Emotional Connections

Production: Spring Awakening
Rehearsal Wk 2
by Helen Hart (Wendla)

Another week of intensive rehearsals has begun. Today was difficult. We rehearsed a scene in which a funeral is held and a touching ballad accompanies it. We were asked by our director (Andrew Panton) to explore our characters and their reactions to the death by speaking directly to the character we had lost (I'm not going to name them incase you don't know the show!) and telling them something we should have told them before they died.

Each person in the group took it in turns to say how they felt and naturally, the exercise resulted in alot of tears! The dialogue was completely unscripted and genuine and it meant that each of us were pushed into putting ourselves in the position of our character and imagining how they might feel.

The difficulty many of us encountered seemed to be the struggle to connect with the emotion of our character without connecting TOO strongly to our own emotions as an actor; something very difficult to achieve.

I think to be honest, many of us found ourselves standing there crying about people we have lost or people that we worry we may lose. However, this was not a bad thing. It was really useful in that it assisted us in understanding our character's emotions and better informed us as actors. I'm biased but I think it put us in a position where we could have a really strong scene. In my opinion, a 'Funeral Scene' can be cheesy & cliche or it can be beautiful & powerful... I'm excited at the thought that ours may well be the latter!

Gonna Build A Mountain ...

Production: Closest to the Moon by Richard Taylor

Rehearsal Wk 2

The cast work at creating visuals with The Climber.

My Creative Junk

Production: Spring Awakening by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater
Rehearsal Week 1
by Helen Hart (Wendla)

What an exciting week it has been for Spring Awakening! After a week or so of note-bashing the show is finally getting on it's feet. The rehearsals so far have been intense yet incredibly good fun, with a very enthusiastic atmosphere.

Today we looked at an exciting & energetic scene within the show (which includes the song 'My Junk.') This proved to be a hilarious rehearsal in which we used water bottles as microphones, a rostra block as a 'bridge' and two office swivel chairs as 'moving school desks'... talk about creativity! (Creative ideas courtesy of Andrew Panton, our director.) The scene is performed by the full company and includes a student fantasising about his piano teacher and another boy getting up to no good in the privacy of his bathroom with his father angrily banging on the door.

The music is really starting to come together and you can hear people starting to take ownership of their vocal lines now that they are more comfortable with them. The highlight of the day had to be when Paul (adult male & Otto) walked onstage and delivered his line in an irish accent because he got momentarily confused which musical we were doing!... An Australian actor delivering a line in Irish within a German show! Priceless!

'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.

Welcome to RSAMD at The Fringe Blog

Welcome to RSAMD at The Fringe 2010
by One Academy Productions

We'd like to say hi to all you followers of our new blog site which will keep you up to date with all things RSAMD at the Edinburgh Fringe 2010.

Following on from the 5*sell-out success of Jerry Springer - The Opera, our MA Musical Theatre students will be back in August with the Scottish Premiere of the multiple Tony award winning and Olivier nominated Spring Awakening.

We will also be premiering two brand new works in collaboration with Perfect Pitch. Closest to the Moon by Richard Taylor and In Touch by Dougal Irvine.

Our cast and production teams will be posting with news on everything from rehearsals to performances, so check back and keep in touch with us.

Tickets for all our shows can be purchased at http://www.pleasance.co.uk/edinburgh

See you in Edinburgh

Reaching the Note Bash Summit!

Production: Closest to the Moon by Richard Taylor
Rehearsal Week 1
By Melanie Bell (Cast)

So we've officially finished the "note-bashing" process and I have to say, with great success. This is due mainly to the patience and thoroughness of the one fabulous Claire McKenzie, our MD. This is by far the most difficult score I have worked on and being in Claire's shoes I probably would have run screaming back to an American Juke Box Medley. In the vein of Sondheim, these songs are as intricate as they come and though somehow the lines meant for singing and the piano lines wouldn't be noticed as belonging together if one heard them separately, together they intertwine and promote instant emotional gut reactions. The music is marvellous, and now that I sort of have my brain wrapped around most of it I feel like I've been let into the secret world that Richard Taylor has created.

Claire started us off "rapping"! Yes, we chanted rhythmically for several hours and with time signatures rotating between 9/16 and 7/16 and 3/8 and 5/8 and 5/16 in a matter of brief measures - rapping was definitely the way to go. And then we meticulously added the notes. Yes, a tune too - ranging from 4 to 6 part harmonies. And the big kicker, though we're saving this for next week, two of these songs are acapella! It's one of those things that when you get right you really feel like you're standing on top of a mountain screaming with joy - which is interesting since the musical itself is about a man who is climbing Mt. Everest. So you could say that after this week of introduction to the score, we have reached the summit - or at least shaken hands with our sherpa.

Aside from familiarising ourselves with the music, we had a full company read-through with Claire, Phillip Howard the director, and Richard Taylor the composer. And as this is a new musical in developmental stages we were able to run around the room shooting off possible running orders and narrative plot ideas. It was concluded that this piece, Closest to the Moon, will remain non-linear - as it should in my opinion. But the biggest question, "Why do people climb Everest?" at it's centre and exploring the climber's reasons in correspondence to what the wife he's left behind thinks about the whole idea, is a way for the audience to be let in and hopefully connect to the climbers and non-climbers inside themselves.

The camaraderie in the room coupled with the artistic team's confidence in us, the actors - has started us off on a very exciting journey. This week ahead will allow for more exploration of the material as we discover exactly what it is going to become, and more chances to nail those terribly and wonderfully tricky numbers as a group. We have to "feel each other". We've started our own little Everest journey together and I couldn't be more pumped!
More to come!