It’s 8am on a Sunday and the air has a stinging chill, as New York City mornings in mid-April so often do. Worse, a bag of trash is leaking its unknown contents into a pool of stagnant water next to the curb, the smell of which has been upsetting dozens of young women who camped out on the street overnight for a shot at fame.
They’re here for the open audition for Hairspray Live!, NBC’s latest live musical, which will air on 7 December. The leaking garbage evokes the Baltimore depicted by John Waters in the original 1988 Hairspray movie, about a teenage girl named Tracy Turnblad who racially integrates a dance show on local television during the 60s. Despite the stench, the hopefuls are undeterred, singing one of the musical’s signature songs, You Can’t Stop the Beat and doing the choreography to stay warm.
One girl is overheard saying, “I needed to go shopping to find a dress that would be flattering, but not too flattering.” It gets a knowing laugh. This is one of the few Broadway auditions that isn’t looking for tall, slender dancer types who can audition with the Dance Ten, Looks Three number from A Chorus Line. Tracy is short and plump, providing an opportunity for young actors from all over the country who don’t normally get a shot at such high-profile gigs. And today there are thousands of them.
A cab pulls up and out steps a young woman wearing a floral print dress with her hair piled high, just like many of the other wannabes in line. One of the girls at the front of the line tells her to walk the opposite way around the block to reach the end. The line stretches all the way down West 43rd Street in Manhattan, turns the corner up Ninth Avenue, and then stretches in the opposite direction all the way down West 44th Street – and the audition rooms haven’t even opened yet.
“It was very cold,” says Erin Walker from Point Roberts, Washington. She’s one of the first girls in line and she got there at 11pm the night before. “But a very sweet man who was holding a spot for his daughter lent me his sleeping bag and brought me tea, so I was very touched.” Walker, like many of the others, has played Tracy in a community theater production of Hairspray in her hometown.
She couldn’t afford the plane ticket to get here, so her friends started an Indiegogo campaign and she raised about $1,400 to make the cross-country flight. “Of course I feel some pressure, but that I’m here auditioning. Not to sound cliche but it’s a dream come true,” she says. “I think they’ll be happy that I tried at least.”
Photograph: Everett/REX Shutterstock
She has a right to be hopeful. This is actually the fourth incarnation of Tracy, first played by future talkshow host Ricki Lake in movie. Then there was the 2003 Broadway musical starring Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony for the role. Four years later, Nikki Blonsky was cast for the movie version of the musical at an open audition just like this one.
Bernard Telsey, the casting director who cast all of NBC’s previous live musicals as well as the original Broadway production of Hairspray, says that he found Shanice Williams, the star of The Wiz Live!, NBC’s last spectacular, at a similar open casting call.
“We’re going to cast someone from today,” Telsey says. The chosen one won’t find out today, but he feels that one of the girls standing out in the cold will also be standing in a soundstage performing the musical live this December. NBC announced on Monday that Harvey Fierstein will reprise his Broadway role of Edna, Tracy’s mother, and Jennifer Hudson will play DJ Motormouth Maybelle.
“I’m looking for a girl that has a lot of chutzpah,” Telsey says for the prerequisites for the perfect Tracy. “Someone who is going to walk in and have that glow that makes you want to pay attention, because that is what Tracy does within the show, she makes people pay attention to her against all odds. Then she has to be able to sing.”
All of the Tracys outside have prepared the beginning of Good Morning Baltimore, the musical’s opening number, which Telsey and his crew will hear hundreds of times throughout the day.
“I just practiced my audition piece and I got myself here,” says Amber Wilks, who took a 15-hour train ride from South Carolina. “I’m going to give it all I got, and I think that gives me a good chance.”
Amber is there with her friend who lives in New York and many of the other girls have plus ones, including lots of mothers and fathers trying to give their girls a big break. Hillary Hellerbach, herself from Baltimore, is here with her teenage daughter, Eva. Her husband waited in line overnight through the worst of the cold and Eva and her mom got there around 6am to finish the shift. “It’s a pretty intense thing,” Hellerbach says of the audition process, especially with a wait like this one. “More power to her, I don’t think I could do it. I know I couldn’t.”
Not everyone is as unsure of what is going to happen in that audition room. “I was born to be her. It’s my destiny,” says Summer Trotter, an 18-year-old pizza delivery driver from Elberton, Georgia. She says there is no way she’s not getting the role. But sadly for Trotter, the odds are stacked against her.
“It’s a chance for them to be seen,” says Telsey – and for the women who fit Tracy’s stats, getting seen isn’t always an easy thing. “We’re casting so many other Broadway shows and TV shows and movies. It’s a way to be seen and heard, I have to make the experience be about that rather than not getting the part.” At 9am the doors open and the line slowly makes its way inside. Someone eventually hauls off the garbage, and with all the hope and nervous energy in the air, the day is starting to get a bit brighter.
