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Characters & Groups in the Director Tools

Daniel Fowler (Admin) • 4 min

In this director tool you will find:

Character List

Also called "available roles", this tool gives directors a place to list the available roles in a production and write a brief description of each. Doing this helps set appropriate expectations for auditionees and also later serves as a list of cast credits in the playbill.

With a predefined list of characters, multiple cast members can be assigned the same role on the cast list and then on the rehearsal schedule, a director can select a single role to easily mark all assigned performers as attendees.

Since directors are able to assign multiple roles to individual cast members, each role only needs to appear on the character list one time. The cast list provides space to enter a custom role for each cast member to clarify anything unique about their assignment (e.g. differentiating dual cast or understudies). As such, there is no need for such designations on the character list.

Pro Tip: Listing too many characters can negatively impact the performance of other director tools, so you might also leave out minor parts that could be assigned as as custom role or on the fly at rehearsals.

Rehearsal Groups

Groups function similarly to characters with regard to rehearsal attendee tagging, but they do not have an impact on playbill's cast credits. Directors can pre-assign groups for characters before starting the cast list to expedite some tagging, which can become tedious during casting.

Crew can also be organized into groups but cannot be tagged for any roles from the character list.

In some specific use cases, it makes sense to duplicate a role as a group. For example, when producing Beauty and the Beast a director might want a group called "Enchanted Castle Ensemble" and another called "Villagers". It would make sense to have a role/character by the same name so that the playbill recognizes the performers in each group separately instead of a single "Ensemble"

Pro Tip: When defining groups, think about the subsets of your cast and crew who will need to attend rehearsals together frequently. It's not necessary to create a group for every two or three person pairing, since having too many groups can be counterproductive later on.

Pro Tip: Try and keep group names short but easily recognizable. When tagging a group in chat or rehearsal notes later on, you will be glad for shorter group names.

Importing Characters & Groups

Before you put a lot of work into your character list and groups, check the list of past shows to see if another director has used a character list and group roster that is similar to yours. Even if not exact, borrowing a template from another show can really speed up your productivity.