Our star student, Christina, was not present today at St. Joseph’s rehearsal! Jacob and I took turns playing both the Clown and Maria (Mario, for a male actor). We had a small group today: Charles, Rufus, Dale, Jacob 2, and Talia were the only students to return. We immediately jumped into performing the entire act, and managed to complete two full run-throughs.

The first run-through went well, and we finished at 14 minutes in total. This was promising, but we have to consider that Christina was not there to read Clown–and she sometimes struggles to get her lines out. We will consider one final cutting of some of her lines, and some of Olivia’s (Talia) lines. But I think we will be within our time bounds for the actual performance, especially considering that Jacob 2 said he may not be there (meaning one of us may take his role, which would speed up the performance, if only marginally).

A bulk of our time was spent today on staging and practicing moving on and off stage. While most of the students did well and responded to the cues appropriately (Charles, Jacob, and Rufus did well), others struggled, largely because they were having a hard time staying focused and reading along with the script while their peers were on stage. I think it would be beneficial for one of us to be in each of the offstage rooms with the students to help them follow along and give them their cues if we think they might miss them. Another component of staging we worked on today was the sword fight in the first scene. I took a moment at the end of the rehearsal to remind our sword fighters to show anger as they entered stage and began the sword fight.

Overall, I felt today was really productive, although I wish Christina had returned. Hopefully she comes back on Monday!