Musical Theatre (24) - Act Two & Audacity

In this lesson we ran the whole of Act Two from beginning to end. What we desperately need to do is learn the dialogue between all of the songs to ensure that the songs flow better from one to the other. By having the appropriate dialogue between musical numbers, not only does the audience get a better understanding of the plot, but this also enables us time to move any set on or off stage.

Our feedback from Mr McKay about "La Vie Boheme" was mainly to do with movement, and that we need to keep the energy going the entire time. However, our other note for this number was to ensure that we know all of the words for the "bisexuals, transsexuals" part. I also feel like we need to articulate more here to make sure that the lines are clear.

Our main note from the teachers was to ensure that we know all of our lines and how the songs go! We also have to set "Without You", "I'll Cover You (reprise)" and "Goodbye Love" still, but apart from these three, I think we have pretty much staged everything else. Mine and Alice's note for "Take Me or Leave Me" was "boom". They said that they were really happy with how we acted it and the energy we had put in to it - they liked our character relationship too and how we varied our proxemics when our emotions and intensities of emotions changed dramatically. However, I am still not overly confident on the harmonies for this number, so I need to listen to them more.

There is a section of dialogue in "Goodbye Love" between Maureen and Joanne. Due to us cutting a lot of Act Two, I personally felt that this was really not necessary; I also feel that it takes away from the main action. It was not used in the movie version of Rent so it is clearly not essential to the story. Therefore, I explained my thinking to the class and told them that I would edit the backing track on audacity so we don't have a long section of music in the middle. The top left image shows me putting the track on to audacity, whilst the top right image shows the track after I made the cut in the track. I halved the instrumental section in the middle which the dialogue is spoken over. I thought this would be appropriate as I left enough music for the characters that are not needed in the rest of the scene to leave on. As Alice and I aren't doing the dialogue, I thought that we could look at each other (whilst still being emotional from the funeral), make a smile to comfort each other, and then hug to show that we have forgiven each other - then we would leave, before the next part of the song. The bottom left image print screen shows me fading out the instrumental part to ensure there isn't an abrupt stop before the next part of the music comes in. The bottom right image shows that the track was saved and exported successfully.