Lena Hall

The Art of the Audition: From Falling Apart to Nailing the Part

Café Carlyle, NYC, March 13, 2018

Reviewed by Elizabeth Ahlfors for Cabaret Scenes

Said Lena Hall in her new Café Carlyle show, The Art of the Audition: From Falling Apart to Nailing the Part, “It’s so hard to sing when you can’t take yourself seriously.”

Watching her recount the frustrating, hilarious, humiliating experiences with auditions, Hall (Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal) obviously takes her singing very seriously, trying since age eight to find out just where and how she fits on the stage. Her teenage dream was to be the sexy vamp and she delivers plenty of funny moments with self-deprecating comments and her yearning for a lusty role of the bad girl.
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  Years of auditions, however, showed her that the vixen part was never hers, although in audition, she belted the oomph out of A Chorus Line’s “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three.” 

Nor was she handed the ingenue roles, although she was earthy and compelling with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “Out of a Dream” (Oklahoma!). Growing up with parents active in the opera world, she studied ballet and opera. She included here a segment called “Soprano Moments: For Mom” (who was in the audience), evoking her coloratura soprano side as Queen of the Night singing “Der Hölle Rache” from Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by W.A. Mozart and Emmanuel Schicknader. 

Hall immerses herself in her music with a variety of theater classics, killing us softly with “Losing My Mind” by Stephen Sondheim, who also wrote her pull-out-the-stops rendition of “Broadway Baby.” In a tongue-in-cheek “The Idina Menzel Corner,” she includes Wicked‘s “I’m Not That Girl” (Stephen Schwartz) and Legally Blonde’s wake-up moment in “So Much Better” (Larry O’Keefe/Nell Benjamin). Here, she lowers her tone and finds a bit of grit that she uses with her rock band, The Deafening. With acute microphone training, she delivers precise lyrics and no shrieking, and her show ends splendidly with the soaring heights and low growls of Andrew Lloyd Webber/Trevor Nunn’s “Memory” (Cats).

The high point of this exceptional show is her audition for the Tony Award-winning role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She was then performing in Kinky Boots and, between shows, dressed as a man since she was going in for the role of Yitzhak, she ran to the audition. Told to improvise a back story for Yitzhak, Hall delivered a creative one-act tale, convoluted, wacky and, take my advice, don’t miss it on YouTube.

Dressed in a runway-worthy glam crimson velvet gown, Hall is outgoing, earthy, and laughs a lot.
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She is accompanied by the talented Brian Nash on piano and, telling her story,  they prove that there’s no business like show business.