Friday, July 13, 2007

New Rep Studio - the first week in Les Mis

Sorry for posting so late, my email was down. Anyway, tuesday Brooke & Bevin came in and did an audition workshop with us before the auditions on Wednesday. We worked on creating the characters personalities in the scene, blocking choices, body language and other things that would help us to make the scene more interesting and generally more developed. It was really cool to watching the scenes be done in so many different ways by the different actresses.

On wednesday we started auditions. We prepared 16 bars of a song and read the scenes that we prepared. Although it was extremely nerve racking (no surprise there), it was not only a great bonding experience (we were all really supportive and encouraging towards eachother) but also a great acting experience. Suzanne would watch our scene and then tell us to try it another way.
Overall, we were all happy with how our auditions went. At the end of the day, we were DYING to know our parts, and Suzanne came out and told us that there would be yet another day of auditions. UGH. We went home that day apprehensive about what would happen thursday when more than half of us would have to sing again and all of us would have to read again.

The auditions went really well on thursday and after about 20 minutes of deliberation, Suzanne and Kevin finally cast the parts. I think we were all happy with the results, I know I was.

On Friday we worked with Kevin on solos and did character work with Suzanne. We also did this really fun exercise where we went into Panera Bread and observed a person for 10 or 20 minutes and took notes on their character traits and then based on the traits, made an actual character. Although most of it was from our imagination, it was a lot of fun to share our characters with the group.

It was an amazing first week and we were all really sad to say goodbye friday afternoon. We all have gotten so close in the span of five days and plenty of hugs went around before we left New Rep.


I think it's going to be a really fun process of putting together Les Miserable with such a small, talented group of girls. I'll keep you posted!!
--Talia

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