Production Manager's Notes - Week 3 - Day 2

I added a slideshow of rehearsal pictures onto the blog yesterday so that they are more easily accessible and so that I am no longer cluttering my posts with multiple photographs from each day.

Today's rehearsal started with Andrew and James showing the rest of us what they had done when they worked independently on their scene yesterday. They had added some nice moments, such as Nick going to sit in George's chair, but they still need to be careful of the jokes as some of them are lost because of the delivery.

Abbie then got the cast to do a warm-up. They started by walking around the room, shouting lines from the script. They then moved on to the greeting game, where they walk around the room and when Abbie shouts stop, they have to greet each other in a certain way - such as, best friends, biggest fan, blind date, drunk, an animal, hate each other, in love and as their characters.
She then got them to stand opposite their partners, across the room from each other and say their lines to each other, starting quietly and getting louder. As they got louder, they moved closer to each other. This helped us to see how George and Martha can be around each other when they start arguing.

We then did a full run of the play for our supervisor (Richard Talbot). He gave us some notes after the run. His main notes were; what is our interpretation of the piece? He suggested that we should either find a section from the rest of the play or devise a section to end the play, rather than ending on a cliffhanger, as some members of the audience may feel like the play hasn't ended and may be left wondering what happens next. He also suggested that the actors try to talk with very exaggerated accents just to see how far we can push them until it gets ridiculous.
Abbie's notes on this run were to make the characters much bigger and to work on the parts where lines were dropped.

We discussed the ending of the play and Katie had a good idea of what we could do. She suggested that Nick and Honey should leave after George exits and that Martha should shout "GEORGE!" up the stairs. Abbie wasn't keen on leaving it there and added that maybe George and Martha should have a bit of an arguement and then start flirting, before the play ends with a kiss.
Abbie is going to work on the ending tonight and it will be rehearsed tomorrow in time for our supervisor to watch another section of our rehearsal.

We then ran from the guests entrance to Martha and Honey's exit with really big characters. This seemed to give the actors more energy than they had previously and made the scene more interesting to watch.

After talking about hair and makeup, we decided that we will test it all out on Friday and if we can't make Martha's hair reflect her character, we will go back to the idea of having a wig for her, which we will buy over the weekend.