How to Audition for Summer Stock Theater

It’s the middle of winter, and audition notices for next summer are already closing. A playhouse in the mountains might want a headshot, a resume, two contrasting song cuts, a monologue, and a dance reel by mid-February. A Shakespeare festival might want two speeches, one in verse. A combined audition might want a video before it will even give you a slot.

Summer stock moves early and fast, and it rewards the actors who understand the job before they apply. You’re not auditioning for one role. You’re auditioning to be useful for a whole season.

The short version: summer stock means several shows in a few months, with the company rehearsing one show while performing another. Companies hire through combined auditions, their own submissions and campus tours, and union calls. Read each season before you pick material, send a clean video package early, read the contract carefully, and plan from day one how you’ll learn a summer’s worth of lines.

Know what summer stock asks of you

Summer stock is old. Wikipedia’s history of summer stock traces it to the Elitch Theatre in Denver in the 1890s. It grew into a “straw hat circuit” of summer theaters, many in New England, that peaked between the 1920s and 1960s. Colleen Dewhurst remembered it as ten plays in ten weeks, from June until Labor Day.

The pace is still the point. American Theatre’s 2025 report on summer stock describes professional theaters that usually run from early to late summer, with repertory companies that rehearse and perform at the same time. You might spend the day in rehearsal for the next show and the evening performing the current one.

In a company like that, it helps to be someone who can hold several roles in your head, take a note once, and arrive at the first rehearsal of show three with the lines already started. Your audition is the first chance to show it.

Find the auditions: three ways in

American Theatre’s report lists the main routes performers use today: combined audition conferences, direct submissions, Equity Principal Auditions, and college showcases. Below are the three you can act on yourself, and you can use more than one.

Combined auditions

A combined (or unified) audition puts you in front of many companies at once. The big ones the report names are SETC, UPTA, and the A1 Conference, and they charge a fee and usually need a video or in-person screening first. New Mexico State University’s theater department keeps a guide to summer theater opportunities that also covers NETC in Natick, Massachusetts, open to non-Equity actors and Equity membership candidates 18 and older, and MidWest Theatre Auditions in St. Louis.

One old route is gone. American Theatre reports that StrawHat Auditions, long a fixture for summer hiring, no longer operates after the pandemic. If an older article tells you to plan around it, that advice is out of date. Our guide to unified theatre auditions covers how to build a package for these events.

Direct submissions and campus tours

Many companies cast their own resident company. Timber Lake Playhouse in Illinois, for its 2026 resident acting company, took virtual submissions reviewed on a rolling basis and also held in-person auditions on a tour of college campuses in January and February. The Forestburgh Playhouse in New York did the same, with college tours or a virtual submission.

Rolling review matters. When a company reads submissions as they arrive, the early ones are read while more slots are still open. Timber Lake’s page encourages early submission for exactly that reason.

Union calls

If you’re an Equity member, some stock companies also hold Equity Principal Auditions, and American Theatre notes they’re often held in person. Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre’s 2025 New York call drew nearly 500 people for five-minute slots. Our guide to Equity Principal Auditions explains how they work.

Expect competition. At Creede Repertory Theatre, for example, the same report says the company now screens 600 to 700 submissions, up from about 200 to 300 before 2020.

Read the season before you choose your material

The fastest way to stand out is to look like you belong in this company’s summer. Most notices name the season, or at least its style, and the material they ask for follows from that.

A musical season means you sing and move. Timber Lake and Forestburgh both said plainly that non-singers and non-dancers could not be considered. Timber Lake asked for a short song that reflects the season’s programming, and Forestburgh asked for two contrasting 16-bar cuts, a brief monologue, and a dance reel. Our guide to cutting 16 bars covers how to make a cut a pianist can follow.

A classical season asks for something else. The Texas Shakespeare Festival’s 2027 company notice asks for two Shakespeare monologues, one in verse, plus 32 bars of a musical-theater song in the style of, or from, Bright Star. That’s a festival telling you exactly what it needs: actors who can handle verse and also sing.

If you need a verse speech, start with one that’s short, clear, and active. Viola’s ring speech from Twelfth Night opens with a question she’s trying to answer in real time:

VIOLA: I left no ring with her: what means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
She made good view of me; indeed, so much,
That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue,

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2 (public domain)

You can find more speeches like it among our Shakespeare monologues, and read the full text of Twelfth Night to learn where the speech sits in the play.

Send a video package that’s easy to say yes to

For many direct submissions, the video is the audition. Treat the technical rules as part of the material, because a submission nobody can open is a submission nobody watches.

• Send a link, not a file. Timber Lake said large video files would not be downloaded or reviewed.
• Follow the format exactly. Texas Shakespeare prefers a YouTube or Vimeo link, asks that if one monologue is filmed in close-up the other is full-body, and does not accept clips from performances or reels.
• Include what each company lists, and nothing it didn’t ask for. A typical package is a headshot, a resume, the songs, a monologue, and a dance reel, but the list changes from notice to notice.
• Make every piece the length requested. Time every cut, so a long one doesn’t get stopped halfway.

Record your pieces only once they’re solid. A video freezes the performance, so if you’re still reaching for words, it shows. Our guide to self-taping alone covers framing, sound, and light at home.

Know what the contract really includes

Summer stock contracts often pay a salary and include housing and some meals, and the details vary a lot from company to company. Read each offer as closely as you read the notice.

The 2026 notices show the range. Forestburgh’s resident company ran from June to August, included shared housing, three meals a day, and a travel stipend, and required a commitment to the full contract. Timber Lake’s contracts covered three to five productions, with free shared housing and two meals a day, and promised each member at least one featured role.

The job is often more than the mainstage. Forestburgh’s resident actors also performed in cabarets and a theater-for-young-audiences show, and the page says plainly that resident actors are not interns or apprentices. Timber Lake’s members also took part in pre-show cabarets and summer social media and marketing events. Ask what’s expected beyond rehearsal and performance before you sign.

Watch the costs, too. Combined auditions charge fees, and American Theatre quotes one actor who refuses to pay to audition: “I don’t want to pay to have a job.” Whether a fee is worth it depends on how many companies you’ll be seen by and how many of them could hire you.

Plan to learn a summer of lines

Here’s the part that’s easy to forget while you’re auditioning. Once you’re cast, you may get only a short rehearsal for each show, and in a rehearse-by-day, perform-by-night company, you’re learning the next script while the current one has to stay sharp every night.

The good news is that one of the best-tested ways to learn is also simple. In Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke’s 2006 memory study, students who tested themselves on a passage remembered more a week later than students who kept rereading it. For actors, testing means covering your lines and saying them from the cue.

So ask for every script as soon as you’re cast, and start with the show that opens first and the biggest role you have. Upload each script to Offbook, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character and wait for your line. For a full-length play, the page picker splits a long script into scenes, so you can work on one scene at a time.

Between rehearsals, keep the show you’re performing alive without a full run. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and on your phone you can listen to your scenes anywhere, with your own lines spoken, skipped, or left as silent gaps for you to fill in your head. A few minutes on a walk to the theater can be enough to catch a line that’s starting to drift.

Our guide to learning lines in a short rehearsal period has a day-by-day plan for the shortest processes.

A summer stock timeline

• In the fall, make a list of companies whose seasons fit you, and note each one’s deadline and the material it asks for.
• By early winter, record your songs, monologues, and dance reel, so you’re ready when notices open.
• In winter, submit early to companies that review on a rolling basis, and apply to the combined auditions you’ll attend.
• If your school is on a company’s campus tour (Timber Lake and Forestburgh both toured in January and February), sign up.
• When an offer comes, read the dates, pay, housing, meals, and extra duties before you accept.
• As soon as you’re cast, ask for every script and start learning the first show.

Questions actors ask

What is summer stock theater?

A theater or company that produces several shows over the summer, usually with a resident company that rehearses one show while performing another. Casts are often students and early-career actors, and many of the companies above provide housing.

Do I need to sing for summer stock?

For a musical season, usually yes: some companies say they can’t consider non-singers or non-dancers. Straight-play and Shakespeare companies cast actors on monologues, though some still ask for a song.

When do summer stock auditions happen?

Mostly in winter and early spring, for the following summer. The 2026 notices above closed in mid to late February, and the Texas Shakespeare Festival’s deadline for summer 2027 is January 2, 2027. Check each company’s own page.

Do I need to be in Equity?

No. Many resident companies hire non-union actors, and some combined auditions, like NETC, are only for non-Equity actors and Equity membership candidates. Equity members can audition through Equity Principal Auditions and some combined auditions. Our guide to Equity and non-Equity theater explains the difference.

Is summer stock worth it?

It depends on the contract and on what you want from the summer. It’s a chance to play several roles in one summer and to learn to work fast. Read the dates, pay, housing, and duties before you decide.