Little shop of horrors: day 4

Today we worked on running the whole of act 1 that we ha set so far. This included "little shop of horrors" dialogue, "skid row" and everything up to "da doo" where Seymour is left in the shop alone.

I felt that the opening dance went a lot better this time around. Mainly because our choreographer offered to help me in our frees. So this time, I knew more of the dance. And felt more confident in it as a result.

We then went straight into running the dialogue. I felt comfortable with this part as I had watched the film and read the opening scenes. So I knew how to carry out the scene efficiently and to a decent standard.

In terms of skid row. We re jigged the positioning of some people to make the stage look a bit tidier. Then ran through the piece without fault. My only hiccup was saying the last three lines of the song in the wrong order. That said, I should be able to rectify that easily. Just by looking at my script!

We carried on to da doo. Which we repeated a few times. First of all, the whole positioning of the cast was messy and was too far back on the stage, we were not animated enough  and as a result the piece seemed weak. Personally, I tried to make myself as animated as I could by trying to act out what my character was saying, and reacting as strongly as possible to my lines. We added a nice touch in the fact that we all look up to the right on the line "total eclipse of the sun" only to have a light shine in the opposite direction. Adding comedy value to the piece.

From there, we split into groups, I was sent to work with our teacher with Mushnik and Audrey where we looked at the scenes after "closed for renovation" we looked into subtext and just got an early feel for what we could do with the scene. In addition. Myself and Audrey worked on the scene before "suddenly Seymour" where we looked at the context of the scene, how our characters were feeling, what had happened before hand. I had to make sure that it was clear that Seymour is in love with Audrey. I made my movements tender, yet anxious inside to show Seymour's nerves. I felt that we made a good start to these scenes. Personally, I need to work on the body language again, but saying that, if my script wasn't in my hand, I would be able to show this more.

To end with, we performed "little shop of horrors" and "skid row" with simply backing tracks to see how it sounded. Thankfully, I think this was successful and carried out well. We need to work on nailing the opening dance and looking at lines so the performance comes together quickly and we can get our scripts down to begin to act properly.