Thursday 26th November (blocking of act two, first half)

In today's lesson we began looking into the spacing of act two and how each scene looked next to each other. We began by running 'Seasons of love' in the theatre, for this we are spaced in a life going straight across the performance space and then every other person is facing the other way, this is so all of the audience can at least see some of the cast straight on. We spent some time looking into certain parts that needed some movement but still wanted to keep it minimalistic. On the line "it's time now to sing out" we all start clicking, going from up stage to down stage. This brings up the tempo of the song and makes it lively to lead into 'happy new year'. I made a suggestion to the director that we stop clicking on the word "measure" I felt that this was a good lull of the song and fitted well afte the crescendo.

We then went straight into the running the act. The first song is 'happy new year', I feel really confident about this song, after going through it a couple of weeks before. Today I explored more about my characters relationship between his friends in this song particuarly, I feel that in this song that he is almost at his breaking point, as he has been locked out of his flat and no body seems to be bothered. He first loses his temper with mimi and roger, I played this subtly. But then when Maureen comes in messing around, Mark gets quite short with her. But then when he realises that she is having a bad time with Joanne, I started to play on this, by giggling at her and filming her while they argue. I feel that this is now one of my stronger songs, as I'm confident with my singing and notes and now feel that I have a clear character path and objective for each interaction.

The next song that I'm in is 'Happy new year B' and I was confident with my lyrics and singing in this song like I was in the first one. But when we just gave it a go and ran it, it became very clear that the spacing needed some work and everyone was just standing around, and it looked very clustered. To break this up I tried to walk off and add some more levels by sitting down by the flat, I backed this up by using this as support of Mark trying to stay out of confrontation and being quite with held. At the end of a suggestion I said that we need to really look into everyone's objectives in this song, and how everyone would be feeling after finding out that the flat is empty. I think that my character of Mark would be quite calm about it, but would begin to shut him self out and not say much.

The last bit that I did in this lesson was 'Seasons of love B' for this im placed up in the flat, while everyone else is in the pairs around the space, at first I felt lonely as I saw everyone conversing with each other, but then I started to take this literally and thought that maybe this is how Mark would feel about looking at all his friends having fun and him all on his own. I tried to use that feeling to effect my singing, by making my words slow and lower and not putting as much effort into my speech.

The main things that I learnt about my character in this lesson was; the drastic change in my emotion from going from the end of act one and then to the beginning of act two which are polar opposites. The second one is his relationships towards everyone but then getting closer with Joanne as they begin to relate over Maureen.

Before next lesson I want to look into the setting and feeling behind the song 'Halloween' as this is my next song that is coming up.