Plaids Wanted

Oct 8 2016 | By Thom Dibdin More

Amateur casting call: Forever Plaid EdFringe 2017

New Edinburgh-based company Atina Arts has put out a casting call for male singers to perform in its Edinburgh fringe 2017 production of the revue: Forever Plaid.

The show features a fictional four-part harmony boy band, The Plaids, all groomed for stardom when they were tragically killed in a collision with a bus of Catholic schoolgirls on their way to see the Beatles’ first US date, recording for the Ed Sullivan Show.

The Plaids’ return, through a wormhole in time and the Ozone layer, finds them giving a revue performance of their vacuous sanitized-pop versions of such numbers as Three Coins in the Fountain, Cry, Perfidia and Scotland the Brave.

Written and originally directed and choreographed by Stuart Ross with musical continuity, supervision and arrangements by James Rait, the show premiered in 1989, going on to a three year off-Broadway run. It was filmed in 2007.

The new production will be staged at “a high profile city centre venue” during the Edinburgh fringe 2017 as the first production from Atina Arts, the company put together by writer and director Tony Delicata who was previously with Fife-based Kingdom Theatre.

Direction will come from Delacata, with Ross Hamilton down for MD. Hamilton is also MD on Balerno Theatre Company’s production of The Wizard of Oz at the Church Hill in November and Loretto Youth Players production of Summer Holiday at the Brunton next February.

The company is looking to audition professional and non-professional actors with vocal ranges of bass/baritone; baritone; and tenor, who have playing ages of 18 to 25 years. Although Atina Arts says it operates as a professional company, it adds: “this particular production is to be staged as a non-paid project”.