First workshop with Director

My target: To pick the scenes that will be used within our 20 minutes of Grease.

In one of my first workshops for Grease we worked with a Director and condensed the Grease musical in order to make it roughly 20 minutes long for our showcase. In order to do this we first had to decide what plot we wanted and what character’s stories we wanted to follow. Although different characters have great songs like Rizzos’ There Are worse things I could do’, we chose to stick with the story of Danny and Sandy. This meant that our musical had to start with the ensemble song Summer Nights. We all felt this was a great song to include as it is extremely character based and would be able to show off our ability to act within song. It also meant that we could convey the plot to the audience directly though the lyrics and not need to include anything of Danny and Sandy at the beach at the beginning of the musical. After this we split the rest of our musical into scenes, the next being Danny and Sandy meet, then the sleep over that the girls have when ‘Freddy My Love’ is sang in order for someone to have a solo. Next would be ‘Hopelessly Devoted’ which would give another opportunity for a solo and tells the audience that sandy loves Danny but doesn’t feel like he loves her back. After than we will include Hand Jive as it allows for an opportunity for choreography and to showcase that we can act, dance and sing at the same time. We will have ‘You’re The One That I Want’ as the finale of Grease. When piecing all of the scenes together we knew that we would have to include dialogue in order for the plot to make sense, because of this we tasked ourselves to look through the script in our next workshop and find all the libretto we wanted to add. At the end of this workshop we chose to have a small cast, so that the people involved would be more reliable and so that we have to challenge ourselves with multi rolling. In order to play to our strengths, we decided that Ramy would Play Danny as he is the most confident in his acting and singing ability, We would have Ellie as Sandy within Summer Nights and then multi roll as Marty, Rebecca as Frenchy, Erin as Rizzo, and then myself as Marty in Summer nights and Then Sandy for the end.  We decided this Multi-rolling would work so that I would be able to sing a solo section too. 

I feel that we reached this target by selection songs that would help to create a smooth flowing narrative together.  The target for the next workshop is to find some dialogue that could link these songs and scenes together.