Finding and Casting the Talent
Anatomy of a Revue, Part 5: Building a Company Without a Script
In a book musical, casting is matching. You have a character — age, voice type, look, personality — and you find the performer who fits. The script tells you what you need. The audition tells you who has it. The process is a lock and a key.
In a revue, there is no lock. There is no character to match. There are no sides to read, no scenes to inhabit, no arc to sustain across two acts. There is only this: an evening that needs to be populated by people who are each, individually, worth the price of admission.
That is a completely different problem. And it requires a completely different way of seeing.
What You're Looking For
I auditioned thousands of performers across thirty-five years. Singers, dancers, comedians, acrobats, mime artists, monologists, impressionists, specialty acts I couldn't categorize and didn't try to. I saw them all. And I was looking for exactly one thing.
I was looking for the person the audience cannot stop watching.
Not the most talented. Not the most trained. Not the most beautiful or the funniest or the one with the biggest voice. The one the eye goes to. The one who walks onstage and changes the temperature in the room. The one who makes the air different.
You cannot teach this. You cannot train it. You can develop it, shape it, give it better material and better light. But the fundamental quality — that magnetic draw, that gravitational pull on the audience's attention — is either there or it isn't. And a revue director must be able to see it in thirty seconds, because that's how long you have at an audition before you know.
Eartha Kitt had it the moment she walked in the door. She hadn't sung a note. She hadn't said her name. She walked in and the room tilted toward her. I turned to my stage manager and said, "I don't know what she does yet, but she's in the show." That was the audition. Everything else was details.
Paul Lynde had it differently — not with his body but with his voice. The first sentence out of his mouth and you were listening. Not because it was funny, although it was. Because it was specific. He had a point of view that was so precise, so entirely his own, that you couldn't imagine anyone else occupying that space on the stage. That's what presence is in a comedian: specificity so total that they become irreplaceable.
Alice Ghostley had it in the opposite way — she seemed to disappear, to shrink, and somehow that shrinking made her the most visible person in the room. The audience leaned in. They wanted to protect her. And then she'd hit you with a line reading so dry and devastating that you realized the shrinking was the setup and you'd been played. Brilliantly.
Three performers. Three completely different kinds of magnetism. All in the same show. That is what a revue requires.
The Company as Palette
Raoul just wrote about color plotting — how the designer plans an evening as a single composition, with a tonal center and departures and returns. The director does the same thing with people.
A revue company is a palette. Each performer is a color — a specific energy, a specific quality of attention, a specific thing they do to the audience when they walk onstage. And the director's job is to assemble a palette that has range.
This is the mistake most people make when they think about casting a revue: they look for the best performers. They want a company of stars. Twelve brilliant people, each one a headliner.
That is a disaster.
Twelve headliners have twelve enormous egos and twelve competing energies, and the evening becomes a fight for dominance that the audience can feel even if no one throws a punch. Worse, twelve people who all do the same thing to the audience — who all command attention in the same way — create the same problem as Raoul's twelve red numbers. The audience goes numb. Star fatigue is color fatigue, applied to people.
What you want is contrast. A company that has range. A powerhouse belter AND a singer so quiet you have to lean in to hear her. A physical comedian AND a verbal one. A dancer who fills the stage with motion AND a performer who can hold an audience still with a look. A veteran who commands authority AND a newcomer whose freshness makes the audience feel they're discovering something.
In New Faces of 1952, I had Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Robert Clary, Alice Ghostley, Carol Lawrence, and Ronny Graham. Each one was extraordinary. But — and this is the point — each one was extraordinary in a DIFFERENT WAY. Kitt was heat. Lynde was acid. Clary was charm. Ghostley was surprise. Lawrence was elegance. Graham was nerve. No two of them occupied the same space on the stage or the same space in the audience's heart. They were six different colors, and together they made an evening that could go anywhere.
That's what I mean by the company as palette. You're not collecting talent. You're composing it.
How to Audition for a Revue
Forget the standard audition. Sixteen bars and a monologue will tell you whether someone can sing and act. They will tell you almost nothing about whether someone can hold a stage alone in a revue.
Here is what I did:
Let them choose their material. Don't assign sides. Don't give them a song from the show — there are no characters to prepare for. Let them bring what they believe is their best material, their showcase piece, the thing they do that nobody else does. What they choose tells you as much as how they perform it. A performer who brings a safe audition piece is a performer who will give you a safe performance. A performer who brings something risky, personal, specific — that's someone who knows who they are on a stage.
Watch the first ten seconds. Before they sing, before they speak — watch how they take the stage. Do they own it? Do they apologize for it? Do they fill it or shrink from it? The first ten seconds tell you about their relationship with the audience, and in a revue, the relationship with the audience is everything. A book musical performer can hide behind a character. A revue performer stands alone. They must be comfortable being looked at, comfortable being the only reason two thousand people are in the room. You can see this in the walk from the wings to center stage. You can see it before a word is spoken.
Give them something unexpected. After their prepared piece, throw them a curveball. Ask them to do it again in a different style. Ask them to tell you a story. Give them a prop and see what they do with it. The prepared piece shows you their ceiling. The unexpected moment shows you their floor — how they handle surprise, discomfort, the unknown. In a revue, things go wrong every night. Numbers get cut during previews. New material arrives at 4 PM for an 8 PM show. You need performers who can absorb surprise without panic, who find opportunity in disruption. The curveball reveals this.
Watch them with other people. Have them do something — anything — with another auditioner. A thirty-second improvisation. A song together. A bit of physical business. A revue is an ensemble, and ensemble means chemistry. Not romantic chemistry — stage chemistry. The ability to listen, to adjust, to share focus, to make the other person look good. A solo star who cannot share the stage is useless in a revue because the company numbers, the crossovers, the finales — the architecture of the evening — require generosity. Selfishness on a revue stage is visible from the back row.
The Star Problem
Every producer wants a star. A name. Someone who sells tickets by existing on the marquee. And stars can be magnificent in a revue — Bea Lillie, Bert Lahr, Bobby Clark, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Danny Kaye. These were revue performers of the highest order.
But a star changes the ecology of a company. The evening tilts toward them. The other performers become supporting players — not by design, but by gravity. The audience came to see the star, and the star knows it, and the other performers know it, and the dynamic shifts.
This can work beautifully if the star is generous — if they understand that their power is greatest when they share the stage willingly, when they make the company better by their presence rather than diminishing it by their dominance. Bea Lillie understood this. She would underplay a sketch with a newcomer, giving them the big laughs, knowing that the audience's affection for her grew every time she was generous. She made herself bigger by making herself smaller. That is star quality in a revue.
It fails when the star treats the revue as a vehicle — a setting for their talent rather than an evening they are part of. I worked with performers — I won't name them, though some of you will guess — who wanted every number built around them, every transition designed to serve their entrance, every other performer positioned as a frame for their portrait. This is death for a revue. An evening of variety cannot be a one-person show. If the audience sees the same face in every number, it is no longer variety. It is a concert. And a concert is a different form with different rules.
The Discovery
Here is the secret joy of casting a revue, the thing that kept me doing it for thirty-five years:
The revue is where careers begin.
New Faces of 1934 introduced Imogene Coca. New Faces of 1952 introduced Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Robert Clary, and Carol Lawrence. The revue format — where every performer gets their own number, their own spotlight, their own three minutes to be extraordinary — is the greatest talent showcase ever devised. Better than a variety show, because the program is curated. Better than a nightclub, because the stage is a stage. Better than an audition, because the audience is real and the stakes are real and the performer must deliver.
I loved casting unknowns. Not because I was generous — though I like to think I was — but because unknowns brought something a name never could: surprise. The audience didn't know what they were about to see. No reputation preceded the performer. No expectation shaped the reception. Just a person, a spotlight, and three minutes. If they were extraordinary, the audience discovered them in real time, and that discovery — that shared gasp of recognition, who IS this? — was the most exciting thing a revue could offer.
Every revue director should be looking for the unknown. The person nobody's heard of who walks in and changes the room. They're out there. They're always out there. The revue is the form that finds them, gives them a stage, and lets the audience fall in love.
Building the Program Around the Company
Once the company is cast, the programming changes. Murray the programmer and Murray the casting director are the same person, and the running order must now serve the people in it.
This means going back to the index cards — which now have names on them — and asking: where does each performer land hardest? What is the ideal slot for this person's specific energy? Who should the audience see first? Who should they be craving by the time they appear?
There is an art to delayed entrance. If you have a performer the audience is dying to see — maybe they saw her in the opening number and she was magnetic, and now they're waiting for her solo — make them wait. Let two or three numbers pass. Build the anticipation. When she finally appears, the audience greets her like a friend they've been missing. That reception — that warmth — is something you designed. You created it by withholding. The program created the desire, and the performer fulfilled it.
Protect your performers. Give each one the slot where their specific magic works best. Don't put the quiet singer after the blockbuster. Don't put the subtle comedian first when the audience is still rustling programs. Don't put the newcomer in the spot where only a veteran could survive. Every performer has a sweet spot — a moment in the evening where the audience is perfectly primed to receive what they do. Finding that spot is the director's job. Getting it right is the director's art.
What Talent Gives You
The program is the architecture. The light is the narrative. The color is the composition. But the talent is the life. Without the right people — the right combination of energies, the right palette of personalities, the right balance of power and vulnerability, star quality and ensemble spirit — all the craft in the world produces a beautiful empty room.
A revue, more than any other form, is about the human being on the stage. No character to hide behind. No story to carry them through a weak moment. Just a person and an audience, in the same room, breathing the same air.
Find the people who make the air worth breathing. Then build the evening around them.
This is Part 5 of "The Anatomy of a Revue," a ten-part series by John Murray Anderson and Raoul Pène du Bois. Previous: Raoul on color plotting across an evening. Next: Raoul on costume as spectacle.