An open casting call is how a new dinner theatre finds its first company: no agents, no prior credits required, and a single evening when anyone who wants to be on stage can walk in and be seen. The notice below announced one such call for a grand opening show on the main street of a small mill town, and the instructions in it are typical of the form.

What a community casting call asks for is modest. A headshot and a resume if you have them; a photograph taken on a phone and a few sentences about yourself if you do not. That second option is deliberate — a dinner club needs singers, servers who can act, character parts and crowd, and the people it most wants to meet are often the ones who have never auditioned anywhere. What the producers are looking for on the night is projection, the ability to take direction and a willingness to rehearse around a day job.

If you are reading this as a record rather than as an invitation, the useful parts are the shape of the thing: a venue address, a start time, a contact for submissions, and a telephone number for questions. Community theatre still runs on exactly that. The report itself is archival — the date, the telephone number and the email address in it belong to the year it was published.