Hamlet The Musical, But It's 6 Times Shorter, With Lions & Less Death

BREAKING NEWS Progress has been made in the realm of Lion King; The Musical!

Today, Thursday the 16th of November, in preparation for our lesson, we had to get changed into our P.E gear as today, we would be doing a lot of moving around.
First things first we started off with a simple 8 count warmup with Miss Richardson and our other warm-up that is "Mini mini ma, Mini mini ma, mini mini, ma ma ma ma ma" repeated over and over. This both really help with singing higher parts and overall warming up my voice. I find the mini ma one is an easy way of warming up.

Here comes the difficult part of our warmups. Yesterday Miss Richardson taught us a new warmup. Everybody can recognise Rossini: William Tell Overture: Final even if they don't know the name. Just to prove that, click here to hear it. It's the iconic race tune! Anyway, at first this may simple, but try it yourself. How we do it is, first we try the song with the words, which goes: "Papa's gotta ping pong, gotta ping pong ball" to the tune. Seems easy right?  It's about to get harder. Then we add in some arms, starting with your right arm, start with it up then pull it down to the beat, a simple 1, 2, 1, 2. Again, still seems easy. Then with your left arm, start with it up, then pull it so you're pointing to the side, then down. Now put it all together. It's super hard to sing and control your arms at the same time, but when you are doing musical theatre, it's crucial to be able to do multiple things at once.

After we were all warmed up, we played Space Jump, an improve game where the main aspect is to have one person start out doing something like, let's say, bouncing a ball. After a random amount of time a judge or teacher says "Freeze" or "Space Jump." That person then freezes for the next person to come up and create a new scene based on the pose the last person was in. (Because I'm so bad at descriptions, here's a video with an example, and probably a better explanation.)

Meagan trying to deal with Nathan being so melodramatic during Space Jump. 

Finally, we moved onto some more choreography. This time to Hakuna Matata. Today it was super simple! Starting out with a box step while clicking, playing hand games in time to the music and ending with a Super Mario Jump!










See below a video of the choreography

Here's an image of me derping out and looking at the camera while trying to focus on the choreography all at the same time.

Summer and I working hard at the Choreography

I found being able to do the hand clapping in time a bit difficult at first, as Chloe (my partner for practice) didn't really know what she was doing at first, but then I taught her and she was fine!

Ooh, I forgot to mention, the cast list went up today! (the names in brackets are the understudies)

Unfortunately, I did not get my own proper role. But, I am Daniels understudy as Mufasa! So I've got to be ready to step in at any time, just in case something bad happens to him, that I totally had no part in... Anyway! I'm proud of those who did get a role. Of course, I was upset that I didn't get a role that I wanted, but quickly after I had gotten over it, I realised I'm not always going to get the role I want. 

Something cool regarding the roles though, I'm going to be apart of the Chorus, which is a separate group from the ensemble that I guess will be doing harmonies?

As I don't really have my own role, I was hoping, on the night, that I could be like apart of the whole makeup and costume scene. I feel that because I have such an interest in making my own costumes and have experience doing makeup that it would something I was quite good at as well as being really committed to it! Jaime, Jakita and I have already been so intrigued by the scene that we've created a slideshow full of idea's and inspirations. It's still a work in progress but here it is!

I can't wait to see the final product!