Rehearsal Report--6/22

Servants dropping Falstaff

A transformative rehearsal tonight with the ladies Ford and Page.  We were focusing on the A-plot and the two assignation scenes primarily--blocking the servants and Robin into the sequences.  Then afterwards I focused on the two merry wives.

The blocking went fine.  It was our first rehearsal with the actress who plays Robin, and I think she's going to be quite funny.  The servants (now officially nameed Juanita and Roberta) are two of the really fine adult women actresses who auditioned.  I have given them the chioce to improv their parts as much as they desire.  I trust both women and know they won't steal focus.

Rehearsal Report--6/21

We had a great reheasal with the Garter Ensemble.  We blocked them not only into their scenes but did the big broad passes of the two "ballet" numbers.  We worked out some great business for most of them, and will develop things for the others to do.  I want each of these ladies to be featured at one point or another.  But the focus last night was to get the big broad brush strokes.  We'll do detail work in the next couple of weeks.

We also blocked all of the material in the Garter Inn with principals.  We were missing a few players do to conflicts, but we were successful in doing everything that I wanted to accomplish with the principals.  We were even able to run a few scenes twice.

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.

Rehearsal Report--6/16

Tonight we focused on the A-plot.  The duping of Falstaff by Ford (Brooke) and the merry wives.  This is a great groups of experienced actors with a mix of exposure to playing Shakespeare.  They took to it very well.  I had abandoned the concept of reading through scenes first at the previous rehearsal and we jumped right in.  We got a fair amount accomplished.  In fact we were just one Falstaff/Quickly scene and one Falstaff/Ford scene away from doing all of their blocking.

Verse vs. Prose--Playing the Punctuation

I talked earlier about the choices Shakespeare consciously made in determining whether his text should be in verse or prose.  He was one of the first playwrights to embrace the prose form, and Merry Wives of Windsor is essentially a prose comedy with less than 20% of the play in verse form.  But why choose to make this essentially a prose comedy?

He usually makes prose the language form of the commoners or the lower class in his plays, and almost every character in Merry Wives is firmly in the middle class.  In fact, Falstaff is the person of the highest class in the play, but unless he is quoting a poet, he never speaks in verse.  Prose sounds more naturalistic, more common than verse, primarily because it doesn't stick to the strict form of blank verse.  There is also a decided lack of heightened language in the prose sections.