Week 41

 Monday 25th November 2024 

Monday felt like a very productive day, blocking Stromboli's main scene within the show- along with his musical number. This scene is my personal favourite, as we see Stromboli have multiple conversations with himself through his puppets. For me this is a moment within the show where we see clearly the mania that has festered within Stromboli over the years from being a failing puppeteer and the mockery from the town that has come with that. There were a few eliminates to break down when putting this scene on its feet, one of which being the individual puppet voices/characters and making sure that what's being said by them through Stromboli matches the voice and the persona that you give it. When approaching this element to Stromboli I wanted to make it clear that, to him he's having a two way conversation and that the puppets (subconsciously) symbolise different parts of his personality- which is a perspective I've taken on the character. This meant that I had to experiment a bit with different accents, and almost evolve other characters that I felt lived within Stromboli. I really enjoyed diving into that though and had a lot of being able to switch between multiple personas throughout the scene, not only through voice but physicalising this as well. 

We then pulled our focus to Strombolis song that is lead into from the previous scene, using the Marionettes he's just been talking to as basically back up dancers throughout the whole number. This was a bit of a challenge, as there's small lifts that are within the song, along with synchronisation and some difficult notes to hit. When the Strombolis aren't Stromboli, they act as the Marionettes in the other casts, so we all had to learn multiple dance parts within the song. This felt like a new challenge for me, but definitely something I'm learning a lot from as its the hardest musical number I've had to sing, and if I was doing this show professionally I would just be expected to straight away b able to pick up these parts without question- so having this time in collage to build on these skills is very helpful to me.  

Tuesday 26th November 2024

Tuesday was another very productive day, running through all of act one with blue cast and red cast. It was very helpful to get to see the structure of act one and see the individual work we've done all come together really nicely. This run through also helped me get a better idea of my journey throughout the show and what scenes occur before mine/after mine- making a mental notes and just getting myself more prepared for further runs. 

We then went over Toys and did some after session rehearsals for the Stromboli scenes we blocked the day prior- just making sure we have all our individual parts in that number spot on to prevent later confusion. It really important that we keep running our already blocked scenes in smaller groups to make sure that they stay fresh in our heads. Right now we're working on polishing things that we've done and making it nice and clean and slick to give ourselves less for our final rehearsal week next week. 

Wednesday 27th November 2024

We started off the day with a warm up run by me and Lola as part of our assignment:

Rehearsal clips from Wednesday: