Triple - Musical Theatre Unit (RENT) - Blog 6 - 05/10/16

Today we performed Seasons of Love once more and moved on to blocking La Vie Boheme. We started off by just singing through the song a couple of times to get a feel for it, but then got up and started trying to act it out. We decided that for Over The Moon, the song before, we will have Alice on steel decking to the right of the audience and while she performs this song, the rest of us would, silently, set up the stage ready for La Vie Boheme, then sit along the edge of the stage and moo along with Alice when she asks the audience to do so! She would then step from the decking to the stage and greet us where we then step straight into La Vie Boheme.

We decided for the tables, we'd have one for the left, middle and right with 3 people at each (Left: Lorna, Alice & Tyler/Joanne, Maureen & The Waiter; Middle: Taylor, Owen, Me/Mimi, Angel & Collins; Right: Cameron, Henri & Warren/Mark, Roger and Diner). We would then have steel decking on one side of the stage where Will (Benny) would be seated to show he has a higher status than the rest of us; this is a typical convention of Epic Theatre.

When walking in, we'd have Tyler chasing after Cameron, telling him to leave ("No, please no, not tonight...") whilst everyone frantically walks about the stage sitting down. This looks very comical as Tyler's attention is constantly changing between Cameron and the rest of us.

After a few runthroughs, I can only see a few issues but some of them are rather major:

• We all need to listen to the song more to get a feel for the rhythm and have a better idea of when we have a line and how to sing it.
• We all need to be more familiar with our lines as we spent more time looking at our lyrics than actually characterising our voices/movement.
• We need to add more movement and give our performance more emotion. This supposed to be the feel good song of the musical and most of the group don't look as happy as we should be.

Next lesson, we will continue on with La Vie Boheme.