On 15/09/16 we had our first Musical Theatre lesson of the year and instantly began preparing for our upcoming performance of 'We Will Rock You'. I did research into the show over the summer so that I could come back to lessons prepared and ready to learn the songs and blocking after auditions. This helped because we began the lesson with singing, to get us into the gist of the musicals tone and the contrasting songs. Before we started singing we did a warm up to make sure we were ready to sing the songs to the best of our ability and we had warmed up our vocal chords and diaphragm to prevent straining our voices through the use of scales in legato and staccato. This was useful because the first song we sang is the first ensemble number in the show- Radio GaGa. I found this song interesting because of the adaptations in the lyrics to make the song fit into the initial theme of the musical, by changing the idea of talking to a 'radio' to 'global soft' which the audience will learn is representing what I can best describe as the worlds 'government' type of corporation. The character who runs global soft has (over time) worked on brainwashing the world so that they all think the same, dress the same and listen to the same electronic music, whilst musical instruments are banned. This character is Killer Queen, and she is the 'bad' character of the show. The characters who sing this song are the GaGa kids, who are the same age generation as Scaramouch and Galileo, only they have been controlled by the globalsoft and think that they have to do what they say. The vocal warm up helped because this song is challenging in terms of range, for example there are moments in the verses where we have to sing low notes, and moments in the choruses where you have to 'belt' notes in order to make it sound effective.
When we sang this song for the second time, I decided to experiment with harmonies to give ideas into the way this song is performed. I feel that this was successful because the harmonies went well with the song and more people began joining me towards the end. The part where I feel that the harmonies best fit is at the end of the chorus when the GaGa kids sing 'all your world loves you' in which I sang a few chords above everyone else. The reason as to why I felt it worked best here is because it emphasises this part of the song, therefore makes the audience hear the lyrics more and it shows how everyone loves global soft and they are calling online their leader, and that the whole world loves it. We discussed chords and harmonies before singing this song the second time and we were shown on the piano the spacing between the notes, for example a C chord has C, E, G, and C an octave above, and these notes would work for a harmony. This is how I got the confidence to experiment with the harmonies which turned out to be successful.
The second song we did was 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'. I feel as though I wasn't as familiar with this song because this is one I hadn't looked at as much as Radio Gaga over the summer, however I still really enjoyed learning it. This song is performed by two characters, Brit and Meat however we sang it as an ensemble to get ourselves more familiar with the musical and learn how to sing as a group. I thought that this song was very up beat because it was faster and had more pauses in the lyrics than radio gaga, and soon realised that it was a rock song like most of the Queen songs featured in this musical, but thought that it would be effective for the characters to perform a jive dance to it because of the beat and the swing to it. I enjoyed this song however I feel as though I could have worked harder to improvise harmonies and get to learn the tune better.
We then sat as a group and discussed how we were going to decide on costume design for the characters we would be given after we audition. I think it is important to design our costume with a reason as to why the costume will look like it does for example style/ colour etc. I imagined Scaramouch wearing purple because this is a very 'rock' colour and it will go with the theme that she is rebellious, I also think that Killer Queen would suit red because it could represent the fact that she is powerful and in authority. I feel as though the Gaga Girls would suit no colour at all, so wearing black with perhaps a glimpse of stereotypical girl colour pink, to represent the fact that they are all the same and are programmed to look and think the same, which is the reason they don't like scaramouch.
The convocation about Costume design lead us onto the subject about what we were wearing casually that day, why we were wearing it and what it represented. We discussed the ideas of the fact that what we wear represents the different aspects to our individual personalities, confidence and overall differences as people. This is contrasting to the show, as people have to look the same in order to 'fit in' with the entire world, whereas in a modern day society we can dress and look however we want and not many people would judge or find it a problem. I found the subject of how long it takes people to get ready for different things an interesting discussion because I personally don't take that much thought and effort into the way I look and dress, whereas other people took a long time and put a lot of thought into it, however we are all still in the same college, the same class, and taking the same course in contrast to the show where everyone is the same. This helped me to develop ideas for my probable of cast characterisation of looking and thinking the same as everyone, and being programmed and brain washed into believing what a society was and what it is now.
Overal I found our first lesson successful because I was able to analyse songs and improvise different harmonies, and this means that I am more prepared for the musical and research into it. I also gained an idea of what characters I wanted to audition for and why. I wanted to audition for Scaramouch because I had an idea of what I could portray, what I could bring to the character and already had some initial ideas for costume.
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