Musical Theatre (8) - Character songs

In today's lesson we continued working on random pieces.

The first piece we worked on was "Santa Fe". Originally, this was just Lewis, Cameron, Owen and Henry. However, we decided that everyone would sing in this to add more depth in terms of harmonies. I taught Warren, Alice, Tyler and Will then "oo"'s that go underneath the melody and then the harmonies we come in on. What we have left to do for this piece is to teach Henry what he has missed and to stage it.

We then sang through "La Vie Boheme". This went really well as everybody is off of script. However, some people are really slurring their words on the fast verse: "Bisexuals, transsexuals, homo sapiens...". This is either because people don't know it or can't cope with the speed - either way I think we need to break it down and sing through it slowly and then build the speed up. Other than learning the words and polishing the vocal side of it, all we have left to do is put Henry in to it and to stage it.

Cameron and I also sang "Tango: Maureen" today. This was a lot better than last week, although there is still one section that our harmony isn't quite right - it doesn't clash, but it isn't the correct one. Also, I am still not overly confident on the harmony "you pretend to believe her but in the end you can't leave her". All we have left to do is ensure our harmonies are accurate and set the dance to it and the blocking of the speaking sections. We also need to learn the introduction (depending on what version of the song we are doing).

Alice and I sang through "Take Me or Leave Me" a couple of times today. The first time didn't go so well as we kept singing the wrong parts and the harmonies weren't quite working - we just sang in unison when we felt the harmonies not working. However, Owen and Lewis got up to sing "I'll Cover You" so in the meantime I listened to the harmonies of the last section. On our second attempt, the harmonies were a lot stronger and we kept to our own parts, however, we could do with singing this together a few more times and just "note bash" it (i.e. just work on the parts we are struggling with) rather than just singing the whole song.

To finish this lesson we sang through "Rent". We didn't expect it to be great as we've only sung through it once but this, unfortunately, wasn't as good as we had hoped. We can't really do anything more on this song until people have learned it.