How Can I Write My Musical When the Prince is Giving a Ball?
One week more. Another week another destiny.
Okay, that was a pretty dramatic Les Misérables reference, but in all seriousness, this week hasn’t been as eventful. However, I do have way more progress to share now on the actual musical itself!
Let’s start with some changes that I alluded to last post. For one, a character will be cut for each theater section. This will make scene writing under the time constraint easier and help with the imbalance that some sections had with five characters (e.g. the ballet/opera section where there were originally three ballet characters and two opera characters).
I have also changed one of the songs. Something that I learned from the camps that I interned at is that kids struggle with two types of songs: really fast ones and really slow ones. As much as I wanted to include a Taylor Swift song after I heard the girls of Annie Kids unite in singing “Blank Space” together, I decided that “New Romantics” would be too challenging. I mean, I could barely keep up with it when it played at Winter Formal. There was also no good Taylor substitute, so I had to nix the idea. Instead, I switched it for a classic girl-power anthem: “Roar” by Katy Perry! This has also been updated on my playlist which you can find in an early blog.
The rough draft of the first scene has also been completed! When writing dialogue, I devised a few strategies.
After writing a good chunk of each scene, I would time myself reading it out. This does two things: allows me to check scene length of course and also lets me feel if the dialogue flows naturally. I know that if it feels janky coming out of my mouth, it definitely won’t work for the kids. To rework the janky lines, I would speak the line before to myself and see how I would naturally respond. I would then rework the phrasing to fit the scene, and it’s worked pretty good so far!
I’m also experimenting with having sections where the actor can choose what to say or do. This makes the performers more engaged and confident in their performance! I’ll include an example below.
Something else has been going on this past week though. As you have seen from my title, the prince is giving a ball! I am currently performing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella: Youth Edition with Places! Productions. Last week was mostly tech week with the shows being on the weekend, so I decided to take a sneak peek at the mini cast to get some inspiration for my show. The mini cast is comprised of the younger actors from 5-14, and I wanted to see how their choreography and blocking was different from ours.
I observed that the ensemble of the mini cast actually moves way more than we do! The moves are less complicated, but they are still dynamic. I think that this is because it is easier to get smaller kids engaged onstage when they are constantly in action. In the older casts, we can more naturally react to scenes with our faces and bodies, but kids can have a harder time with that (I experienced this in Annie Kids). I plan to see an actual performance of theirs this week, so I can analyze the final product even better!
That’s all for this week!
Take 7 till next post.
Photo credits: Josie Poehls
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