Super Objectives, Guitar and your Mum!

On Monday Mr. Fearnehough was ill so we progressed as an ensemble and decided to go over the guitar scene once more. This led to the introduction of a running joke, in which the Zanni shout "Your Mum!" every time he speaks of "a special someone". We then came to the scene in which I (as Pantalone) force Rose to go on a date with horrible but rich Mickey. Here we came up with a running joke, in which every time the name Mickey is mentioned the Zanni come on and sing “Hey Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey!”. We also added to my Pantalone character by making me dance while singing “Mickey’s got the money, Mickey’s got the money…”. This is good because it really highlights Pantalone’s obsession with money. The bad side is I have to learn to dance… Bekki led a warm-up which consisted of relaxation. This was good because Theatre is the last lesson of the day and we’re usually too excited.

On Wednesday, Mr. Fearnehough introduced to Stanislavski, particularly to super-objectives. Super-objectives are the overall objectives of anything from scene to character to play and are the most important things for an actor to be focusing on. For example, our play’s super-objective is to make people laugh. My character’s super-objective is to be a tight grouchy git whose only passion in life is money. In this lesson in particular we paid special attention to our super-objectives, which I think was reflected by a slight improvement of everyone’s acting. After this lesson on Stanislavski, we went back to devising our play. Lydia started us off on a stretching workout that nearly finished me, after which we went straight on to the restaurant scene. We developed this further by adding the Zanni as MacDonald’s waiters and Pantalone’s phone call. Lydia helped out a lot as directors in perfecting our reactions, something we are all still struggling with.

On Thursday we went straight into devising, quickly going over the scenes we had already done. This culminated in the inclusion of the Zanni singing “Jack and Rose sittin’ in a tree”. Also, we gave the Macdonald waiters Liverpudlian accents to make them sound funnier, as well as a Tango dance scene in which Rose is thrown about by a narcissistic Mickey. Overall I’m impressed by how much we add to each scene each time we revisit it. Can’t wait for the actual production!