Little Shop of Horrors - rehearsals week 5 (1st - 5th June)

This week, we have been working on the number 'Ya Never Know', which is a number performed in Act 1 when life for Mushnik, Audrey and especially Seymour, and the Mushnik's Skid Row Fourist Shop start to travel uphill with the Audrey II plant suddenly attracting customers, business and fame for the shop, and fame and fortune for Seymour. The song starts with Mushnik (Harry) singing and the rest is predominantly sung by my character, but there are times when I am joined by the ensemble.

The most challenging difficulty I found with working on this number was the fact that obviously my character is traditionally female but due the number of girls we have in our class, the part was changed to a male, and the challenge I found was being able to sing the melody of my parts in the octave of the women on the Broadway recording to keep that soulful and wide-ranged vocal essence to the character. At the beginning of the lesson, our teacher went through some vocal exercises with us so this defiantly warmed up my vocals for it came to me singing my parts in the song. 

I again found the choreography fairly easy to pick up but it, overall, added to the performance and delivery of the number making it comical and attractive. 

Little Shop of Horrors - rehearsals week 4 (18th - 22nd May)

This week of rehearsals we worked a number called 'meek shall inherit' which, in context, presents all this fame and fortune for Seymour taken to an extreme to the point where Seymour cannot take it any more and is reassessing his deal with Audrey II. Within the song Seymour is visited by three agents desperate for Seymour to sign contracts for them to take him in with Audrey II. The song is driven forward by the trio (Ronn, Crystal and Chiffon) as they are paid by the three contract agents to bring deliver Seymour to them.
The one difficulty i found with this song is timing. In between the different verses of the song, there are rather small bits of dialogue between the the trio, Seymour and the three agents, therefore this dialogue has to fit right in the time we have before the next verse comes. What makes it alot more difficult, is the fact that within the music, it does not make it clear when the next agent comes in with his verse - there is no clear bump or change in music. So in future when we run this number, the people who have dialogue need to really look and listen to the time we have before the next verse comes in.
Something that i very much like about what we have done with this number is how, on the chorus, the whole rest of the cast join in with the vocals and choreography to further enhance this stress and depression for Seymour creating the implication of a larger amount of audience he has to please - and a larger amount of voices in his head - strongley portraying this fame and fortune taking over his life.

Little Shop of Horrors - rehearsals week 3 (11th - 15th May)

The main focus on the show for rehearsals this week were making sure the setting and blocking of scenes and dialogue was complete, allowing us to then go away, annotate our scripts for direction and character analysis purposes, and start learning lines - having the direction of scenes set.
Going through dialogue for both our director and us to direct has really been a very beneficial factor for all of us for many various reasons like; enhancing our understanding of our characters and the story as whole; therefore allowing us to really get more into role of our characters; being able to explore the subtext and objectives of dialogue within scenes all towards our characterisation and creating these individual characters; being able to notice and create that contrast and similarities between different characters; and generally seeing the show and story as a whole coming together. For me, personally, these various different reasons are certainly why I've found the setting and blocking of dialogue and scenes, and working with my fellow cast members as well as our directors, has been a strongly beneficial factor of the rehearsal process.

Also this week, we worked on producing the finale number to the show, which is held and carried strongly by vocals and vocal harmonies - providing an overall powerful finish to the show. What's good about the way we have done this number is that having hardly any sort of movement throughout the number, puts emphasis on the vocal arrangement and also the lyrics and story we, as the cast, are telling, and allows to really perform the number through facial expressions, body language and charisma.  Before the number, Seymour sacrifices himself to the plant in order to try and kill it from the inside. We also are left with the information of a plan to form Audrey IIs all over the world for business and attraction purposes, only then are we relieved that this was in fact Audrey II's plan all along - world conquer. Because of this, throughout the finale number, we inform and warn the audience "don't feed the plants!" as if this was reality, which, in my opinion, is a very effective way of relating to and directly addressing the audience, leaving them feeling engaged and a part of the story.

When singing through the song and creating a sort of vocal arrangement for the number, I was able to pick out harmony lines in certain bits of the song to add that extra flare and wow-factor - especially on the end note, where I sing a note of a higher harmony line that goes well with the melody of the final note, adding slightly more of an enhancement to this big, powerful finale note of the whole show.
A target that I am giving myself for when we next visit this number is to make sure that my joint contribution to the vocal arrangement throughout this song is produced confidentially and to make sure the levels of performance and energy is still kept high, and not letting the fact of there being hardly any sort of movement or choreography bring them levels down.