Thursday 1st October (Rent Page 1-15 Run Through)

In this lesson we ran through the scenes and songs from page 1 to page 15. For me this included the opening song Rent, being a 'bum' on the street dotted around the stage, some simple movement during the beginning of the song One Song Glory and the song Light My Candle. The opening song wasn't as successful as we hoped it would be, it was quite confusing as we had done some more work on it since we were last in the theatre space so it was difficult to get used to the staging again. I suggested that we involve some solo improvisations of running across the room doing some forms of physical theatre inspired by Frantic Assembly, and nearer the end having everyone come on stage facing the audiences and singing directly to them, this worked well because everyone was involved and it helped to immerse the audience by breaking the fourth wall and interacting directly with them. We decided that this song needs to be an angry, energized song as it opens the whole show. After this we returned to our initial positions on stage on the floor huddled in small groups as homeless people, I made sure I kept a slouched posture and didn't make too much eye contact to show fear and hopelessness. My next action was to walk slowly, maintaining this character during the opening counts of One Song Glory. When I am off cast I will just move to another spot on stage but as Mimi I will walk off stage to prepare for Light My Candle which I have to start in section G, which is only accessible from behind the curtain and up stairs made from staging blocks when you start off stage. We don't have this set out yet as it is too early in the process but I made sure to act and react to the space as if it was real. Next was Light My Candle, my first duet with James, playing Roger. This is the first time these two meet officially as Roger explains in the lyrics he has seen her around before but they are introduced properly in this scene. I feel my run of the song was very successful, I didn't need my script for most of the song and I felt relaxed and comfortable with the notes I had to sing. Mimi uses her sexuality and confidence in a comedic way which I really emphasised in this rehearsal, it got a very good response from the rest of the class as people laughed and when I looked around the room everyone was watching and seemed engaged, this gave me a lot of confidence and made me think about what more I could do with my character with humour. For example upon looking through my script in more detail I realised that Mimi has some sarcasm in her lines and I really want to use this as much as I can because from my research of watching other schools/colleges performances of Rent, the movie and the filmed Broadway performance this take on Mimi's character hasn't been done before. I feel confident using comedy and therefore think it will work well. After the lesson Charley, playing Mimi in the other cast, James and myself spoke briefly about blocking a simple plan for movement, just how we will walk around the stage, when we will walk to certain places and specific movements we need, and noted this in our scripts.

To finish we sang through the song Seasons Of Love to work out the harmony groups and make sure we knew the lyrics, as this song is very important for the narrative of the play and to stay true to Larson's initial intentions.