unit 5 and 6 evaluation

This term the musical theatre students have been doing Cell Block tango from Chicago we started this process by all picking a different role which was a woman who killed their husband. when we first got this assignment i had so many ideas in my head on what we could do, initially i though of black lace and red lipstick/hankies/item and with chairs. When we picked to do Cell Block tango i thought the hard thing would be singing and dancing and i was also thinking about how to make it our own as all the ideas that were coming to my head were all based on the movie. what we did to come up with ideas is one day in class we spilt into groups to think of different ways to make cell block tango and my group came up with the idea to wear orange jumpsuits instead of black but we wanted to keep the fishnet. The other group came up with it to be in an insane asylum which was a good idea but then it came to me that we should have a thing at the beginning where there is a police siren going off looking for prisoners and then we walking in and take our mugshots, i thought this was a good idea because it add something new to a song that's been over done a lot. I also looked at different shows that people had done and i came up with having the chairs all in one line so its like a chorus but then we ended up putting them into a pyramid. I had to watch a lot of different productions of Chicago that people had done but also looked at the time that it was set in (1920s) and i found out that there was flapper back then who were woman who had short hair short skirts would go out drinking and dancing and men were fascinated by them. We had to look at the famous choreographer Fosse because its his dance styles that are in cell block tango, his movements are sharp and on beat and a little bit awkward. thinking about the costumes i looked up prison uniforms that woman wore in the 1920s and they were all rags and we all thought that wasn't what we were  looking for. we then got into a bit of a muddle as the person that i play is a female so we changed the lyrics a little bit so that my person is a gay male. We adapted it by making it modern day prison and we wanted to keep the red light from the musical. during the time of Chicago i was kind of like a group leader in the fact that i would constantly give help with lines and choreography, it was hard when people weren't putting their all in because its a group piece and we all need to do well not just for ourselves but for each other. We all had to work on our characters by ourselves which was good because there was something different each time, we also had to make our solo part with the husband to show the interactions with the wives and husbands. I think we worked as a group very well because we all knew what we were doing and some of the times we all had very good ideas so it was fun seeing how it all would work out. There were complications during rehearsal like we all had so many ideas for the dance or how we wanted it to look, so we had to cut some peoples ideas out because it wouldn't fit with certain parts of the song, another complication was that we were really bad with timing at the beginning and we were always missing out ques and then some  of us did not know the right lines to the song so it was hard to do it because we were all in different parts, to over come this we spent a couple of lessons just listening to the song without dancing so we could just focus on getting the words and timing right. We also had problems with dancing and singing at the same time so we sometimes did the dance while singing the song with no backing track and that helped because there was no rush to finish. To help us with our performance skills we would do a couple run throughs and then near the end of lesson pretend like we were actually performing on stage we would also sometimes show our class what we had done so far and it helped to get there feedback. at first we thought that we were going to be singing and dancing with mics so when we were told that we were not we had to work on projection and articulation so people in the back row could still hear what we were saying. the one thing we sometimes did not do was but all of our energy into it because we got tired or just could not do it. When we were planing the production side to our piece i went back to the idea of having the police lights and siren because i thought that it could be a key part of our piece as it shows even without costumes we are in jail or in trouble with the police. Watching the original i really liked that there was a red wash and then white spotlights for the solos parts and we spoke as a group and all discussed that it was a good idea to do that for our lighting, we wanted to use a police sound effect in ours because we thought it went well at the beginning we then decided to have the beginning of the song play under the scene at the but then we ran out of time because the scene was to long so decided to play it after so it went from white side lights straight into red lights which i liked because it was a clear and quick transition. I personally think that the production side went really well we got all the ques right and the lighting suited what was going on so much and i think it had an impact on the audience because the red really added that sinister touch to the piece and i think the police lights helped the audience to know where we were. i think in the end our piece was very successful to hear the audience clap was really rewarding because it shows that all your hard work is appreciated. I think we all really worked hard and we really were communicating with the audience because we were yelling and explaining our stories to them. when i was trying to think about what to do with my character all i could think about was be completely insane and i think it paid of i felt my monologue was very strong. i think i have really worked on singing and dancing and i think im slowly getting better at doing both at the same time, next tie i would change my projection to try and be even louder. Along with Chicago i was also in 'One night only' 'follies' and my solo 'i'm the greatest star'. When we were rehearsing for one night only we started by thinking about all the different elements disco has because it is a lively and we would have to do typical disco moves