YouTube Cons, Cautions and Kudos

MomCares
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:24:58 +0000

There were some interesting quotes about YouTube in an article that sjstxmom pointed to from another thread…

"YouTube, for instance, has become a go-to research tool on Broadway. A casting director for the hit musical “Billy Elliot” regularly hunts for talented children from their homemade videos on the site. The producers of the new musical “Sleepless in Seattle” added the songwriter Michelle Citrin to their creative team last year after seeing performance numbers that she posted to YouTube. And executives at Disney Theatrical Productions used YouTube to find and compile potential Ariels when “The Little Mermaid” was running.

“I ended up collecting 20 possible Ariels on my YouTube ‘Mermaid’ account, and then Disney executives around the country were able to log on and assess each of them,” said Jen Rudin, a former casting director with Disney Theatricals. That search yielded Megan Campanile, a college student from Cincinnati who ended up on Broadway as an ensemble performer and Ariel understudy in “Mermaid.”

For the musical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” last year the director James Lapine constructed a montage of “Send in the Clowns” partially from clips he found while browsing for talent on YouTube and Facebook."

Hopefuls Sing Out From Afar as Broadway Scouts Go Online - The New York Times;