Audition & Casting Policies & Procedures

It is the educational objective of Peacock Players that all auditions be conducted in a professional manner consistent with Peacock Players’ mission to create theatre that entertains, educates, and inspires our community, and to offer theatre arts educational programs that encourage, enlighten, and challenge our students.

Types of Mainstage Productions

Peacock Players provides year-round theatre for students of all ages. In our desire to provide a fair and balanced amount of educational opportunities for all participants, Peacock Players currently offers four different types of Mainstage productions: Youth Productions for ages 6-14, Teen Productions for ages 14-18, Crossover Productions for ages 6-18, and Peacock Players & Company Productions for all ages – including our alumni, family members, and community theatre adults.

Professional Selection

Peacock Players is deeply committed to fair, unbiased, casting procedures, and takes great pride in providing selective casting to better educate and prepare our students to the realities of professional theatre. Not every person that auditions is cast, however we hold strongly to the belief that each and every audition opportunity is an honest educational experience – whatever the result. This type of professional audition process benefits the individual artist and their ability to accept and learn from each audition, whether the student is a career-bound artist or a recreational theatre enthusiast.

Equal Opportunity Casting

Peacock Players is genuinely committed to providing equal opportunity and nondiscrimination in all aspects of our academic and production programming. With exception to productions where race or gender is required to serve that specific story, casting is always decided to ensure our productions are of the highest quality and artistic integrity.

Open Auditions

Peacock Players adheres to a policy of open casting; that is, each Production Team (Director, Musical Director, Choreographer) casts the students with the talents and qualities appropriate for a given role regardless of that student’s age, year in school, ethnicity, or gender. Pedagogical objectives are always considered in an attempt to provide individualized theatre arts training, but there is no correlation between traditional school-based class hierarchy and the casting experience.

Casting Evaluations

Casting of actors is carefully evaluated on the basis of the individual acting, singing, and dancing skills demonstrated during the audition process; as well as on the actor’s appropriateness and suitability for the specific roles required to serve each project. We carefully evaluate the following factors when casting:

  • Vocal instrument and technique
  • Facility to produce quality sound, projection, and diction
  • Ability to match pitch and rhythm
  • Vocal health
  • Emotional accessibility and vulnerability
  • Talent
  • Passion
  • Training
  • Experience
  • Potential
  • Availability
  • Commitment
  • Audition preparedness
  • Intelligence
  • Expression
  • Originality
  • Reliability
  • Willingness and ability to take direction

Guest Artists

On occasion, Peacock Players may engage the use of a Guest or Resident Artist for a role in a production that might not be selected otherwise from the student talent pool. The use of these Guest Artists provides our students the educational opportunity to work alongside gifted professionals and accomplished theatre artists.

Mainstage Debuts

Peacock Players is proud to acknowledge that we are an ever-growing family of young theatre artists – with several opportunities throughout the year for new participants. We are proud to acknowledge that every Mainstage production yields a number of new players to our stage. We strongly encourage new talent to audition at Peacock Players.