With opening night rapidly approaching (don’t worry cast members, it’s still a long way off), rehearsals are well underway. For the first few weeks we had been working in isolation - acting and music rehearsals kept separate, allowing each of the performers to work on their own parts before we attempted a combination.
Until Thursday.
Last week we had our first proper run of the play with the musical elements included. And it wasn’t half bad. It wasn’t even a quarter bad. In fact, it was pretty good. So much time had been spent working on the ‘acting’ that I had forgotten just how much of a part the music has to play in the production. Suddenly the very serious dramatic scenes carried more weight and there was a much better flow to the piece as a whole. Obviously, as the play was designed and written this way, it shouldn’t have come as such a revelation. But there you go.
Not everything worked. Not every segue works as well in reality as it does on the page. How many of the songs are in-character performances? External commentary? Both? On a more specific level, one of the songs is far too long and really drags a scene down. This has nothing to do with the choice of song, or indeed the performance. The problem is a combination of context, length and situation. We’ll have to make changes to ensure that it works but I don’t doubt that it will.
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