Photo Credit: Randy Le’Moine via cc
Casting Directors auditioning actors for Musical Theatre often hear the same songs over and over again. Are they bored of those songs? Sometimes. However these songs are often sung time and time again at castings because they are great to show off acting and vocal skills and they become the perfect musical theatre audition song.
With the internet it has become so much easier for people to get access to scores through sheet music download sites and also naughty bootleg sharing sites. Forums are allowing people to share hot tips and new favourites and Youtube makes searching for audition material much easier. It can be wise to try and find something new, something people are going to be surprised with, but often the favourites are the best. The casting director finds it easy to quickly compare you with others and the accompanist will know how to play the song!
The following are popular audition songs because they work for people, they are story songs, they are able to stand on their own and allow you to show off your singing to its best but also, which is so important and often overlooked when auditioning for musical theatre, these songs allow you to show off your acting skills too.
Audition Songs for Women (with videos):
Here is a list of five current popular audition songs for women.
Click on title to view the video
Click on image to buy from Amazon
Click on title to view the video
Click on image to buy from Amazon
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My White Knight (click to view video)
The Music Man
My White Knight is from The Music Man and is a classic ‘dreamer’ songSung by librarian Marian Paroo near the end of Act One. She is being wooed by con man ‘Professor’ Harold Hill, but she will have nothing to do with him. In the song she sings of her ideal man and why she is not interested in Harold.A lovely song full of character and emotion. The song needs to be played and sung with innocence and truth and it can be a real heartbreaker. -
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How To Return Home (click to view video)
Tales From The Bad Years
This beautiful song is taken from the musical Tales From The Bad Years by contemporary musical theatre writers Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk.The show is about a group of acquaintances and strangers who are entering their twenties with great expectations. Over the show they connect, meet, argue, fall in love and collide with each other until they start to grow up and realise that the bad years make the best stories.The song is about the mixed emotions felt when you have to return to your family home after you feel you have ‘failed’. This is surely a feeling that we have all experienced at some point in our lives.The song can be powered out and you can choose to give it some real belt moments, or you could keep all the emotions controlled and play it much smaller and really try to internalise the emotional content and give a more ‘real’ performance than you often see in musical theatre.“The house is pulsing with an alien heartbeat, Was it always here but you never listened?
It’s calling you to be the girl that you were way back then… again.” -
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If My Friends Could See Me Now (click to view video)
Sweet Charity
The 1966 Broadway show Sweet Charity is one of my favourites musicals and the character of Charity is such a beautiful and complex character I think it is a perfect choice for an audition as it gives you lots of scope to show off your acting.The show is all about the fortunes and misfortunes, the romantic ups and downs of an ever-hopeful prostitute called Charity Valentine.Charity has ended up back at the apartment of the film star Vittorio Vidal. Charity is starstruck she sings this song whilst he is out of the room fetching her some old movie props which she can have to prove to her friends that she was actually there!Charity is full of heart, wit, humour and honesty. The song is a reflection on her charmed life and is full of fun lyrics and Charity’s quirky character which makes it a joy to perform. -
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Loving You (click to view video)
Passion
Passion is a wonderful Sondheim musical adapted from an italian film Passione D’Amore. It explores the theme of love also touching on obsession, beauty, sex, power and manipulation.‘Loving You’ is a beautiful song sung by the ailing and plain Fosca who has fallen in love with the young soldier Georgio. He does not love her and pleads with her to give him up and with this song she explains that hers is not a love she is able to ‘give up’. Her love is not a choice, it is who she is, all she is, and she would gladly die for him.‘This is why I live, You are why I live’ -
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There Won’t Be Trumpets (click to view video)
Anyone Can WhistleAnyone Can Whistle is set in an imaginary town which has gone bankrupt. The only place which is doing well is the local sanatorium, known as ‘The Cookie Jar’.The town’s council, in the hope of the tourist dollars it will bring to the town, declare a rock with a spring of water coming from it to be a holy miracle – capable of curing the ill. Fay Apple, a young sceptical nurse doesn’t believe in miracles and has brought all 49 of her inmates from the Cookie Jar to the spring to see its holy powers for herself.The inmates escape and Fay goes into hiding and hopes for a miracle herself, a hero who will deliver the town from its madness.“Those smug little men with their smug little schemes They forgot one thing: The play isn’t over by a long shot yet!” -
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