Cross-over days

We had a full day with the full company of The Sad and Cautionary Tale of Smackheaded Peter yesterday. I was looking forward to the day with extreme excitement.

We did worked on some transitions, did a run-through, had a production meeting, changed the beginning of the play, worked more transitions and then had a sound design meeting. That's the order of what happened...

One of our old frenemies, time, tried to sabotage the atmosphere in the rehearsal room at the start of the day. People were a little nervous/tense about running through the play, getting off book, some uncertainty about some physical sections of the play, thinking about transitions- there are still sections of the play that we've not been able to rehearse with everyone present, it's been a tricky process...and the challenges of working several nights in a row at restaurants/shows etc were also affecting energy levels in the room. However a little company TLC began to change the atmosphere and we had an excellent first run-through!

It's not pretty yet- but we're definitely get there and frankly, if it was too pretty at this point in the process I'd be worried about us 'peaking too soon'!

So, now, in our unique rehearsal process, I move on to Anything Goes for a week and the acting company on Smackheaded Peter brew/mull/digest the work/embed lines today in a rehearsal lead by our wonderful Stage Manager, Lauren Williams and our very capable Assistant Director, Andrew McNaughton.

I'm torn about today. If I could split myself in half, (and not frighten people), I'd do it. Half of me would love to be at The Grand, meeting stage management, the props department, the costume designer, our vocal coach, (Rick Kish), seeing Susan Ferley (my boss) and production manager in preparation for Anything Goes and the other half would be incredibly happy to be with the Smackheaded Peter company to build on the work we did yesterday. I'm frustrated to say the least- and also, what a wonderful problem to have- I can't be two places at once.

If my brain were hair (which thankfully it's not!) it would look a little like the drawings of Shockheaded Peter, the German character Struwwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter. I hope though, that that is where any similarities would end... Struwwelpeter was a boy who had poor personal hygiene. According to the Wikepdias (the source of all extensive research!), "Literally translated, Struwwel-Peter means Shaggy-Peter. According to Ellen Handler Spitz, the book was intended as a highly exaggerated send-up of the pietistic children's books of the day in which good little children came to good ends, and the badly behaved did not."

Shockheaded Peter is definitely an influence on our play, The Sad and Cautionary Tale of Smackheaded Peter... but it's not about the hair or the hygiene! Promise...

Week Three begins...

The weekend was mostly spent organizing things for the week ahead: taking our postcard design to the printer, working on the rehearsal schedule, trimming the script, talking to some of the actors about the trimming, working briefly with our Assistant Director, Andrew McNaughton, to get our wee video done, chat with Designer Brandon Kleiman, seeing a play, beginning to organize our company mail outs, blogging...starting to get ready for the next play (which starts soon!)-

And a bit of relaxation.

And now- ready to leap into action and looking forward to the next layer in the process!

Onwards and Upwards.

Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
- Francis Anne Kemble (1809-1893)

Here we go...

and we'll keep on moving!

Choral work, persuasion games and hallucinations

Day Two:

A company vocal warm-up to start. Richard Stewart and Marilla Wex are the ying and yang of voice work for our company. Richard is focusing on voice work and Marilla is our dialect 'go to person' for this process. Their skills are fantastically complimentary and we have a wonderful, freeing voice warm up that finishes with practicing the two dialects we're incorporating in the play, East London and RP. Lots of energy in the room and a good, upbeat atmosphere.

Now that the voices and bodies are warm, we move on to working on the choral sections of the text. We look at units, (where there is a 'change of subject' in the text) and I introduce a game. It goes like this- when a Chorus Person is listening to a person speaking they always have the option of moving towards the speaker (if they agree), staying still, (undecided) or moving away (disagree). It just encourages people to keep discovering how they feel about what's being said to them- and that they're individuals within a larger group. It sounds ridiculously simple... and it is... and it seems to be an effective game- that can even be played in performance.

So, we play the game with a portion of the text that its easy to apply it to.

After we take a break I want to explore the tactics that people use to persuade a group. Each company member has one minute to speak about a subject that they feel passionate about. Topics range from the G20 (visceral, high stakes), to riding along the lake (beautiful images inspiring our imaginations) to the power of theatre, tiny dogs, heavy metal music and cheese... The people that are listening play the same game that we played before the break,(moving forward, backward or staying in the same place) with each individual speaker and then, (when everyone has had a turn), we share some tactics that we feel worked as well as chuckling heartily at some moments when people really didn't agree with us. (I can share with you that most people in this company are not fans of soya cheese).

Then we applied the 'passionate speaking skills' to the scene work. I love it when a game helps us play a scene better... and it seems that this one really helped everyone play and listen actively and feel that they contributing as equal members of an ensemble. It was a playful and effective morning.

After lunch- we dive into more scene work, in a later section of the play. More text work, units, objectives... We have a highly focused afternoon with the dubious Lawyer character, Pollack, (that Paul Tessier is playing) and the version of Mother Cheapside that appears at the end of the play, (when she lives in a tiny apartment with twenty cats- and is physically threatened by Bryan's character, Smackheaded Peter). We find an exciting 'character arch' through the scene for Mother Cheapside- and then it's the end of the day. As always, Marilla considers her character's objectives and actions very deeply...



Andrew McNaughton, (our assistant director), and I, sit with two immensely dense parts of the script for over an hour. There are a number of drug hallucinations in the play- and connections with 'invisible forces' during the hallucinations- so we talked a lot about what the story beats are and the relationships of the characters in the scene. We're also looking for opportunities to trim the script, but it's tricky... tricky, tricky, tricky... With our brains full of rich, spectacular images, (dragons, angels, flying over London), we head home.