Rehearsal Report--6/20

It was a rerun rehearsal of last week.  The actress playing Anne was not contacted to see if she could attend, so we confirmed old ground and started to get a little more in depth with the characters and individual moments throughout the B- and C- plot.  There was a lot of cleaning up and clarification of blocking.



Fenton has been progressing nicely on his big speeches.  He's becoming more deft at visualizing the text for the audience.  He's at the point where he is nearly memorized with 45 line verse monologue, and it's flowing pretty nicely.  He's is getting into the same rhythmic breathing/cadence, but that will go away upon memorization.

Some real funny blocking with Rugby, Caius and Quickly was established.  I love it when a minor chracter like Rugby gets a chance to shine and take the moment.  The real plus is that it is plainly there in the script only heightened by a good actor.  There's some really good stuff coming from Rugby and Simple being children.

Some real interesting dynamics were happening in the Evans/Shallow/Slender scenes.  Slender is heading in a dumb blonde direction and it is working really well.  Shallow and Evans are at times conspiring against him and that is a nice docotomy.

Spent the last part of rehearsal working with Evans on dialect (a little bit) and more on playing the punctuation.  He was definitely getting the hang of it.  We are searching for the right dialect instruction technique.  I found some clips Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill) and directed him there.  I thought I had a Welsh accent tape, but alas I do not.

Issues raised:
--Dialect keys for Welsh
--Hymn choice for Evans?  Letting him blaze that trail a bit.

Prep for next time:
--Review all Garter scenes and determine how to use the Garter Ensemble; a lot of this is new blocking for everybody.
--Costume Notes
--Find Welsh guidelines