Rent

As a class we have decided we want to do Rent the musical in our double lessons, I am playing Mimi. It is quite a lengthy show at about two hours, so we our cutting some of the songs that are not key to the story, so that we will be able to get it all done.

In our first lesson of rehearsals we started by singing through the song 'Rent'. As not many of us knew it we then moved on to start setting 'La vie Boheme' that most of us were at least familiar with. We have pretty much set the whole of the song. We all worked together to come up with ideas of what we could do, trying out different things for different parts of the song. I think this works better sometimes than having just one choreographer to create everything, it takes away the massive pressure from just one person and creates more ideas and variety within the show.

Once we had set La Vie Boheme we went back to the opening, Rent, and started thinking of how we would stage it. We were trying to think of ways to create an industrial looking loft, which is where a lot of it is set, and decided we would probably use the stage. People went off to find random things such a moving carts, lights, chairs, a bin and paper. Basically things that we can add to our performance stage to make it look a loft as well as giving us things to move around and interact with during the scenes. This is our main idea for the start of Rent, for people to be messily running around the loft, moving things and climbing on things creating a manic kind of atmosphere and sets the scene for the start of the show.