Monday 29th October 2018

I wasn’t in the lesson on Tuesday because I was ill, so I decided to research my character so that when I came back into lesson I would have a developed understanding of my character, which would benefit my later rehearsals. When looking at my character I discovered that she begins as a “floozy” she seems a bit dim-witted but is desperate for fame, so desperate that she’ll do anything to get it, like sleep with someone. As an audience you’re made to believe that she’s just and innocent, fame driven girl, but then as the plot develops we find out that she’s so fame driven that she’d even kill for her desires. We find out about her devoted husband Amos and how she really doesn’t care about him, but he would do anything for Roxie, even cover for her when she murdered Fred. This wickedness is another part of her character. There’s several layers to this character which I believe is going to be hard for me to portray, it’s going to be a challenge but I’m willing to put the work in order to portray this as successfully as I can.

Chicago was inspired by the real-life 1924 murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, Annan was the basis for Roxie Hart. While living in Kentucky, Annan married her first husband, Perry Stephens. They were divorced, and Beulah then met car mechanic Albert "Al" Annan. They went to Chicago together, where they were married on March 29, 1920. There, Albert found work as a mechanic at a garage and Beulah eventually became a bookkeeper at Tennant's Model Laundry. At the laundry she met Harry Kalstedt and began an affair. On April 3, 1924, in the married couple's bedroom, Annan shot Kalstedt in the back. According to her initial story, they had been drinking wine Kalstedt had brought over, and got into an argument. There was a gun on the bed and both reached for it, but Beulah got it first and shot Kalstedt while he was putting on his coat and hat. Originally when I was looking over the lines I was worried about having to do a Chicago accent but now from looking at the background of the character I should really focus on a Kentucky accent, due to her originating from there. Accents are definitely not my strong point, however if I want to make my character believable I need to add the accent.

Before we sung anything on Thursday we worked on warming up our voices, I never really understood the use of warming up the body along with the voice because I didn’t think it was really relevant. However Sam told us that the body and the voice work alongside one another. This idea is that if your body is tense you’ll be unable to breathe correctly thus straining your voice.  You don’t want to put a strain on your vocal chords because you failed to loosen up the muscles. The first part of the warm up began with us walking around and finding a random partner and then alternatively counting from 1 to 5 and then swapping over the numbers we counted. This began to warm up our voices gently but it helped to wake up our brains and engage us into what we were about to do. I found that this really made me focus on what I was being asked to do and I felt that it mentally prepared me for the lesson and engaged my brain. Afterwards we starts with humming some scales, starting with a hum is a gentle push into the warm up as we don’t want to go straight into singing as it could still strain our voices. The idea of going up and down the scales is to ensure that every part of our voice is warm this is both the chest voice and the head voice. I never even knew that there were two different kinds; I just thought that there was low and high. However I’ve discovered that I’m definitely more confident with using my chest voice, I feel like I’m able to project my voice much better than when I’m using my head voice. I often struggle with the transition from chest voice to head voice, which I think is something I need to work on. However my song “Nowadays” remains in chest voice, so although this isn’t important for this particular part I feel like it shall benefit my strength in singing if I can do this.

We then moved onto singing up and down the scale but with different sounds, for example the sound “Za” comes from the front of your mouth, however the sound “Na” comes from the throat, so this exercise helps to warm up the muscles in our mouths as well as our voices. Once we’d finished warming up we were told to get into 4 groups depending on whether you were a soprano, alto, tenor or base, I had absolutely no idea what he was going on about. When he explained to me that a soprano was a high singer and a base was a low singer I could gage where I thought I was, so originally I placed myself in the alto group. “All that jazz” was the song we were working on, and there’s one harmony in the piece that the company sing, when the harmony was divided and I heard the alto bit I heard that bit was quite low, which was definitely using our chest voices. Even though I’m comfortable with my chest voice I really struggled to find the note to start the harmony, as naturally I just wanted to sing the tune. However I stuck to it and attempted to find it along with the other members of my group.

During the drama lesson we began by doing a physical warm up as Nadine was coming in to finish the choreography for “All that Jazz” as they didn’t get it finished on Tuesday. The warm up began with the usual stretching and working through the feet in order to prevent muscle strain, but towards the end of the warm up we were told that we were going to multitask and warm up our bodies and our voices at the same time. This consisted of small jumps on the spot whilst singing the 1,12,1 song, which also involves going up the scale. This was incredibly difficult. You couldn’t quite get enough air in to breathe and sing at the same time, it definitely worked on improving our intercostal muscles to intake more air at a time. Then they ran through the choreography, being a dancer I am able to pick things up fairly quickly, so I just watched for the first run through, then Nadine went over the very end bit so I decided it would be beneficial for me to join in and get into a space where I believed I would fit in so that I would only need to focus on the first bit. After this was done they went from the beginning again, so I watched the beginning and joined in with the final bit. Then more choreography was added onto the end so I learnt this as well. Then we went from the beginning again and this time I joined in. I feel like this whole process strengthened my ability to pick up choreography quickly, considering that I took it into my own hands and figured out a way to learn the choreography that would be beneficial and efficient for me and the rest of the class, because it would’ve been pointless to make the teacher go over what they’d done, it would just hinder the rehearsal process.

The targets I’m going to set myself for this unit are:

1.       To try and develop and extend my knowledge in and around singing.

2.       To really think in depth about my characterisation and think outside the box a little bit.

I’ve decided to set myself these targets in order to help me develop my knowledge in the world of musical theatre, specifically singing as I know it’s a weakness of mine. The reason I decided to set myself a target of thinking in depth about my characterisation is because, I feel like I often forget about this key part and I don’t develop my character until the last few rehearsals and this isn’t good enough.