Black Books by Blak Yak

I understand where you're coming from Daniel; it can be very hard to get people to audition for a show where the three main roles are cast. What happened was this; Blak Yak wanted to do a season of TV comedies presented on the stage. The original idea was one episode each of Red Dwarf, Coupling and Black Books. I tried for months to get the rights but failed to do so prior to the auditions for the one act season. As a result, we auditioned Coupling and Red Dwarf with Black Books in mind. In the end, we got the rights, but too late to be able to produce anything decent in time for the season. This is a decision, which I made (as I was intending to direct) after informing the actors that they were cast. So, when we got the go ahead to do a full-length production of Black Books this year, we went with the actors who had been cast last year. That being said, there are some fantastic roles available and I think people would be doing themselves a disservice by not auditioning because they can't read for the leads :) As for the British sit-com thing, we do tend to do a lot of them, yes (Red Dwarf, Coupling and Men Behaving Badly) but we also do a lot of other kinds of plays (check out http://www.blakyak.uniting.com.au/showlist.html). It's just that our adaptations from other mediums (books, film and TV) seem to be very popular. They also carry with them different challenges and tend to be a lot of fun for the casts and crew. Of course, anyone wanting to bring something new is always welcome . . .