Friday, July 25, 2014
I have not been keeping up on blogging, mainly because we were so busy! But now, I am going to blog away! This week has been absolutely amazing. Meeting different people who have traveled to JTF and performed the same shows as you, meeting the directors, and everything else in between has been such a fun experience. One of the techniques that our music director (Rick) had used I liked a lot. He would play out the melody and harmony once or twice, sing it for us, then tell us to sing it, then we would just tweak the trouble parts. I really liked using this method because I feel like I learned the music quicker this way and was able to learn my harmonies easier and I was confident on them. I also liked how we would rough block a scene and then we would go back and fix any bumps in the road. Our director (Marty) really helped us get into character and help us stay in character. Even though I did not have a lead role in this production, I felt almost as if I did. I may have had only one line but I sang in almost every song and did something in almost every scene. Ensemble roles may not have the most solos or the most lines but ensemble roles help a lot with telling the story. There were 53 named roles in Madagascar Jr so everyone felt as if their part was important. For example, we had a scene where all the ensemble roles were scenery or dancing birds or a pond. They helped us give the audience a visual of what "paradise" looked like, without using scenery or props.
We learned some new games to play called Statues in the Museum and Bang. The first day of workshops we broke the ice by getting into different groups based on what the director called out, such as what state we were from, how many pet we had, etc. Abby, Ethan and I were the only ones from Wisconsin. There were people from Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, but only 2 out of the 48 kids were from New York. Some of the other kids had been in other iTheatrics workshops, but most kids were newcomers like us. The first few hours of the workshop consisted of learning some songs and then auditioning and by 2:00 that afternoon they had the show cast. I was a lioness, Abby a lemur and Ethan was a lemur and a penguin. We had a lot of fun with our roles.
The rest of the week we worked a lot with music, blocking and dance. We only had one run through of the show before putting on 2 performances on Friday. One crazy thing was Friday morning before the show the director Marty decided he wanted to change some things about the scenes, which he can do since the show is not set in stone yet. After Friday's first performance, he changed some other things before the second performance. He said it would take 2 or 3 years before Madagascar Jr. would be ready to come out for theatre groups to perform. We got to keep our scripts though so that is cool.
One thing that impressed me was a lot of the kids were off book for our performances, even though we technically only had 24 hours total of rehearsal time. Only a few kids felt the need to keep their scripts in hand for most of the show, otherwise everyone was either off book or only grabbed it for scenes they weren't as confident with.
On Friday we were told that out of the 48 kids that were part of Madagascar Jr, 43 were All Stars, and the remaining 5 submitted video auditions and got in that way. I thought that was a cool tidbit of information. Also on Monday, I had a girl come up to me and told me I played the Sour Kangaroo in Suessical. Since I was wearing my Suessical cast shirt, I thought she was referring to that until I realized that she recognized me from JTF and I recognized her, so we got to catch up, which was really fun.
Overall, this week has been amazing and I've learned a heck of a lot in just 5 days time. So thank you iTheatrics, MTI, DreamWorks, and anyone else who helped make this workshop possible and letting me experience this once in a lifetime opportunity!
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