"I really need this job. I've got to get this show."
—From A Chorus Line
By 9 a.m., when the auditions start, there are hundreds of people standing in the drizzle outside Broadway's Royale Theater. By midday, as the skies clear, the line has grown to perhaps 1,000. They wait for hours for the chance to spend, in most cases, scant minutes standing onstage before being rejected and hastened out the door. A few are on a lark, and some may be on a mystical private trip: one young woman wears a lifelike head-to-toe bear costume, which she refuses to take off even to dance. But most are serious of purpose, and many are attractive and talented. In all, some 2,000 would-be performers are shuffled through, and 300 are called back for further auditions; eventually, perhaps one or two will be cast. Yet even the losers, as they come blinking into the sunlight, say it has been worthwhile, and they use almost identical words. "You never get anything," explains a dancer-typist, "unless you try."
It may be the most passionate American dream, more nearly universal than finding the streets paved with gold or hearing the crowd cheering the winning touchdown or even taking the oath of office, hand on the Bible: the vision of being discovered and thrust into instant movie stardom. In much publicized myth, it can happen at a soda counter. But it happens most often to people who work at it, begging for appointments to plead for the privilege of being allowed to audition so that they can then risk being "typed out"—excluded because they have "the wrong look"—after a glance from a casting director. In life, humiliation and disappointment wear actors out; in show-business legend, the defeated heroes are inspired to fight anew.
Most people who struggle for stardom live in New York or California. Even the giddiest know they have little chance of being discovered in a drugstore in Manhattan, Kans., or a restaurant in Los Angeles, Texas. They scour the trade newspapers for notices of auditions. The more fortunate have union memberships that get them past guarded doors. The rest try to fib their way in or, if less bold, wait for "open calls." Known as "cattle calls," they may be publicity stunts. But for an unknown, they may be the only hope.