Musical Theatre (7) - Character songs

We began this lesson with a quick vocal warm up and then we all performed the songs we worked on last lesson, as well as other songs. After our warm up, we all sang through "Seasons of Love" just to keep it fresh and polished and to show Tom. Tom is an ex-student who did Rent last year as his Workshop Unit. This was the production of Rent I did as Maureen; Tom played Roger. As Tom was Roger, he stood in for Henry (who won't be back until after half-term).

The next song I did after "Seasons of Love" was "Take Me or Leave Me" with Alice. Despite the fact that we have never sang this together, we were quite happy with how we did. We both knew our character intentions throughout this song and which parts were ours. However, where I am used to being Maureen, I was not confident with Joanne's harmony for the final "me". Therefore, for today we just sang it in unison. What I shall do before singing this again, is listen to the ending to ensure that I am confident on my harmony. What Alice and I will do is actually practise this together to ensure that we are both confident on the parts that overlap each other.

After singing "Take Me or Leave Me", I sang "Tango: Maureen" with Cameron. This went surprisingly well bearing in mind that we had only got the first half of the song sorted on Monday. On the whole, we are confident with the vocals, all we need to do is sing through it a couple more times together to build our confidence. Cameron will learn the lyrics off by heart, and I shall go over my harmony for the final part of the song so I feel more confident with it. Once we have sung it a few more times together, we will be able to start setting the piece and learning to tango! The image on the right shows the lyrics to "Take Me or Leave Me" and I have annotated them with where the harmonies are and character intentions.

The final song that I sang today was "La Vie Boheme". Today was a big improvement on last time we sang it, as nobody was using lyrics and we got into the mood of the piece more.