Rent (Thursday 1st October) blocking of pages 1-15

In this lesson we started our first blocking session, we are in our performance space for this rehearsal, which was a lot more helpful as we could see the space that we hade and could see where everything would be set in comparison to everything else. At the start of the show I have these small songs called, tune ups, this is what my main focus was on during this session.

Prior to this lesson I had looked over these songs and had down some work on the lyrics. We began by just running the song and seeing how it played out. I made a suggestion before we started that my character of Mark was to be quite annoying and up in Rogers face during this scene. I said this as I thought that Mark was going on at roger and was really up in his face, with his camera. I think this worked well as the motive and feel for this scene as its the first time the audience get to see any of the characters and I think this makes it clear what marks interest is in and how passionate he is about it. When we had run this scene a couple times, trying out different stagings, we found it best to be down in the main space of the flat, in section H, as it gave me room to move around. To progress this scene even further, I'm going to look into my characters objectives in this scene, and why he is being very up in Rogers face. My first impressions was to just get more attention, this i then linked back to my back story's and how Mark wasnt seen as much of a success by his mother and she didn't really notice him.

My next song that I'm in is 'Rent', I had noticed a problem with this as me and the person playing roger are the main singers in this song, which meant that i could not do the dance that we had originally choreographed. We were then blocked to just be on the blacony (G) and just sing the song from up there. This worked really well for the majority of the song as we were over looking the rough streets that were happening bellow, but when it came to the end where everyone was singing too, I thought that the energy dropped from my and roger, so I then started to improvise and see if it would work if we came down into the main space and do what was planned with the rest of the company. I think this worked as it brought everyone together and brought the energy up. When singing this song I tried to show some of my characterisation for Mark show through. I did this with my tone of voice, by trying to seem wordy and whinny with what I was saying, I think this began to come through but I think with time and learning more depth to the song it would come through even more.

At the end of this rehearsal we did a sing through of the song 'seasons of love', we began to work out some of the basic harmony and layers to the song. I do the bass line, which is at the lower end of my register and I can just reach the notes. With my part going under everyone else's I think it creates a very soulful tone to the song, which really helps create the tone of the piece. Before the next rehearsal I would have liked to looked at my part in 'tango Maureen' and see if I could work out some of the harmonys between my character and Joanne.