Triple - Musical Theatre Unit (RENT) - Blog 4 - 29/09/16

Today, we worked some more on Seasons of Love adding movement to the piece and perfecting what we already had and then looked over Rent quickly to know which bits we each sing.

For Seasons of Love we felt it was far too boring to just sing the song in a line, so we decided to choreograph a walk in and have us walk into the line progressively. We also had each soloist step out for every solo.

Below is how we staged our scene:

• During the beginning instrumental, we all walk in sporadically and stand some distance from where we end in our line, facing slightly diagonally.
• During the, "In daylights, in sunsets...." verse, we progressively walk to our position in the line. We stay in this line for the remainder of the number.
• For each solo, the soloist steps forwards and sings their section (e.g. Taylor steps forward to sing, "...journey's to plan, then steps back into the line.) When Henri and Lorna finish singing their section, Henri steps back twice and the rest of us in line walk towards him creating the space for him to step back into. As soon as we're in line we stop.
• During Lorna's solo, she stands at an angle and gestures towards us then steps back into the line at the end.

After a few runthroughs, we feel that Seasons of Love is pretty much ready. We then went on to listen to Rent a couple of times and then singalong to get a feel of which parts our characters sing. With Collins' section, I wanted to perform it very similar to way it's performed in the movie version as in the Original Broadway recording, Collins' voice sounds much higher and I feel this wouldn't work well with my naturally deep voice.

For next lesson, we are to listen to both Rent and La Vie Boheme ready to work on next lesson.