This week I got my first scene for the exam, which is Act 1 Scene 8 of Blood Brother, and the character I'm going to play is Mrs Johnston ("The Mother"). After presenting the scene with my partner to the teacher, I started to collect information about the character. I'd never seen nor read the whole play before this course, but I'd read several summaries about the story for the auditions, and I also saw some videos of a couple of scenes/songs, so I had a rough idea of who is who, but it is technically nothing when you're given a role to play. I've already started to read the play, but I'll reread it during the weekend, because now that I have my character I'll be able to focus on her and take notes while reading.
Along with those pieces of information that I got from my teachers, here is what I have so far. This is all about the character in general, not the scene I was given.
The facts:
* working class; housekeeper/cleaning lady of Mrs Lyons
* very young (about 30 years old)
* mother of 7 children (plus expecting a pair of twins in the beginning of the play)
* religious (Catholic)
* her husband left her
* family-oriented; loves her children more than anything
* sells one of her twins to Mrs Lyons because she can't afford to raise him up
Some conclusions:
* working class → very poor → agrees to sell Edward (doesn't know it's illegal)
* single mother of 7 (then 9) children → patient, responsible, maternal, caring, always very tired
Next I started to search for information about the life of the English working class in the 1960s, when the play is set. I mostly used short summaries about England's history, such as this site. I found out that working class people had a low status in society, and they were generally quite ignorant because they were not well educated.
The other thing that I got for the exam is Cell Block Tango from Chicago. I'm going to play the part of Liz ("Pop girl"). We listened to only one version of the song with the group, but I did a bit of research after that at home, and I realised that there is actually lots of different adaptations of the same thing, and most of them are slightly different from each other. I watched a couple of full performances, and so far, I found these two the best:
Stratford High School's Stratford Playhouse, 2014:
I particularly like the choreography of this one, though I think the girl who plays my character is overacting a little bit.
Broadway Backwards, 2015:
Here the set and the costumes are very good, and the way the male actors can deliver these roles is just awesome.
Though I'm mostly an actor, not a singer, I also found the tips of my teacher about using one's singing voice very useful. She said that most of singing coaches focus only on one particular side of their students' singing voice, and, because this sounded quite interesting for me, I googled it at home after that class. I found out that there's actually a great difference between the head voice and the chest voice (some of my sources also said that yodeling, for example, is based on switching from one to the other - that got me into trying to learn how to yodel, by the way). I'm not quite sure I got them right, but when I tried to feel the difference in my voice, I noticed that when I'm using my head voice, I can feel my throat resonating, and when I'm using my chest voice, the it's down in my chest. As a person who only had music lessons at nursery age but was a phonetics and phonology student decades later in the university, I find it quite interesting to discover the connections between the speech organs and singing voice.
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