Musical theatre evaluation

Musical theatre overall evaluation. This last section of the course has been, for me, by far the most enjoyable. Its been an ongoing project with bits and bobs of the last assignment popping up everywhere. The first main project was the LHS has got talent dance competition. This was a great experience for us as a group as it was the first chance for us to show off all our musical theatre skills together as opposed to just dancing. The final ‘ hairspray’ peice was amazingly well choreographed with the singers and dancing parts working together flawlessly. The hardest part of preparing this dance was the transitions between singing and dancing and as it was our first attempt at a musical theatre peice i think we managed this very well. Performing was very exciting for us all there was a real buzz back stage and everyone really got a taste for a proper performance. Even though we did rec ieve some negative feedback from the judges we had to much fun to let it bother us that much and it was a harsh lesson in how tough the whole industry is. Working towards performing a monologue was the next task we had to face. For me this was a nerve racking thought as i find acting, especially a scripted piece, hard as there is a lot of pressure to perform the words right and i always worry m y interpretation will be wrong. But using my growing confidence gained from drama lessons in and out of school i have learnt that you should always use your gut feeling on how to interpret a piece because even if you are wrong you cant perform it properly if you don’t believe how you are presenting it. And generally there is no right interpretation and i have seen many west end shows with different leading ladies that have slightly changed the interpretation of a whole character and its always so well received by the audiences. So i took the task onboard and spent a long time preparing, because my character was Anne Frank i did a bit of research into her. i was terrified when it actually came to performing but i found the words did flow a lot easier when i relaxed into it. Afterwards i was pleased with my performance and received a distinction for the acting section so my worry was unessacary. next we had to begin work for our huge end of year show. after deciding on the logistics and themes ect we begun to work on dances we could put in that we had already devised before. we decided not use our hairspray dance as many people felt it, firstly did not fit with the theme and secondly was not popular to a lot of the group memebers so we set to work on creating a few new dances that fit perfectly,so we choose two songs from 'Annie' and even after changing our original theme we kept these in. we also devised a routine to 'dont stop me now' to go along side 'somebody to love' both put in so we could show of our costumes made in constume construction linking the two parts of the course together. the tecnical preperations for the show are what all of us struggled with most as none of us were used to it and honestly had no idea where to start. the first choice we made was to find a good technical crew that could help us in an area we werent familiar with. This was a very good decision and meant we could learn a lot about stage management and lighting ect as we planned for the show. on the night the whole production was amazing, the tech crew were such a good help and their experience put us at ease a lot! All the performances went so well and the respone afterwards was amazing. I think that if i was to try and put on a show again i would only change a few things. Firstly i would spend a lot more time learning about the backstage elements and sound and lighting because i found this was hard for me knowing nothing at all. Also i think its an important part of working in the industry and as a performer its good to know about all the behind the scenes things. Another thing i would do is have more whole cast rehearsals because for the size of the production one was not really enough but this couldnt be helped because of spacing and finding the time to arrange one. this whole unit has been my favourite! i loved it so much its everything i want to do when im older and i had so much fun singing on stage and performing properly to a paying audience and getting such good feedback was the perfect end to an amazing two years