Final Evaluation

The play as a whole turned out to be a very good professional Pantomime. We all really tried hard and pulled it out of the bag in the end. We got the reactions we wanted from the audiences and worked together throughout the whole thing showing our relationships on the stage to be just as close as when we were off of it. We had good audiences and not so good, but we put in as much effort as we could to make each show as good as the previous.

One of my favourite parts of our Pantomime had to be when I was dragged off stage by Wishee Washee and The Genie. It got a lot of laughs and I enjoyed messing about in that particular scene because as well as this I had to speak the words to a song in time to a backing track. Though I do think I could have done so much more in this scene and if I were to go back I would put more melodramatic action into the song and more power behind my voice.

Another part, which I wasn’t in, that I thoroughly enjoyed watching, was the chase scene, where Aladdin is being chased around the stage and through the audience by the police officers. I think the lighting, sound and acting overall was very gripping and amusing in this scene. It made me want to see more and if Aladdin actually managed to get away in the end.

One of my weaknesses at the beginning of this process was breaking the 4^th wall and talking to the audience. I found it hard to come up with what to say in my ad libs also. However, I did overcome this by doing some research and I found things to say and learned how important it was to connect with the audience. By the end, it came to be quite a strength of mine. Although, I did feel bad for scaring the young children, which possibly means I did my job right.

A constant weakness that I had throughout was my lines, not that I forgot them as such, but I would stumble over my words and stutter, for example in one of the shows I stumbled over the word “quickly” and I think the reason for that is because I was rushing to go off stage. It happened quite a lot during the rehearsals but not so much when the actual show went up, though it still happened even then. So, to prevent this from happening I should have possibly done more vocal warm ups and was just confident with the next words that were going to come out of my mouth even if they were going to be wrong.

Added to that, I worked through the challenge of playing Abanazar as a woman when it is traditionally written for a man to play. This was a challenge for me as I had to make the character slightly more feminine to fit in place. I feel I achieved this in the end as I took all direction on board and annotated my script to help me with my performance of the character. For example, the director and I feminised the scene where Abanazar wants to marry the princess, we changed it to Abanazar making the Princess her slave. Also, my body language and hand gestures were womanly, although strong to go with my character, throughout.

Some strengths of mine were that I projected my voice and a pronounced my words well. I had a good pace of speech and was clear with the plot lines that I had to get across. I remembered my lines and cues which helped me and my fellow cast members, as some of their cues would be some of what I had been saying beforehand. I believe I really caught the audience’s attention as I didn’t have to prompt the audience or reinforce what I was saying to get them to heckle me.

Overall, I think I performed to the best of my ability and if I were to go back and change anything I would change each scene individually and look through for things that could add to my character. For example, being more evil or even changing how I laughed or the tone of my voice when I speak to the other characters, I could belittle them more as I think that’s something my character would do.

I also watched back the performance of the recorded Pantomime and reviewed it .Overall I believe we did well but it was not our best performance.

At the end if the prologue scene, with myself and the Spirit of the ring, i noticed that i lighting que to exit off stage was not actually there. This resulted in the end we didn't know when each other were going to exit and we are both meant to exit at the same time, so it ended up look quite messy. However this didn't happen for the rest of the show so it was a minor glitch.

In the view of the set we had an accidentally left bottle on the stage, through some of the performance it was blocked, but it did stick out a bit, but we rectified the situation as soon as possible by making sure that we got it off the stage as quickly and smoothly as possible. It was not necessarily in the way but it definitely wasn't part of the set.

As a negative for myself in this particular performance, I would say that I reacted to some of the opposing lines to early. So gave away what it their line would end up being. For example, at 14.24 I knew I had to do a sarcastic laugh and did it a bit to soon so I didn't give the jokes chance to sink in with the audience. It was a little rushed.

Here is the whole Pantomime which was filmed during a matinee performance...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPatzt2-UTY

Promotion

We needed people to hear about our Pantomime, so, we decided to do a bit of advertising. Here are a few ways in which we did...

We put up posters in and around our local area. Showing the dates, times, and location that it will be shown in.

We also did a photo shoot to go in the local paper.

Here is the article made to go with our photo shoot pictures.

We even hosted a promotional event whereby a few of the cast went to different venues dressed as their character to perform some songs, dances and a scene or two for the public to see. I heard that it went very well and there was a lot of positive feedback.

Another promotion tactic we had was to lower the prices of one or two of the performances, the public love a special offer, including myself.

We also created a trailer which is posted online via YouTube...

Script

Here is my annotated script of Act One...

Rehearsal - Tech Run

We had started to work with tech students. They were working alongside us doing the lights, sound and mics.

We blocked all scenes first, making sure all cues were in place which I wrote onto my script to remind me. Some of the sound and lighting were quite tricky, but when put together looked really good. For example, here is a scene that I very much enjoy watching but I wasn’t actually in this particular scene. However, technically the lighting and sound are shown here to best advantage.

As rehearsals went on it started to look more and more like a proper professional pantomime which was one of our goals. We also had our costumes on which really got us all into the zone of panto. We were a stronger production altogether.

Singing

We all enjoyed performing the songs being used for our panto, however, we needed some more practice of how to really project our voicse and start getting into the song properly, acting it as well as singing.

Here is a clip of us practicing a different song that isn't being used in the Pantomime. we did this as a little competition for boys and girls. The brief was to show passion and sing in the right pitch at the same time.

We went over this a few times then had to use the skills we had learnt in the songs that we are actually using in our pantomime.

Characters off of the stage...

Characters in your own home?!

We were set a task by the director, of doing a video of each of us being our character out of rehearsal time. For exampl,e at home doing your day to day routine or at a supermarket shopping and whoever 

had the best video would win a treat, here are my two competition entries.

This was very much like another rehearsal we did where we had to play a game as if we were in character so, one game was simply to keep inflated balloons in the air. As I was evil I kept forcing them to the ground and made the spirit of the ring help me as I had power over her. However, people caught on to my evil plans, so I started to get over powered by Aladdin and the villagers which is a similar scenario to the play.

We were also given notes, here are the prologue notes...

Rehearsal - Changes

Changes in the performance that affected me

There were two changes in the Pantomime for me. One being, that I had to now come in from the top of the stairs and through the audience in the cave scene. This was tricky for me as I had to ad lib coming down the stairs and one of my weakest points was to ad lib. I used what I had researched and made some lines up myself that linked to what my character was talking about. For example, “Do you know where the cave is?” and responding to their heckles with different cheeky remarks.

I feel this helped me on stage as well as I had more connection with the audience. It made breaking the 4^th wall easier for me because I had to build the confidence to actually speak to them.

The next change during rehearsals was that my character Abanaza, could be carrying a real dog dressed as a spider in a few of my scenes. This was however, not set in stone to be performed on the night. The difficulties I faced were that the dog was quite heavy and it made me soften my character because the dog was cute so I kept losing my characterisation. I could have overcome this with practise though. On a positive note this gave me experience of work with animals live on stage.

*image on the right taken from another pantomime to illustrate dogs being used on stage.

Rehearsal - Walk and Read through

About a month before the show went up, all mains, alongside the director decided to do a read through of the script without our scripts in our hands, so that, we could learn to flow nicely together because a lot of our scenes were static and sounded quite robotic.

We all sat in a circle and went through the lines, making sure we didn’t wait 3 seconds before we answered, this is because there would be dead air in those seconds and seem like we were not having a real conversation, plus it would look as though someone had forgotten their line. We were also making sure we had the lines correct, checking for words we had missed or randomly added.

The next day we went through Act 2 in exactly the same way. I think doing this helped us work together more and help each other out, as when we got lines wrong we spoke to each other about it and helped each other go through that particular scene again. Also, this helped with the relationships we showed on stage. As we were more comfortable with each other off stage it showed when we were on it.

After the read through, we did a similar thing again but this time we were acting and working on particular scenes. Taking out things that didn’t sound right, for example, in my first scene with the spirit, I had a line that read “could it come a little bit quicker because we only have about 90 minutes?” This was cut as it didn’t flow nicely into the prologue. As well as this we added lots of different things like, jokes, actions, etc. For example, the Dame has to shove me in a feminine way to reinforce her sarcasm, but because the dame is obviously a man the shove is a lot harder, so it makes it comical for the audience to watch as the impact makes Abanaza look as though she is about to fall off stage.

Pantomime

As a whole cast trip we all went to go and see a pantomime being performed on stage. We were lucky enough to get to see an Aladdin pantomime which was a different version of the Aladdin that we were performing. This is better because we won’t entirely base our play on the one that we had watched. However, it was nice to have an idea of how to portray our characters on stage and how to act. This resulted in all of us wanting to get our Pantomime to the same professional level as theirs. Seeing how successful their performance was is very up lifting.

Some parts of the Pantomime I remembered and wanted to put into my character. For example, the insults that the Abanarza villain said to the audience members like: “shut it”, “imbeciles”, “pathetic.” These gave me an idea as I was struggling with what to ad lib when walking through the audience in one of my scenes.

The evil character in this particular version wasn’t too mean, which I thought was nice but quite a few times he had to encourage people to boo him. I wanted to play my character both ways. A lot of evil but a little bit of sarcasm. This, I thought, would keep the audience gripped to the plot of my character and make them want to boo me. If they “booed” I knew I had done my job.

Research

Research

Throughout the time spent going through the rehearsal process I had time to research pantomimes and the typical ‘bad guy’ in a pantomime to help develop my character and get a greater sense of your typical Pantomime.

I looked up the definition of a Pantomime and this is what came up – “a theatrical entertainment mainly for children, which involves music, topical jokes and slapstick comedy and is based on a fairy tale or nursery story, usually produced around Christmas time.”

As well as this, I went on to Youtube (a media site), and found a clip of the Pantomime villain in a variation of Aladdin which was shown on Itv, to see how he, being the equivalent to my character, portrayed his character, the use of the stage, props and gestures. This is the clip I watched:

After this I looked up on the internet some stereotypical insults that a villain would give to their audience, but unfortunately I didn’t have much luck with that one, although I did find out some information about audience participation.

Audience participation is an essential part of Pantomime. For example, as I am the villain I would have to say: “Aladdins dead isn’t he?” and I would then be given the reply of “oh no he isn’t!” The audience should always be encouraged to: “boo”, “cheer” and “ahh” the characters.

Also, I found out information about why certain stage directions are set in place aswell. You wouldn’t think there was a reason why the villain always entered from the left and the fairy always enters from the right, the reason for this is that there is a hangover from Pantomimes roots in Comommedia Dell Arte where the right side of the stage symbolises Heaven and the left side symbolises Hell.

                                     

Another feature of Pantomime is cross dressing. The leading male, known as the ‘Principal Boy’ is traditionally played by a young women In tight fitting male clothing to show her femine aspects, and another older women ‘The Pantomime Dame’ who is play by a man. Here is a rehearsal clip of our very own Principle Boy and Dame...