the day to day of a professional actor in the San Francisco Bay Area

mostly the day to day of a professional actor in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also the home of the Counting Actors Project

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Counting Actors - special RIII edition

The results for October will be up next week sometime (so you can still report on shows today or tomorrow - would love to get stats for Honey Brown Eyes, How to Write a New Book for the Bible and more south bay/peninsula shows up in here).

I'm listing Richard III separately, and here's why.  It's a national tour.  It didn't do any hiring/casting here, and didn't rehearse here. Local/non-local hiring is pretty much a non-issue for things like this or the recent tour of Billy Elliot and current tour of Hair. 

Ray Renati sent stats for Richard III, the first stats I'd gotten for one of the big touring shows, and I thought about it, and realized that if what the Counting Actors project is about is looking at who gets local jobs, men or women, union actors or non-union actors, local hires or non-local, then counting tours doesn't make sense.  So I've added that info on the Counting Actors page.

Before I get to the stats, a quick digression.  I've been asked about why I'm not looking at ethnicity of actors, writers and directors as part of Counting Actors.  My original answer was that I wanted to keep things simple, and take on a project I could manage.  I'd love to see tracking of who gets the stage management, design, and crew positions on top of adding ethnicity to the mix.  It seemed not only like more than one person could handle, but that counting ethnicity requires self-identification, not an outside eye saying 'this person is Asian, that person is African-American, etc.'  I feel uncomfortable looking at others and putting labels on them, and in asking those who are reporting to do the same.  I do hope that someday the tracking that is happening in the Counting Actors project will get taken over by an organization with the bandwidth to handle following all of these variables, and more - age, people w/disabilities, etc.

And now, the RIII stats.

Richard III/The Bridge Project
Male Director, Male Writer
27 actors: 6 female, 21 male
All union, all non local.
Notes: the cast was made up of American and British actors, so while all were union, 15 were members of AEA, and 12 were members of BAEA(British Equity).  Two male characters, the adolescent princes Young Edward and Young Richard, were played by adult women.

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