Today we worked a considerable amount on The Epiphany and the short bit before where Anthony storms in upon Judge Turpin's near fatal shave with Sweeney.
With this we weren't sure whether we should stay naturalistic with The Epiphany and have Rob portray the new psychotic side of Sweeney through his pure facial expressions or do something similar to the 2007 film and have represent Sweeney hallucinating and showing him on the streets of London threatening citizens of London. In order to choose, we tried both.
To start off we went from the end of Pretty Woman which is where Anthony storms into Sweeney's shop, exclaiming that Johanna would elope with her, and Judge Turpin leaves Sweeney, disgusted with the company he keeps. Frustrated, Sweeney sends Anthony away and Mrs Lovett comes to find our what's wrong. This scene proved quite difficult to act out at first as we didn't have Tom as Anthony but James stood in for him so there wasn't many issues.
When it came to singing the first part of The Epiphany before Sweeney goes a bit mental, I felt that Rob was far too static; although he had good facial expressions, I thought there was a lot more we could do with such a complex scene. We wanted Rob to pace a bit more being extremely angry whilst Lorna is trying to ask what's happened. During the "there's a hole in the world," part Rob walks to the front of the stage and flicks open and closed his razor and on "not for long" he raises it up to the sky. He lowers it fiercely on "die" and then turns to Mrs Lovett on "Tell you why Mrs Lovett." Rob then interacts with Lorna creepily pushing her in the chair and threatening her with the razor. When he starts keening, Rob walks away from her and stands at the front of the stage.
We wanted to experiment with the abstract side of this piece and see what it would be like if I we do something similar to the film where Sweeney goes around London. We experimented with Rob jumping down from the stage and then walking between the rest of the case representing the townspeople. We didn't get anything set in stone though so next lesson we will work more on this.
For the remainder of the lesson, we cut down the script removing lines and sections which we didn't like or didn't think were necessary.
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