After our final performance, I was really impressed and satisfied with how it went - and everyone shares the same opinion. Overall, I think we all clearly understood every single word we said/sung and we all had clear understandings of our characters and character relationships, and along with this came a great performance individually but also as a company. For the majority of the performance we were all clearly heard, which shows our constant work on projection had clearly paid off however we had been informed that we all were quieter at least once in the performance. There are number of aspects I can think of that could be the cause of this, firstly because for many of the class it was their first musical performance and it could have simply been nerves which will obviously be improved as we progress through the course because we will face a lot more performances, and/or most of the class are not trained singers and find this hard, or people just find projection very hard (this is definitely my case) and have recognised that this is something to work on throughout the course.
Rehearsal process
As the weeks progressed, we all worked very well together and it was a very good environment to work in; we all supported each other and were able to have laughs whilst still getting a lot done. However despite this, we had a few problems with professionalism, which entails being quiet and respectful when people are rehearsing, treating rehearsals like performances (so carrying when forgetting lines etc...), and coming to rehearsals prepared. I think this was a problem because for many of the class it was their first proper performance so resulting in being unfamiliar with what comes under professionalism. However this definitely improved very quickly. I tend to split the rehearsal process into three distinct stages: 1. Learning/staging the material, 2. Cleaning and polishing, and 3. Run through's.
Stage 1:
During this stage I struggled a lot when it came to learning the songs because I tend to take longer than usual to learn a song and this I think held the rest of the company back a bit, because we would constantly have to spend more time learning a song when we planned, for example, to learn two songs that rehearsal and as a result we spent a lot more time than planned on learning and staging the show, which gave us less time to clean and polish. I think to work on this flaw of mine, I simply need to be extra prepared for rehearsals, this entails starting to learn the material before everyone else or start as soon as we are informed of the play/musical we are doing so that I am not two or three steps behind everyone else in rehearsals, and we can spend more time on cleaning and polishing what we have learnt. As a whole company, I think we started quite badly because not everyone knew each other very well so there were, for some people, issues with confidence, acting with people in a certain way, singing in front of people and supporting each other and giving feedback, but naturally as we progressed (only took a week or two) everyone got to each other a lot better and everyone was more than comfortable with each other so these issues were very quickly erased. Again as a whole in the early stages, was we didn't know much about our characters (this is obviously before we done any character research), so we were all trying out different ways to play our characters and trying to find what suits, and I think this a very good thing to do as an actor because it gives you an opportunity to find what aspects of acting you are comfortable with, what kind of people you can portray and become of your versatility as an actor.
Stage 2:
I think this stage of the rehearsal process was a lot more successful in terms of professionalism and getting more things done, possibly because we learnt from our mistakes in stage 1. I think everything became a lot easier because all the songs had been learnt and blocked, so it really just came down to taking direction and criticism from our peers and directors. No one had any trouble when it came to this, we all tried out any directions we were given without arguing (except the very odd occasion) because we all realise that the directors have a vision in their head of the performance, and they are watching our rehearsals from an audience member's perspective so they would obviously see first hand what needs improving and how. The song that we spent to most time trying to clean and perfect was probably La Vie Boheme because we constantly had issues with energy levels, knowing the context of what we're saying and the contextual information of the song, and we never really felt like it was good enough yet. So we discussed as a company that we should work on this, and we all discussed what points should be specifically reviewed and why, and what sort of things we want to change/add. We did this with most numbers, but it was mainly La Vie Boheme. Overall, I would say we worked very well together and we listened and took on board any ideas either of us put forward.
Stage 3:
Our first few run throughs, I think were not very good because we were not fully aware of the order of the songs, when dialogue was, and most of us were mainly focussing on learning the songs so we forgot about the dialogue, and it just these run throughs all the more stressful. Also we very rarely had a full run through from start to finish in one go because we simply didn't have the time in lesson, so we actually only had about two complete run through's prior to the performance, which didn't fill us with much confidence about how the performance would go because we felt we weren't ready, but it turns out we knew everything individually, and we had done act 1 runs and act 2 runs completely, so we knew what we were doing. By about half way through this stage, we were all pretty confident with our own individual performances and our characters; I think the main problem was our performance together as an ensemble, because I think some us had our own issues with some songs - whether it be not knowing the contextual information of the song, not knowing what it means to your character, forgetting lines, or just not really aware of what is going on, because this had an effect on the people who were confident on said song because it is very hard to act well in this situation because most of the time, acting comes from bouncing off other's peoples energy and individual performance. I felt like this in the song Goodbye love, but I knew what was going on, I just don't think some people knew that it was supposed to be a very heated and tense argument, and I found it very hard to be the one who is trying to keep everyone calm, become annoyed with the feuds within the group and break it all up because there wasn't much there to break up. But this was definitely improved by the time of the performance. In terms of professionalism, this stage was very successful because again, we were all very respectful of each other when others were on stage and whenever a line was forgotten or timing was off, or any thing was forgotten for that matter, we all just carried on an worked round it.
Individual performance
I think my performance was very good - I embodied this neutral, kind and awkward character and captured his train of thoughts and physicality. I played Mark with, at points, quite an angry tone about him. I think he would be getting quite angry because all he wants is for his friends to get along and finish his film. However with people like Roger and Mimi arguing, and Maureen and and Joanne arguing, and Roger not leaving the house, and with Benny's threat of eviction, I think this would absolutely be getting a bit too much for Mark so I definitely think Mark would begin to get quite angry. However overall, I think I capture his positive and optimistic outlook on life very well.
Playing Mark has been very fun for me, a very different character to what I have played in the past so I definitely was challenged, but I absolutely think it increased my versatility as an actor.
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