points to my ledger than trying to cover up any flaws. We tend to focus on our own small mistakes, whereas others remember the positive. Think about your experience of a time when you were so nervous about someone staring at your pimple, but all they remember is your kind smile.

That is almost the one sentence version of this blog. Don't be so worried about your artistic pimples that you get too self-conscious for us to see your genuine smile. And that's not to say that colleges won't care at all about potential flaws. I mean, red flags like an attitude problem or being difficult to work with could certainly count against you, as could certain vocal, physical, or musical issues. Though, as we talked about before, when it comes to attitude, the vast majority of our students today do not have attitude issues when it comes to cockiness or defensiveness. More young students walk in with too much timidity for fear of not seeming humble, and that leads to too much meekness.

So my big advice for you, worry less about the possibility of a vocal crack, a line messed up, or whatever artistic flaw you're trying to hide from them, and worry more about the shot not taken. Worry about the audition where you didn't give it your 10 out of 10 for fear of failure, and so you achieved a safe six. Since I can't help but make a baseball analogy in basically all of these blogs, try to swing for the fences and let them see a really long foul ball or even a giant swing and a miss rather than a timid bunt down the third baseline. As an educator, I can work with a big swing and a miss where you end up smiling on your butt a lot more than I can someone who leaves the bat on their shoulder.

So share yourself, shoot your shot, take down the mask, and get fully in the game. I can't promise it'll be comfortable, but I promise with practice it'll get easier and it'll help you reach your full potential as an auditioner for this process and beyond. All right, I hope you enjoyed that audio blog, and please come back next week for some more summer break content, and we'll be back with season six in August. Until then, enjoy your summers.