I’m working on the part of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.  I don’t have a good process for learning lines of dialogue and find it easier to learn songs.  It’s easy enough to find recordings of songs and I have made a playlist of all my songs, and a rehearsal track playlist.  I was alarmed to see that the songs I’m involved in take about an hour.  That’s a lot of singing.

I have been trying various things to learn the dialogue lines.  I record them, listen to them, write them, recite them, and oddly at times I dream them.  Every morning I wake up with the lines or a song stuck in my head.  I have until the 17th September to be off-book so I need make sure I work on this every day.

Tonight we begin the fight choreography.  Should be interesting finding out how Sweeney is going to throw me in the oven.

 

During the rehearsal break for Sweeney Todd, I decided to attend a couple of training courses.  The first one was a Level 1 & Level 2 Estill Vocal Course.  This was a wonderfully practical course that was very well structured.  I imagine it will take me a long time to master the things I was taught, but I will practice once I get back to Tokyo.  I am very happy that I went as it’s been a long time since I felt that anything I was doing vocally was going to significantly improve my voice.  It also gave me insight into what I need to do in order to help other people with their voices.

I attended a course on Directing for Theatre at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  This course was not as structured as the vocal course and there was a lot of it that I already knew.  It was good, however, to consolidate the information I had learned before and to get to see other people direct.  Directing does seem to be one of those things you can only learn from doing and from watching others.  I have plans to direct a musical next year, so hopefully I’ll be able to use some of the things I learnt.