Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
parent of child actor, June 27, 2002
This review is from: Audition Monologues: Power Pieces for Kids and Teens (Paperback)
Audition Monologues changed my daughters life. My 14 year old daughter has attended auditions on a regular basis for over 2 years (unsuccessfully). Finding the appropriate material that would allow her to demonstrate her skills was next to impossible. It simply didn't exist until now. We bought the book and began practicing on a nightly basis. While the monologues are brief and easy to deliver(under one minute), they are exciting and allow for artistic expression. Using these monologues, my daughters confidence soared. She was actually able to identify with the characters which gave an authenticity to her presentation that she previously lacked in auditions. Using these at auditions allowed her to demonstrate her full range of acting abilities. As a result, she landed the part in two of her last three auditions, the latest a speaking role in a national T.V. commercial. Audition Monologues made this possible. My daughter and I are grateful. I would reccomend it to anyone.
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49 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible! Totally inappropriate for kids!, December 3, 2005
This review is from: Audition Monologues: Power Pieces for Kids and Teens (Paperback)
I bought this book for my 13 year old son, who is interested in acting. I made the mistake of taking previous reviews at face value. The monologues in this book contain subject matter that is very adult and completely inappropriate for young teens.
For example, one monologue is titled, "My Mother is Gay". Another is a teen girl talking about how her boyfriend is pressuring her to have sex. In a different one a girl talks about how she did have sex with her boyfriend. Another one is about a teen girl talking about how she has AIDS. Still another is about a boy from a large family, where the mother is pregnant again and the father wants to give away the new baby when it arrives. A really disturbing one talks about "cleaning" a cat by putting into the toilet with shampoo, closing the lid, and then flushing. The words cr*p, scr*w, and a** are sprinkled throughout the text.
If you want your teen exposed to the seedy side of life, this is the book for you. If you want your child discussing topics of an extremely adult nature, go for it. Otherwise find different material. We ended up purchasing "Great Monologues for Young Actors" (I and II), which has many familiar, classic plays and much more appropriate subject matter.
I don't know what this author was thinking. Surely she could come up with topics to discuss that didn't include non-stop sex, drugs, alcoholism, homosexuality, aniaml cruelty, and so forth.
Horrible, simply horrible book. I returned it to Amazon.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Horrible Audition Monologue book, March 24, 2007
A Kid's Review
This review is from: Audition Monologues: Power Pieces for Kids and Teens (Paperback)
The monologues in this book are bad. I am a winner of a number of Dramatic Interpretation sections of speech competitions and a young actor. I have no use for monologues like the ones in this book. They are not "power pieces". They are, with few exceptions, "let us display the most shocking and outrageous things that teens might get into, or that adults seem to think teens are always getting into" pieces. There is no art that one can bring to these monologues. I would also, in fact, warn people away from any acting class that would use a book like this. If I were to take an acting class, I would take it to learn how I could show the development of a character through a monologue, not how to be able to recite a one minute piece that doesn't allow for any development and does not even really exist in the context of a play.
Let us compare two monologues. The first one is one of my favorites, from St. Joan by Bernard Shaw, when the protagonist refuses to accept perpetual imprisonment over being burnt at stake. The second is titled something like, "My mother is gay" from Audition Monologues: Power Pieces for Kids and Teens. The first can be played in many different ways. My favorite way to start it is in anger. Joan has believed that she it to be let free, she is being disillusioned, and is angry at her captors. The only way to start "my mother is gay" is by being ashamed about something while talking to a friend. Back to St. Joan, I usually take the anger into sadness. If she is imprisoned forever, she will have to give up all that she loves. With "my mother is gay" the only way you can go is to continue to play the embarrased-about-something teen. Finally, I would end the St. Joan monologue with resolve. She knows what she must do, and why she has to do it, and the monologue has brought us to this conclusion. The end of "my mother is gay" comes with an 'amazing' realization. The only way to play this part of "my mother is gay" is by still being ashamed. The realization that you bring the audience to is the fact that he is ashamed that his mother is gay. Note, though, that it is hard to understand different parts of "my mother is gay" for a couple of reasons. The first is that there is only one thing being portrayed. The second is that the monologue is so short, it is hard to tell if there is a beginning or an end. The third reason is that the monologue is badly written, so how can you expect different parts to it?
If you are at all serious in any way about doing audition monologues, or intend to become serious at any point with monologues, stay away from this book. Instead, do one of a few things. 1) find a resource book that lists a large numbers of monologues, characters, and identities, and use that resource book to find the plays that the monologues you have chosen come out of. Then read those plays and actually understand the importance of the monologue to the action, and why the monologue is so important. Or you can 2) actually find some good monologue books, my absolute favorite (for teens) being Great Monologues for Young Actors, edited by Craig Slaight and Jack Sharrar.
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