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