The biggest musical on Broadway right now is Hamilton, and it is already proving to be most revolutionary indigenous musical to arrive there since Rent; a show that re-makes American history to make history itself. Its composer Lin-Manuel Miranda knows his musicals through and through, and though it speaks with its own unique rap voice, he populates it with references to other shows. And it's striking, seeing his earlier Broadway musical In the Heights again now in London after seeing Hamilton, how that show has led to the other.

This reviews opening is strong. It begins by calling it 'the biggest' musical on Broadway, the adjective biggest is a strong use of adjective, to compliment the play using the biggest highlights how strong of a performance it is. It is also strongly approved that they have mentioned the composer of the production, the musicals performance seems to be positive in this review.

Reviews of In The Heights

 "In the Heights’ is really a soap opera. Themes of immigration, heritage and gentrification play second sax to hope, home and young love, and cheesey metaphors abound. There are sunrises and sunsets, a heatwave and a power cut, and fireworks at the interval kiss. But you’re irresistibly caught up in the comings, goings and blazing interactions of the individual characters, through to David Bedella’s conflicted patriarch and his fearsome wife (during her solo, Josie Benson manages to stamp two heels at the same time).

But on press night it’s Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, as Vanessa’s melodramatic boss Daniela, who provides the defining image. Heavily pregnant in real life and still working the bodycons, she hurls a leg over the top of one of two freewheeling fire escapes and has at the high note with everything she’s got. This is musical theatre bursting with new life."

" In The Heights was bit disappointing. I feel that the storyline was not clear and felt myself getting confused throughout the performance. The songs are catchy and I enjoyed the musical side of it but I felt it came across quite in organised and wouldn't go and see it again to be honest."

Who wrote the play was not mentioned it either of the reviews, however the characters are mentioned in the positive review and they even mention the actors name not just their character, giving key characters is a strong point to include with in a review.

Neither reviews mention what kind of play it was which is necessary to sell the performance to people who have not watched it and are interested in seeing it. It is mentioned that the it is a musical in both reviews which is a positive as it gives the genre of the performance which is worth mentioning.

The first review is a positive review of In The Heights, shown through a use of adjectives such as 'Blazing' and 'Irresistibly".

The Review of the bottom one is negative, explaining that the music was not helpful towards producing a strong storyline and the script and music do not merge well together, but the script would of worked solo, so would the music if it was performed to a higher standard.

9.1

- choose 2-3 key moments and analyse them deeply making sure you include why you felt that these moments are strong moments in the performance.

- pick out the highest points and also the lowest points of each key moment you choose.

- physical theatre is about the live atmosphere (wouldn't engage enough people if shown on tv)

- focus on making points about the lighting choices, the sound and the set and analysis why you think it was good.

- evaluate and analyse each of the smaller sections or acts that interested me.

- live performances do not come across as interesting if seen recorded and not performed live, such as if a performance was filmed and placed on TV.

- they use the idea of live to catch the peoples eyes and draw them in to the performance.

OverView of 'As You Like It'

Characters in As You Like It:
.Rosalind
.Orlando
. Duke Senior
.Jaques
.Celia
.Duke Frederick
.William
.Audrey
.Corin
.Adam
.Charles
.Phoebe

Shared Experience have created a thrillingly distinctive performance style that celebrates the union of physical and text-based theatre. From their first production in 1976, they've managed to create theatre in this image. Risky, distinctive productions. Energy of live performance and the unpredictability of the stage.
The company was founded by Mike Alfreds in 1975 and in 1987 Nancy Meckler became the second Artistic Director, with Polly Teale joining as Nancy’s Joint Artistic Director in 2000. Shared Experience is now steered by a group of Associates including the directors Rebecca Gatward and Kate Saxon, the writer and director Jessica Swale and producer Conrad Lynch. Under their authorship, the company is entering its fourth stage and is creating a new body of work with a fresh voice.

I am looking forward to watching as you like it to gather my own personal opinion on the performance, I feel it could be well executed with strong vocals and acting that can be seen as wacky but strong. Hopefully it will be an all round good show.

My Director Ideas

If I was to put on a performance of The Tempest by Shakespeare, I would create a lighting effect on the stage that was quite dark, to represent the obvious of being trapped on a forested desert island but to further interpret the idea that bad is about to happen, and that a lot of dark troubles will be arising soon. In class I am currently working on Act 3 Scene 2 where Caliban leads Trinculo and Stefano into the trap of killing Prospero. The lighting being  dark would represent events about too occur however I would want to add a slight blue/green dipped light to represent the features of the island, such as the sea surrounding it and the grass on the island.

Family Tree in the Tempest

 Prospero has a large range of links with the rest of the characters from The Tempest. Prospero's brother Antonio, and Miranda Prospero's daughter who was exiled with him to the island.
You then have Caliban who hates Prospero as he is his slave and ends up planning to murder him with Stefano and Trinculo. Ariel is an imaginary spirit who guides and helps Prospero in the exchange or a promise to freedom. Prospero is respected by the King and the kings son wants to marry Miranda.


The kings brother Sebastian has planned on killing the king to try and take his throne from him.

In our piece our group wanted to communicate and educate the audience on drug use and the affect that drugs can have on a person’s mind and lifestyle/choices. We wanted to communicate this to the audience through serious scenes as well as creating humour to not make the performance to dark and a constant negative vibe. We choose to do this through creating dark scenes known as ‘dream scenes’ as well as using the lighting and creating a lot of the dark vibes with the music we used in the background. We decided to use songs by The Tiger Lilies as they have a lack of beat and the lyrics that are used have a sinister vibe in the songs, which adds to the darkness of the scene. We wanted to show what drugs can do to a young person’s mind, and how they can almost completely take over the way your life goes. We also used the lighting to show this throughout, by using natural everyday lights of yellows and white whilst doing the naturalistic scenes, and then used coloured lights and the strobes too show the weirdness of the dreams, as well as to highlight the idea of your mind going to different places and having different thoughts whilst under the influence of the drugs Jack has been taking. We also wanted to show the effects that drugs can have on the actions taken, not just what they do to the mind. We showed this through the characterisation carried in Harrys character of Jack as at the start of the piece his character has a friendly and enthusiastic personality but as the performance continues we see his character traits change as he becomes more aggressive towards family and friends and begins to become more independent and pushes people away. I feel this was effective to the audience, as you could see Jacks relationship begin to fall apart, by tones of voice changing for example when Jack says the line “It’s none of your business anyway, why do you care?” and you start to hear the sarcastic and vicious tone in his voice, which later leads to the end of the piece where Jack sees himself in an argument with his ‘best friend’ and you can physically feel the tension building up between them. Another example created to show the effect of drugs of the human mind and its actions would be the last scene ‘Butchered’ and the acting brought into that, this scene was created to be a big plot twist on the whole performance, but to also create confusion to the audience of whether it was real life or fantasy. I feel this was effective as for example when using the song ‘Jack- TigerLillies’ to create a fearful affect, in the piece, and I feel the song and strobed red lighting, created the idea of an uncontrollable thought that was being created as it goes on to then end into the idea of ‘Jack the Ripper’ and by switching the characterisation to a strange, scary character that is uncontrollable, and used this to show what drugs can do.

We also wanted to communicate to the audience the humour side to our piece, we wanted to show that life is not always bad no matter what and that there can be good times in all negative situations. We also used a sense of humour nearer the beginning more than when the performance started to finish because we wanted to use the humour to show the connection between Jack and his family, and create a bond. We choose to show this through our characterisation and the personalities we created for their characters. All our characters were created to have a funny element to them as we thought this would benefit the audience interaction and the way the audience watched the piece to entice them into the piece. I feel this worked really well as we made the audience laugh on different occasions, for example when the characters of the Nan and Mum done a dance to an old fashioned song, we added this to have a random scene that doesn’t really connect to the performance to add an aspect of Kneehigh but we wanted it to be humorous so that the audience would stay interacted and interested.

WEEK 9

Over the last weeks we focused on only accepting and adding to the final piece and scenes we had. As we had spent a lot of the lessons, focusing on fully developing the first 3-4 scenes, we decided for the first hour of the first lesson to continue creating the Hansel and Gretel scene until we were happy with how it went, we decided to add a physical theatre movement piece to the instrumental of the song 'Human, Rag'n'BoneMan' , we wanted to add music into our piece were we could as we wanted to keep an on going vibe when there was no speech. We focused on using puppetry to show the witches taking control of our bodies, like the drugs take over Jacks body. We also thought this would be a good idea as it would attract the audience to watch and try to understand what is happening.

As we wanted to use the progress of the show to highlight the affect drugs can have on an individuals life and there personal relationships with family and friends we decided to create an argument linking from a scene beforehand were jack begins too lose focus on Amy and what she has to say, to show a few weeks down the line were Jack and Amy's relationship has completely fallen apart created by Jacks paranoia from the drug usage. It starts with a slow vibe of stress and anger, to show Amy still trying to offer support to Jack but as the argument continues Amy gives up more and more and by the end they are screaming at each other and the audience watch the whole relationship fall apart with the line that ends on "I'm done with this Amy". This is due to the fact that all though this is months after the dynamics of the argument are made to represent the time from where Jack began to take drugs to where the affect has begun to tear his life apart. This creates an effect on the audience as it creates an emotional attachment from the audience to Amy of how hard she has tried to work to help and support Jack and will show the affect of drugs and how at the start of the performance Jack was so enticed by Amy and her friendship to then see them fall apart, would make the audience feel apart of the friendship. By creating a relationship from the audience to Amy to then lead on to the 'Butchering Scene' would create such an unexpected twist, it would shock the audience as well as ending with a Kneehigh inspired scene.

The last scene "Butchered"has been inspired by the idea of Jack the Ripper as well as mixing in the idea of Red Shoes and how the shoes can not be taken from here fit so therefore have to be cut off. We decided to have red flood lights and strobes to create a scary affect and using the red to also represent blood and danger. We use the song 'Jack- Tiger lillies'  which has a weird vibe to it and has no beat but the lyrics are very twisted. We wanted to use a song that fits to the piece so that the audience understand the vibe of the scene. We use fake blood to create effect and contrast it onto white sheets to really highlight the blood.

WEEK 8

Over the 4 hours of lessons we had this week we firstly focused on creating the second dream of the performance where we used the idea of adding another fairy-tale/kids story, and took the context behind the Hansel and Gretel story to create Dream 2. We used this idea as we believed that this story would be well known to the public and would bring the audiences attention to the piece. We also thought that by using Hansel and Gretel instead of a really popular well known fairy-tale like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, we have more opportunity to open up the story to more unexpected twists that would not be encountered for in the real storyline but would make sense if the story was to be rewritten with these events. We decided to use the idea of the witch taking over there bodies instead of turning them into food, to show the aspect of a sinister style from Kneehigh. We wanted to make this scene contrast as more confusing and weird compared to the first dream which was based on a more demon like style to show drugs over taking the mind, where as in this dream we wanted to show more the affects drugs can have.

Once this dream was finished we began to piece together the whole performance to get it completely finished so we could then focusing on picking out the improvement needed parts and adding Kneehigh to create an overall performance. We decided to end the scene on the idea that Jack and the beanstalk could ink back to Jack the ripper but not too intensely. However, the twist into it is that this scene is really a dream but we also came to the conclusion as a group that this would be left as a cliff-hanger so that the audience can decide how to take the last scene and leave with the thought they want. We also believed that by doing this we would be adding more Kneehigh affect as it would be highly unexpected.


We wanted to complete the whole piece instead of just going scene by scene in detail as we believed some scenes would work better without trying to add loads of detail into it, to create a more naturalistic affect and then we could add detail into the sinister twisted scenes so there was a strong contrast, once the whole thing was completed and all the characters and their traits were completed we filmed the whole piece so we could watch it over, analyse it and create the changes necessary to add effect, and to make sure the whole performance together made sense.

THRIVE performance

Live performance has nothing to say to a young audience

On the 4TH of March I went to Thrive at the Old Market Theatre in hove. It was a promenade show set in one location with props, set and lighting which emphasises the show its self. This is effective to a young audience as we were standing and not sitting. I feel this aspired to a younger audience as it was something unique and unusual and I felt it was effective as you could move around the surface and see multiple points of views from any angle; this is what I feel Toby Ealden wanted when planning set with the designer Barney George. It was effective as the three actors each had one side which was decorated to suit a personality and each was under a ladder to create a room type effect. For example, Ashleigh, played by Claire Gaydon, had a side of pure white which you could spray paint and interact with as well as some clothes and lights. This was effective as you could relate to her quirky nature which was suggested by the ‘arty’ styled decorations surrounding her area. I feel this may relate to a younger audience as of her personality is relatable to that of a younger age as of the way she moves and talks by using slang that today’s younger generation may use.  Her body language was very open. She would jump about o each step and always had her arms either side of her either doing a hand gesture that would emphasis a point she would be making by making her palm flat and fingers together, this made her seem bigger and almost as if she was inviting you into a hug. Her facial expressions where always happy and she would have her eyes open larger than usual and a smile when she wasn’t talking. This was effective as it spoke to a younger audience as this again allowed a younger person to connect with Claire as she seemed younger than what she really is age wise.
Another point that made it seem interesting to young people was the use of physical theatre. Someone who used it well was Ollie who was played by Daniel Morgan. His use of physical theatre was very interesting. It really made a younger audience link to him as he would use bold and big movements to portray his emotions which younger people may be able to link to. A place where he would do this well is after the death of his friend. He would use is arms and hands to cover his face and then fling them away in a robust anger type of movement that his face heighten as he appeared angry. He would do a set of movements over a beat of four which allowed a rush of emotions that would seem to be repeated and may overlap one another if they had felt the experience of losing someone close to them; this was shown through the movements. This would be effective for a younger audience as they may have lost someone or lost a relationship or a friendship and may have experienced emotions that could be perfectly described through the movements Daniel did; I feel Amy O’Sullivan wanted this as the choreographer. We then see this heightened by the fact that he started to seclude himself off using jenga bricks to create a wall type idea to the audience and then went into a big ball by tucking up as tight as possible. Personally I feel that Toby Ealden wanted this array of emotions to be portrayed as he may have wanted younger people to connect with this and especially those who have lost someone close to them. This links to the direction of the play as people could link to these emotions and personalities of these characters and almost put themselves in their shoes.
Another point that made it relatable was the ages of the characters and how they were portrayed to a younger audience. The younger generation are able to link to the characters due to the choices they make, their outfits, language choices and topics they might talk about. This is important for a connection as the younger generation may not be able to link with someone who appeared older due to a dry humour or experiences they have yet to live through. This must have been a point that Toby Ealden wanted due to characters being younger and being played by older actors. They needed to be immersive so the audience could quickly catch on to what they may be trying to show. This can be then be heightened by their choice of clothing which would have been a choice of both Toby and Barney George. A good example of this is Raph who was played by Luke Vernon. He had a snapback hat on backwards, trainers of an iconic brand and long baggy clothing has if he was aim to be a road man. I feel all the younger generation may associate this with being youthful as it many people tend to wear the same sort of stylised clothing that the character Raph wears. The actors also acted younger by being more flamboyant and robust with their movements and would speak faster so that their pace increased when speaking which would make them seem like the don’t have time to stop or have an enormous amount of energy when speaking about something, like the party for example. Ashleigh had a lot of energy for the party so spoke with a fast pace to almost make it seem more like a big event and something super exciting which you could link to a younger generation as throwing a party when only still in high school (years 11-13) would be a big deal especially if alcohol is involved. You could link this to acting and direction the play went. The acting would be important as the actors are acting younger than they are and the direction is important as you need it to flow and seem like a typical young teenager type atmosphere.

WEEK 7

Over the two lessons this week, we managed to create and film a few new scenes and add music and lighting to them. As over the weeks before we had created a strong theme and overall idea and had all become comfortable and happy about the final idea we had created we wanted to focus on trying to create the overall piece quickly and then expand on the scenes once we had created the performance start to finish. We thought this would benefit us and our piece as we believe once we had a strong idea we would feel confident with the piece and would then be able to focus more on characters and adding more content, script and characterisation to the overall piece.


We decided that we would begin by creating relationships between the characters and focus on creating the physical theatre and movement that was going to be involved. We then focused lastly on scripting this scene. We decided to do this as we wanted to gain a personal perspective on how Kneehigh works and believed if we created a piece like they do, we would be able to understand how Kneehigh theatre company works.


My characters relationships take a while to break into in the performance, but here we see my characters relationship begin to blossom with the character 'Jack'. We see a connection created with in the idea of love and trust and see how strong their friendship becomes. We focused on showing this as we believed it would later create a stronger effect when the audience begin to see their relationship fall apart due to the drugs. It helped me develop a personality for my character and focus on showing these traits with in my acting. By looking into Kneehigh before hand it really helped us develop a strong idea on the way Kneehigh worked and made us focus on narration and adding a sinister effect to our piece.
We have naturalistic scenes with in our piece to create the idea of a basic lifestyle , and then using the more Kneehigh based sinister scenes to show the effects drugs can have on the human mind and family life.


Our first dream scene is the first sense of a mysterious and sinister scene we get, and is used to show Jacks first 'trip' on Drugs. We took an original song known, 'American Horror Story' and used the dubstep remix which created a scary and unexpected effect, and created a physical theatre movement piece with quick sharp demon like movements to put together a scene. We thought by using physical theatre we could create the effect of how the drugs completely take over Jacks mind and thoughts and show the weirdness of his dreams. Coming to this decision was difficult as we couldn't decide whether we wanted to go straight into showing how the drugs can take a bad effect or show the slow transition throughout the dreams of how drugs can cause positive trips but can lead to bad situations.

WEEK 6

This lesson we decided to focus on the idea of the beans in Jack and the beanstalk to represent a type of drug brought into Jacks life. We focused on the themes of Guilt and Addiction taken from red shoes and decided that the abuse of drugs and addiction to them would be a good way to show them, in this scene we learn more about Jack and his relationship with his Mother and Grandmother, we felt as a group this was an important thing to focus on in the scene, and I thought in general that by showing the bond of the relationship it will expand on the affect drugs can have on a person and their relationships, which would make the audience more emotionally involved later on in the performance. We also wanted to show how drugs can come into a family situation and tear it apart so by using the affection and love towards his family we could then show Jack begin to fall apart from his family and lose the people close to him.


We discussed the music options for the first scene and decided to use a song that contrasts against the love and connection in this scene, to create the theme of Kneehigh and to add something unexpected and almost weird into the scene. We used the song 'Animals-Cocorosie' as we sensed a hint of lullaby beats in the background and compared that to the idea of sleeping, which we done because we thought it would bring a small sense of naturalistic feel to the scene as we didn't want the first scene to be too surprising as we wanted it to build up throughout the performance. However we liked the contrast of the lyrics in the song as we felt it brought a real, mysterious vibe to the scene. We were very aware and careful when picking our songs as we didn't want to pick a song that had lyrics that could be related to the scene as we didn't want to confuse the audience by creating too much of a strong link between the song and the script.


CocoRosie- Animals


We also decided to have natural lighting to create the set of a bedroom, so we used the natural yellow lights focused in on all directions too open the whole space to be used in the scene instead of focusing on just one space on the stage so we could expand ourselves over, and create a natural way of life instead of trying to focus on only one spotlight.

WEEK 5

After discussing where are piece was going, we decided as a group to start again and change our idea as we felt that none of us were really getting an attachment to the piece and couldn't get comfortable in the character and the story line and felt that our piece related to Kneehigh but had a small amount of relation to the story of Red shoes and we wanted to create a piece based on the themes taken from Red shoes and also wanted to focus on the idea of a twisted fairy-tale/kids story, and used the idea of Jack and the Beanstalk, we decided to use this as we knew it was well known so people would understand it but hoped that the twists we were deciding to place into the piece would catch the audience off guard and be really unexpected, which is a strong aim for a Kneehigh company production to create.



We decided to create the original characters of Jack and his Mum to stick to the story line, however with the two extra people in the group we created a character of Jacks Nan and a best friend figure for Jack, we done this as before we started devising we made a list of ideas of plot twists we wanted to create, which contained of twists such as jack potentially dying near the end of the piece as a result to the drugs,a longer expand on his family finding out about past generations and how there amily evolved to become what it is today, the story relating to Jack and the beanstalk but having a wtist at the end linking the charcter of 'Jack' to actually link to Jack the Ripper and an unplanned pregnancy occuring into the story  and then based the characters in the piece on what would look best whilst adding the plot twists.We decided to use the Jack the ripper plot twist as we felt that we could relate this back to the story of red shoes and the idea of her feet being cut from her body as a result of addiction, as well as using Kneehigh overall to create the most unpredictable plot twist and something none of us had ever really seen in theatre before.

We only then focused on creating the first scene as we had spent a lot of the lesson speaking about new ideas and costumes and set, we decided to keep the natural world costumes quite predictable and stereotypical, such as black leggings and then a coloured top for the charcter of the bestfriend, and like a pair of trousers and a patterened old fashioned top for the Nan, as we wanted to create the most naturalistic vibe we could gain for the 'life' scenes, and then decided the costumes in the 'Dream' scenes would be vibrant and quite strange so that there would be an obvious change of normal day life and dream scenes, as well as using the costumes to show how strange and unpredictable the dreams can become.
We decided to keep the first scene quite relatable and naturalistic as we wanted the magical and mysteriousness of it to grow stronger as the piece went on, so we created a scene where all characters were introduced by names and personality, so that the audience could get a good point of view on the relationships in the storyline.

We created a small set that remains the same through out the whole piece, which contains three different levels, and holds a tree in-between the three of them. We decided to use this as we thought it was very un-naturalistic and unexpected and links to the idea of weirdness in Kneehigh. We are going to expand on this and cover the whole of the stage blocks so they relate back to nature to really contrast against the piece, to create an unexpected set against the performance ideas. We tried to show the personalities in all characters strongly because we have multiples scenes were dreams occur and in these dreams our fairy-tale characters are based on our normal life characters personality.

WEEK 4

This lesson involved creating a presentation around the theatre company Kneehigh and how they work and create performances. I worked alongside Charlotte and we created a PowerPoint about the techniques and ideas they use and how abstract and twisted their ideas really are. Too show this we linked back to some of Knee-highs well known plays , such as 'Dead Dog in a suitcase (and other love songs) and used a small trailer like clip from YouTube as part of the presentation to try and portray how unique the theatre company is.

This is my presentation


Kneehigh have a strong non-naturalistic insight into the scripts and performances they create. Knee-high company focus on creating and improvising a piece around ideas and the connotations of the ideas, and keep a settled order on how to create a performance, ending with creating a script to fit round what was improvised. Kneehigh often base their performances on the idea of twisted fairytales and 'magical' ideas, to create a eye catching and tension filled piece.


We researched Kneehigh and went through their webpage,we found the webpage to be very informative, and helpful and managed to create a powerpoint about Kneehigh and its background from the information found. Kneehigh are a Cornwall based theatre company with a local, national and international profile. For over 30 years we have created vigorous, popular and challenging theatre and perform with joyful anarchy. They tell there stories through the architecture of Cornwall, using an epic to tiny scale and keep a group of ensambles with them to create performances.

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