Workshop (14) - Pirelli entrance // Wait // Pirelli death

Pirelli Entrance:   To begin this lesson, we ran the scene where Dan appears as Pirelli for the first time. We are happy with this scene now as it is cemented and we know what we are doing with it. We wanted Dan's entrance to be very melodramatic to form a contrast to when he reveals himself as Daniel O'Higgins, for comic value.

"Wait":   As this is the next scene after Pirelli's entrance (that doesn't involve our extra cast members), we moved on to the song "Wait" and the short scenes either side of it. The first time we tried the song, it didn't feel right as Rob stayed in the chair the entire time. As the song involves me basically telling him to calm down, we are going to stage the song now with him moving about frantically and randomly, but stopping now and again when I tell him to calm down. We only ran the song once as I am still trying to develop my character fully. Since our first lesson on Sweeney Todd, I have been workshopping my characters characteristics to try to develop my own version fully. However, I have found this quite difficult - and it will affect how I perform my songs, but especially this one - therefore, I shall do some research into different ways the role has been played and then do a character profile. However, we also developed the scene with Tom that happens directly after this song. We workshopped where he would enter from - we knew he would have to run up the stairs, but we didn't know where he would enter from - therefore we tried a few ways. We got him to run in from the hall door and up the stairs. This worked well as the audience could see it happening and it was very sudden. We then tried him running from the back of the hall to the stairs, through the aisle in the audience. This worked better than the first time as it came as more of a shock to the audience and it suggested he was running through the marketplace (instead of through the pie shop).

Pirelli Death:   Pirelli's death is the first death that is shown in the play and (as far as we know) the first person that Sweeney has killed. We workshopped his death as we wanted it to be very dramatic as the scene leading up to Pirelli's death has been very tense and the death is the climatic part of the scene. Therefore, we wanted to workshop this death in three different ways and then pick our favourite, so it is the best we could possibly do:

1. Mocking:   Pirelli would sit in the barber's chair being very presumptuous calling him Benjamin Barker, and threatening to tell Beadle. Pirelli would be very overconfident by sitting there and not even turning round to bother looking at him. Sweeney, would then pick up his razor and slit his throat. This would be an understandable way for Sweeney to kill him, but difficult to look realistic with fake blood as the slitting would be done facing the audience.
2. Strangling:   We discussed a similar set up to the first idea, but instead of having his throat slit, we tried having him strangled (by the belt used to sharpen the razors). This definitely worked a lot better than the first way. Dan controls the supposed strangling by holding the belt too, with the backs of his hands against his neck and holding the belt out slightly. This means that the death scene looks realistic still but is perfectly safe.
3. Slashing:   We tried the idea of throat slitting again, but this time Dan would face Rob (and therefore have his back to the audience). Dan would then face the front (after Rob has made a slashing motion by his neck) and would hold his neck, squeezing a blood pack (that wouldn't be visible to the audience) by his neck to make it look like his throat had been split. We thought this could look really good if done right, but we felt that it could be risky as the audience might see the blood pack and it could get quite messy.

We decided that we would go with the second way we tried as it looked really realistic and was also the safest option too.