'In Touch'ing the High Notes

Production: In Touch by Dougal Irvine
(in assocation with Perfect Pitch)
by Rachel Middle (Alice) & Michael John Griesen (Friend)

Hi! We're Rachel and Mikey, and we're playing 'Alice' and 'Friend' (respectively) in "In Touch" at the Edinburgh Fringe. Look back at our blog regularly to check out all the crazy goings on with the cast and rehearsal process...

We had our first proper sing through of all the music on Saturday, it started off badly. There was noisy and smelly work going on just outside the building and after ten minutes of suffering we were finally driven out of our nice rehearsal space by the oily fumes that somehow managed to make their way through three closed windows. We relocated to a practice room in the depths of the RSAMD where we rehearsed 'David’s Birthday Poke' for a while. Our esteemed musical director is also called David, which is a continuing source of hilarity for us all. After a lengthy discussion on the exact rhythm of ‘Po po po po po poke’, we moved onto a run through, recorded by Candice with a high quality audio recording device owned by the department.

“Could we use this to record our rep sessions, David?” asked Paul curiously (Paul plays the Irish 'Eamonn' in the show)
“Yes.”
“Do we have any rep sessions left?”
“No.”
What a shame.

The music is fantastic and gets easier every time we do it, but we still struggle with the unusual time signatures and high notes, though a lot of Alice's notes have been put down an octave now. Byron (who plays 'Tony') needs to work very hard though because a lot of his notes are up where only the dogs can hear him, when we sing “Alive” he looks like he’s about to die, which is wonderfully ironic. It’s been a really good couple of weeks so far, we’re all on top of the music and looking forward to getting the songs up on their feet and learning more about what our director wants us to do.

In March we did a workshop of Act II of "In Touch" and we had to vibrate constantly when we were ‘online.’ It’ll be interesting to see what Ken Alexander (Director) wants the avatars to do this time, and more importantly, whether or not we will get a live horse on stage for the fringe. I obviously hope that we do.