Christmas Community Concert

Monday 26th September 2022

This was the start of our Christmas carol singing where we taught by Tom, our task was to learn a 15 minute piece for a The Muppet's: Christmas carol songs to perform at the globe for a Christmas concert. We started off with a couple of voice warmups to get us ready for the singing most of the warmups were based on rhythm and working on going high and low. We were then told what our first song was which was called 'Scrooge'. We had lyrics and the music in background to keep us on beat and remind us how its sung. Tom started off by playing the beginning tune on the piano then we were challenged to have more of a rough voice for the song because that's how its sung on the film because it shows how feared we are of scrooge. After learning a couple of the verses we got asked if there was a group of us wanting to go at the front and sing the first verse together. I got volunteered to go towards the front by my friend Will, which sort of pushed me out my comfort zone because I don't really sing in front of a lot of people. However, it helped me become a lot more confident in myself. We then started the blocking section of the song which was a challenge as I had not done something like this before. At the start, since it was all new, the timing was very fast for something I had never done before meaning I was a little slow getting into position because I had no idea what was going on. In today's lesson I felt out of my comfort zone a little but because I don't really like people to know I can sing but I managed to fit well into the piece we were given and step out of that awkwardness and be confident in myself to pull this off with everyone else. 

Monday 10th October 2022

We continued on our 15 minute segment of 'A Muppet's: Christmas Carol', in this lesson, we started off with the warmups we had done before to warm our vocals up and get us ready to sing. We were given another two songs to learn from this lesson aswell 'One more sleep till Christmas' (which ended up becoming a solo) and 'It feels like Christmas,' which in the end we didn't do so our time dropped from 15 minutes to an 8 minute segment where we would be doing the other two songs. These songs were more lighthearted and soft instead of the rough tone from the song we did the previous week. I found this to be easier than the 'scrooge' song because I was able to know what to expect from this task. 

Monday 17th October 2022

For this lesson Tom's aim was to start to polish the blocking for the song 'Scrooge' because we hadn't finished it all and in certain places it was still a bit sloppy and most of us were either out of time because we had to run far in the 8 seconds we got to get to a certain position or we were all just out of sync with one another. I decided to be near the back when we all bunch up so I tried to stay as far left as possible because that's where we had to run to. I made the choice of moving from my starting spot and walking straight backwards and queuing up behind Adam and Emie while I wait for Morgan to serve us, I had the idea of getting served and making my way over to Will and handing him one of the drinks I had gotten the only problem was with it being a fast paced song I would only have a certain amount of time before Scrooge (who was Jamie) walked past and scared us so I had to change my idea to just waiting to being served. After being served I would drop to the floor in fear as Scrooge walked past the groups one at a time, then he would turn around at a certain point and scream at us which made us run to that bunch which we had a count of 8 to perfect and get there. We started to move onto the lighter tone of the song but the problem was majority of us hadn't learnt the song lyrics so there was a lot of mumbling and a couple of predominant people who were progressively louder than the rest because they had learnt it. So Tom started to sing us through the lyrics so that we could perfect that first before we could even try and finish off the blocking, after managing to get us all to know we moved onto spacing after bunch where we had two semi circles (I was in the back) and we had to pass through the centre semi circle and then pass back through. With there being a lot of us and some people missing each week we had to keep changing who was going through the gaps till we finalised it in weeks to come.  

We then had a rehearsal at the globe where we watched by the other groups that were also part of the Christmas concert to get us ready for our performance. We watched two other performances before us before we then practiced ours. Our performances fell on the 29th and the 30th of November we had dress rehearsals in the college beforehand on the 29th to make sure we all had our costumes ready for it. We were then told to meet at the globe at a certain time to get ready for when it would begin. We were sat at the top with all the other groups waiting for our turn while the audience were sat at the bottom. Before it was our turn we would make our way down the stairs and into the side part behind the curtains where we would wait for our cue to go onto stage. Before us there was a lad singing so we made sure to all get into our lines ready to get onto stage in the order we needed to be on. When blackout happened we all moved into our positions and got ready to sing and do our blocking routine to the 2 songs. It was the exact same on the 30th of November but this time we joined the higher education team at the end for one final song where some of musical theatre students came on too early and walked off or were stood in the middle chatting away.