You have my sympathy and empathy. The same thing has happened to me (as far as losing a part to someone who didn't even audition, although I did get another part in the show).

I did stay with the show, however, met some wonderful people, got a good response with the part I did play, and even enjoyed the audience's response to the role and the wonderful lines I got to deliver.

Welcome to the wacky world of theatre where a director's whims and wheedlings sometimes are a burden to bear.  While the aforementioned play made me very cautious when working with that director (which we have done many times since, often with great results), I've got some good memories, lessons, and contacts from the experience.

Now you know why actors have to have thick skins, and must try constantly not to have thick heads.

Enjoy and  survive.

Very unfair and totally innappropriate for a community theatre production.

There are far too many people out there that behave in community theatre as though it were professional theatre. (I would imagine most who are guilty of this are those who are bitter that they never made it professional.) There is a reason why it is called community theatre, and pre-casting really should not take place unless there are literally not enough people auditioning to cover every role in the play being produced.

Different strokes indeed.

There is something very improper with pre-casting in the community level, if you bother having auditions at all. It is in very bad form, and shows no desire to be truly community based. If people want to cast their friends and such, they really should foot the bill themselves and rent a hall. Otherwise, why put on the charade to call it community theatre? What community, other than the director's personal circle, is being served by that?

That to me is no different than announcing community theatre auditions, and casting a show, only to provide free meals to the person with the most lines, at the expense of the theatre, or something like that. It is pandering and catering, and it should not be done. People pay money to see community based actors on the stage, not to see who the favorites of John Q. Director are, without giving anyone else a shot.

Those are the sort of things, it seems to me, that turn people away from trying theatre. They know they can never see their name in lights in New York or something, and yet they get treated just as much like a piece of garbage in Sioux City, Iowa, or whatever community theatre area it happens to be.

Announce your intentions from the beginning, at the amateur level. If you do not, and let people audition, you do not have any respect for the community part of the "community theatre."

Community theatre should be equitable, or it just should not call itself such.

Granted.