Hi Marian here, October has been a bit of a busy month for me, so I missed a couple of rehearsals in the last few weeks, which is never ideal as panto rehearsals are particularly busy and fast paced. I was therefore very pleased to see that we were doing dance recaps this week on everything we’ve been taught so far!
Panto always has more songs and dances than any regular musicals, so if you don’t keep going over them it can be quite a daunting task to get everything up to standard in the last couple of months before show week. It’s always fun to run through the dances too, as it shows you how much you’ve already covered and it’s a free fitness class! Jo has choreographed some really fun, upbeat numbers to get our audiences toe tapping already and there’s more to come!
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that as one of the longstanding members of the group, the energetic dances are getting to be more challenging each year and Jo certainly take no prisoners with her choreography! It takes a while to build your stamina back up after the Summer break and dance recaps are always both mentally and physically tiring, but they give you a good indication of how much homework you need to do and mostly it’s a good surprise to realise how much you can remember! We all left the Monday rehearsal tired and aching, but very excited about performing these dance to our audiences.
We were joined by our fab tech team on Monday as SM Alex Snow, Lighting designer Matt Herd, Set genius extraordinaire Matt McManus and general nuisance Warren McWilliams started to work through all the technical aspects of the show to make sure everything we want to happen will and we’ll ensure everything looks great, runs smoothly and there’s magic throughout the show.
On Wednesday it was time to learn two new songs and as usual we were all blown away by the collective sound that such a talented cast can produce – even if we do say so ourselves! Mike is very clever with his musical arrangements and his patience with us when we all get a bit overexcited and rowdy is commendable! I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the songs we learnt made a few members of the group emotional (in a good way!) – I won’t name names though to spare their blushes and protect their image!
It’s lovely to have new and old faces again in the cast for this show and the newly crowned Mrs Wall has been helping with the team bonding by running the SMP tuck shop and setting fun quizzes to do in the break – this week’s quiz was based on Musical titles, so no surprise that everyone got top marks!
The Mermaids also had their first costume fitting on Wednesday which was top secret, we all can’t wait to see what our magical costume team of Fay, Ellie and the very talented Debbie Sandys have come up with! Needless to say we won;t look like this.
The show is definitely starting to take shape and if it’s half as much fun to watch as it is to rehearse then you need to get booking your tickets now, so you don’t miss out on all the fun!
You can book your tickets by clicking below.
