Hello and welcome to my second installment of the Pirate blog.
We’re roughly half way through the rehearsal schedule and I have to say I’m really pleased with how everything is going. Thanks to the hard work of the cast and the team we’re still on schedule and although we’ve been moving at a rapid pace, the cast are doing their homework and whats been set has been retained and is looking great. This week saw us set the ‘Policeman’s Lot’ and ‘Climbing Over Rocky Mountains’ numbers, whilst moving onto singing through Cat Like Tread and the adjoining music with the men.
We only have a few bits left to learn and the whole show will have been blocked and sung through. It was always my aim to try and get everything set and learnt early and everyone has risen to the challenge. This means we’ll have lots of rehearsal time to run the show, polishing and adding extra little bits all the while.
On a personal note this show is proving an enjoyable challenge for me, the nature of the show means that I’ve had to do rather more choreography than I would normally, resulting in me locking myself in a room and fighting or dancing with myself. Thankfully when it all gets too much for me Fay’s on hand to make up some proper dancing.
Our version will be unlike many other ‘Pirates’ before it. Myself, Fay and Erika decided from the onset that we didn’t want this show to have a stuffy or concert feel to it. So often you see productions of the show where all the emphasis is on the singing and little consideration given to anything else. In our eyes this leaves a rather boring show. We want ours to be a real triple threat.
As the show is out of copyright it’s rather liberating as it means we can really put our spin on things. We’ve taken a much more MT approach to our version, we’ll let you be the judge, but we believe what we have is a much funnier, more entertaining version of the show with a modern feel. The show has so much scope for humour and we’re doing all we can to pack our version full of it, we’ve come up with some great characters and it’s great to see the cast develop these each week in rehearsals.
The next few weeks see us set ‘cat like tread’ and learn the finale section of act 2 then tie up the loose ends and duets which will mean we can start running the show.
I do hope you come to see the show, forget any preconceptions you may have of it, what we’re offering is a fresh fun take on a classic.
Pirates of Penzance runs from 7th-10th June and tickets are available to buy through the Millfield box office here:
