By Katie Bernstein aka Nancy & Ella's Mum
I’m writing this blog as we are approaching the third week of rehearsals for Run! A Sports Day Musical. It’s an interesting part of rehearsal time to start analysing and writing down thoughts as it’s right in the middle of the process! The first week in particular felt like we were getting to grips with music for the first time and each other. It’s always interesting to be put into a rehearsal situation with people you’ve not really met before; this script allowed this situation to feel so comfortable, mainly because the music and score is so full of child-like energy that you can’t help but feel the sense of play in the room! That combined with an absolutely lovely cast and creative team, and the instant brightness that Polka Theatre emanates.
Now we are approaching the third week in this four week rehearsal process, you can’t help but feel a slight pressure to be off book with lines and songs, but this is an exciting pressure, where you can start trying things you had been slightly restricted with before; now that you feel the words organically start to go in to your head. It’s also wonderful working with a director such as Adam because he’s clearly thought about the vision of the piece before we begun, which makes us as actors work with pace, and to be able to keep a positive atmosphere, and it allows us to approach the text with confidence.
What I think is so uplifting about this piece is the fact that we are mainly playing children, and the music and text reflects this; with the combined force of Adam and Emma’s choreography, which gives us an instant opportunity to play in the sense that we are able to feel a sense of freedom, which makes us not worry about looking silly which I think is what being an actor is all about!
So as we approach this pivotal week in the process, I can’t wait to see what we all discover as the countdown to show 1 commences!
By Peter Dukes aka Richard & Mr Budge
It's for jobs like these that I love being an actor. The opportunity of working with such a talented cast and creative team on a brilliant piece of new theatre, with a great script and score doesn't come round as often as one would hope. Also knowing that we'll get a chance to hopefully inspire some kids comes as a cherry on top!
So how is it going? Well, we're now into our second week and it's already beginning to take shape. Characters are starting to emerge through a plethora of crazy choreography, brilliant songs and with the aid of Adam Penford's vision; the exploration of this 'Amazing Sports Day' is taking wonderful twists and turns. The chance to be working so closely with both Lisa Evans the writer and Julian Butler the composer/MD has given us such a unique insight into the piece and a chance to bring their ideas and words to life.
Mr Budge's dream for a sports day is certainly something that most year 6’s wouldn't get a chance to do and we're having great time creating it and I can tell you that Richard thinks it's probably the best day of his life so far!
It certainly isn't a gentle stroll that we've got on our hands over the next couple of weeks but with the hard work that's already gone in I certainly think come June everyone will be ready to Run!
By Stephanie Fearon aka Ella
So, it's the end of a productive week at Polka Theatre! I've had so much fun working on the musical Run! so far, but it's also been a lot of hard work. The show has a lot of complex musical content so this week, we've focused on learning all the songs including all the complicated harmony lines! Thankfully, my brain is no longer frazzled and everything's starting to settle! I'm really looking forward to piecing everything together now and working on the script in detail. I'm so happy to be working on this production, and it helps to be working with such a lovely cast and creative team. It should be a great show and great fun at the same time. I can't wait!
By Joseph Adelakun
The first day of rehearsals certainly felt like the first day of summer, especially after a week of heavy rain, so that was a good sign.
First of all we did a read through of the play in front of a lot of people, the director, the composer, the writer, the artistic director, the stage managers, the assistant choreographer, the marketing team, the administation team, front of house, technical team, production team and basically EVERYONE involved in the show which gave us a real sense of how many people there were involved to make this happen. After the read through, we had a look at the model box which is like a miniature version of the set and were impressed by how many props, trap doors and set changes we were going to have. Most of the cast hadn’t seen the theatre before so we went upstairs to look at the theatre before breaking for lunch.
After lunch we talked with Lisa Evans, the writer about her inspirations for the characters which gave us a better sense of context of the play. Although the story itself is made up and the events are fictional, the characters are based on real people and the circumstances are very real so it gave us plenty to think about. After this, we got stuck in and started to sing through the material and we surprisingly managed to sing and work through the first three songs of the show!
One of the things you think about before the first day of rehearsals is what is everyone going to be like and how are we all going to get on? But now having met the team and done some work together, they're all lovely and we're going to get on just fine!
By Jo Castleton (aka Mum, Miss Martha, French Charlie and others!)
So week 2 of rehearsals and its one of my favourite moments when rehearsing, finally getting up and blocking the show, working out where we are on stage and our entrances and exits. It’s like working out a big puzzle, mapping out our physical journeys. First we read the scene again like a radio play, then we roughly work out our moves, Philip Wilson our director is fantastic at letting everyone chip in if they have an idea and it’s a real communal effort! We have the set marked out on the floor so we know where everything will be, and we have a lot of rehearsal props and furniture, a rather realistic fake dead rabbit arrives along with other props like a gun for my cowboy! It’s fun to be playing men and women in the show, definitely a challenge. We are making such great progress and will have blocked the whole play by Friday.
I play a variety of parts including Annie and Sean's Mum and a variety of Americans on the children's journey and am relieved when on Wednesday our marvellous dialect coach Richard Ryder arrives! His mission - to make the O’Briens sound like a family and make sure everyone’s accent matches where they are from! We work on the Cork Irish accent first and listen to lots of YouTube clips to help us and also learn about the zones in your mouth where the accent should be focused, for example our Irish accent should be focused in zone 1 - towards the lips. It’s really helpful and everyone feels a lot more confident.
This week has flown by and we have got such a lot done including more music rehearsals, had photo's taken for the local paper, fitting the songs in as part of the action. It’s been pretty cold in the rehearsal room so we are well wrapped up and drink a lot of tea! We buy biscuits by the truck load to keep us going. It’s a great atmosphere with lots of laughs and everyone now relaxed having got to know each other a bit more (I now know everyone's favourite biscuit - you never know when that might be useful) Looking forward to more detailed work next week and then we open two weeks today, ahhhhhh! I can’t wait!
By Clive Llewellyn (aka Father, Captain Murray, Lil' Luke, Matt Colby)
It’s the start of the 2nd week of rehearsals for the Twist of Gold Company at Polka Theatre. For most actors there are various moments in the creative process that make us nervous and they’re all different for every single one of us. For me they are usually the first day (when we all meet for the first time) the ‘read-through’ (when we have to collectively read the play for the first time and try out those accents that we’ve been practising in our bedrooms) and that scary moment when we get up on our feet for the first time and attempt to make it work.
The last one happened today for the entire company. To be precise it actually began on Saturday for some of the company but, because not all of us are involved in the earliest scenes, our director, Philip decided not to call all of us into rehearsals together till today; and clearly the guys had worked incredibly hard. That first week of hard work, when we sat around a table and discussed the play scene by scene was definitely worth it.
What it meant was that by this point we were all very familiar with each other as we’d read, reread, discussed and analysed the play for a week.
Tomorrow we have the blessed assistance of the voice coach. Most of us (except Claire and Charlie) are playing more than one part, which means at least 2 accents to get right.
Roll on Tuesday!!
By Charlie Hamblett (aka Sean)
It’s the END of the first week? I can’t believe it’s the end of the first week. A rehearsal room shrinks whole hours into precious minutes so everyone has to get to know each other really fast, the play has to be tackled just as quickly and I have to try not to make Clare, who plays my sister Annie, laugh too much while she’s trying to concentrate. One week into Twist of Gold and a lot has happened!
Each day, we diligently read and re-read the script, picking apart its interesting moments, addressing any immediate difficulties, and discussing its characters and themes under the leadership of our encyclopaedically knowledgeable director, Phillip. As well as being great fun, it can be genuinely insightful. Group discussions really help to make things clear to an actor and it’s great to hear everyone else’s opinions and their very own tales as we work. Before we began, I sketched a lot of my thoughts down into a notebook. Besides anything else, I was worried I’d end up randomly blurting my things out, and so my method has kept this to a minimum at least!
It already feels like we’ve been in each other’s company for quite a long time; theatre has a wonderfully immediate way of bringing everyone together as we embark on telling our story. If you know Twist of Gold already, you may have guessed I play Sean, Annie’s older brother and together we journey out from our hometown in Cork, Ireland, sail the Atlantic Ocean, make friends and face enemies (and grow up!) in our search for our father in America. Among many other things, I’m trying to get to grips with a County Cork accent which sounded very peculiar the first time I tried it out aloud at home. (I wasn’t sure where Cork was entirely at first...the very south of Ireland if you’re interested). We’ve also squeezed in just enough time to tackle the shows wonderful music and I’m beginning to learn some traditional Irish jigs on the violin or, ‘fiddle!’, as Sean calls it.
Things are rattling along at steam-train pace - something Sean and Annie could have really done with in their perilous journey across America... Bring on Week Two, as the show, now getting onto its feet, really comes to life!
By Clare McMahon (aka Annie)
The first day of rehearsals for an actor is much like the first day at school I think. There's the packing your bag the night before, making a nice lunch (with a club biscuit for tea break), leaving lots of time to get there and then panicking when you can't find the right room. Once you find the room, you embark on the nervous meet and greet with all the other actors and creative team. I am always anxious about the first day, and yet after each one I've always come home thinking, 'Well that was just fine, what was I stressing about?!'
Today was the first day of Twist of Gold rehearsals. We have approximately three and a half weeks to get together a fabulous and exciting show. I'm playing Annie O'Brien, a nearly 11 year old Irish girl who, with her brother Sean, leaves home in search of her father in America. It's really exciting playing Annie as she's very feisty and full of questions. It allows an adult actress like myself to be quite cheeky and push boundaries that would often seem impolite on a normal occasion.
Today we started with a read-through of the play out loud with all the cast and creative team sat around a table with cups of tea and bottles of water. It seemed to go well! I called out my own name instead Sean's at one point but that can only be expected on the first go, especially as I hadn't had my club biscuit yet.
After the read-through we had some lunch and then we tried some singing. Olly the composer got us doing all sorts of harmonies, it was lovely to come together as a cast of six and get a feel for what the coming months are going to be like. Myself and Charlie, who plays my brother Sean, quickly latched on to each other to navigate the tricky Tenor notes, although we got a little over excited at one point when we got it right and 'high-fived' forgetting we were meant to keep on singing...it bodes well!
The afternoon concluded with a look at the model box. This is a miniature version of the theatre and shows us what the designer, Max, has thought up for set and props and costume. It was very exciting and really helpful to get a sense of the environment Annie and all the others will be travelling through.
We ended the day with a walk on the stage as some of us hadn't been there before, and it's a brilliant space. I think my Granny Kate will be impressed with Polka; they should be pleased as she's 95 and travelling all the way from Ireland to see the show! I know Twist of Gold is going to be a truly wonderful play...let's hope Granny Kate agrees!
Hope to see you all in approximately 3 and a half weeks.
Imagination is the most wonderful thing in the world. The experience begins the moment you open up the treasure trove of your mind. That’s why I find creating stories so thrilling and exciting, I never know where creativity will take me. Never more so than at present as I am starting to think about ideas for my Writing the World story.
I’m at my best when I come up with two or three ideas before settling on the one that inspires me most. Sometimes the story just pops into my head as though someone waved a magic wand. Other times I like to keep turning ideas over in my mind and thinking about different endings or what the characters are going to be like. I often get ideas by talking to people or remembering an event in my own life and merging it into the story taking the reader on an adventure.
The theme of my story for Writing the World will be London, a city I adore. So this certainly gives me plenty of choice. What I’ve got to do is pick a subject which is exciting, maybe something which I have personal experience of because I sometimes think it’s easier to base your story on your own experiences. But making stuff up is just as exciting. Should I write about something in the past, in the present or even in the future? That’s what’s so wonderful about writing you can let your imagination run free.
I always get a buzz of excitement when I am asked to write a story because I never know what will come out in the end. So I’m looking forward to finding out what my imagination will eventually create.
By Philip Wilson, Director
Happy New Year!
Since my last blog, Max Jones (designer) and I have spent many a long hour in his studio, finding a way in which to tell the story of Annie and Sean’s epic journey – which I have started to describe as a 19th-century road movie! I am delighted with what has emerged. Some elements of the first model – known as the White Card Model, because it’s an unpainted version of the set – did have to be cut, because when the cost of each individual section was added up by Dan Rainsford, Polka’s Production Manager, it was just too expensive. But Dan and his team have done wonders, making the money stretch as far as they can. And Max and I found that we were able to simplify some sections and re-use other scenic elements (along with some items from Polka’s Prop Store), while retaining the feel of the design. So what you’ll see appears to be a rough, earth-strewn, wooden arena backed by a cyc (a curved cloth which can be lit in lots of different ways), but there are lots of tricks and surprises included!
Meetings have also been happening with the lighting designer, Philip Gladwell, on helping transformations between scenes. Meanwhile, composer Olly Fox and I have been sourcing lots of music to use in the piece, while sound design advisor Max Perryment has been tracking down masses of sound effects.
Of course, none of this would be much use without a cast! Casting Director Anna Kennedy and I saw a whole range of actors, from which we selected a company of six highly talented (and very musically able) performers: Clare McMahon and Charlie Hamblett are playing Annie and Sean, while Trevor Allan Davies, Jo Castleton, Ian Harris and Clive Llewellyn play everyone else! These four have up to six or seven costumes each: it’s going to be busy backstage!
Rehearsals start in a few weeks’ time. I can’t wait…
We’ve hatched! The Ugly Duckling opened to audiences last week, and it’s been fascinating seeing the reactions of the young children. For me, the show only springs to life at this point. All of the hard work of the months before is for this moment - when your story meets the audience. That’s when you see what’s working, what still needs attention. That’s when you see things as if for the first time, all over again. For me, it’s the best part of my job – I love sitting with an audience! On this show, I’ve been struck by how powerful and simple the story of The Ugly Duckling is, how it seems to resonate for young children. And it’s been brilliant to see how rapt they are by the dance, the pas-de-deux at the climax of the play; it’s a beautiful scene.
Our work’s not over though. Jo (the co-director) and I are working with cast and crew on creating our ‘toddler’ version of the show, which opens next week. This is a slightly shorter version, that runs at 30 minutes instead of 40, and is tailored towards children ages 1 and 2. That’s a tough crowd. But as always at Polka, we take great care in thinking about our audiences, and doing all we can to make sure our work can connect with them and spark their imaginations.
By Martin Ward, Composer
After three weeks of rehearsals and with 2 days to go to the first show, it’s time for the technical rehearsals in the theatre. This is the moment when all the hard work starts to take the shape of the finished show. Scenes, dances and songs which have been rehearsed separately up until now have to run together, linked by music, sound effects and lighting, flowing from one into the next and turning from fragments into a whole story. It’s an exciting time.
The musical journey of The Ugly Duckling began in May. I started by concentrating on finding just two themes – the first to capture Ugly Duckling himself and the second for the world around him. From these two simple tunes almost all of the rest of the music would develop – everything Ugly Duckling does is accompanied by his tune, which changes and ‘grows up’ as he does, whilst the world theme does the same for his surroundings, helping portray everything from his mother, to the river, the swans and even the snow and ice of winter. By the start of rehearsals in September these themes had filled out to about 20 minutes of music – including ideas for all the big scenes and dances – and once in rehearsals with actors, directors and choreographer this music immediately set the tone and pacing for each scene, but this was just a starting point. As the actors reacted to the music, so I watched them and found ways of letting the music react back to their movements and acting, to the direction and choreography, developing like a conversation, until the drama and music became entwined and inseparable. A partnership.
And so now the technical rehearsals are in full swing and all these little conversations between music and drama are slotting together to form a full story. A collection of elements, all enjoyable in themselves coming together to form something more.
By Philip Wilson, Director
It’s the beginning of October, and lots of exciting first meetings are happening. Simon (Reade, the adapter) and I have already been talking through his adaptation, over the past few months: but Twist of Gold’s creative team is now complete, so I have started work with the designer Max Jones (whose sets have been seen in venues as varied as the Royal Court Upstairs and the main stage at Welsh National Opera). Initial conversations and looking at photos and other images have progressed to working with bits of card and scale figures in the model box. With umpteen locations and some filmic jump-cutting in Simon’s writing, the design has to be both evocative of each place… and yet able to be transformed in a moment. We are hoping to open up the Polka stage as much as we can, and to use its height, its depth, its auditorium… Once we get a bit further along with this process, we will meet up with the lighting designer, Philip Gladwell, since Max and I know that light will create and shift environments, more than physical scenery.
I am also speaking to the composer Olly Fox, about the key instruments and sounds of Ireland and America – and the links between these (many of the early settlers in the US came over from Ireland, of course). Violin is specified by Michael and Simon, but there’s also the bodhrán, the whistle, the accordion; plus the banjo/ukelele, honky-tonk piano... Quite an orchestra! Plus there are the sounds of the sea, wagon trails, and the American plains – which Max Perryment will be sourcing.
And for all this music, I need six marvellous actor-musicians! So at present Casting Director Anna Kennedy and I are comparing lists of suggestions, after which she will start checking the availability of actors.
We're now mid way through our second week of rehearsals and things are going well. We're all working very hard but there's still a lot of laughter in the room and lots of yummy food to keep us full of energy! I'm having great fun exploring the differences (and sometimes similarities) between my two characters Theresa and Yolanda. Though very different ages and living in different decades, both characters are strong and intelligent and a real pleasure to play.
With just over a week to go, Troy and I are running lines whenever we can: On the way in, whilst eating lunch and on the tube home (despite getting some funny looks!). I'm raring to get on the Polka stage and get an audience in, until then…Amelia x
Tuesday 30th August
Only a week to go until we start rehearsals for our new play, ‘I have a dream...’ by Levi David Addai. And the timing couldn’t be better – two days ago, 28th August, marked the 48th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech. In Washington DC they’re about to unveil a new monument to the famous Civil Rights leader – it was to have been unveiled this weekend, but the hurricane over there’s postponed things until next month. Read more about the story here:
The play is aimed at children aged 7 to 11 and explores the story of the Civil Rights movement and asks what that means to a young person in today’s London. It’s fast-paced and funny too! Next week we’ll be posting updates from the rehearsal room, from those of us working on the show. So log on next week for behind-the-scenes news as we begin to bring the show to life.
Jonathan Lloyd, Artistic Director
After thousands of auditions, up and down the country, we finally have our final 12! Oops, wrong show. Let's start again Mr Addai..... After weeks of auditioning, I Have a Dream... has its cast, and will be starring the great Troy Glasgow and the amazing Amelia Donkor! Had a great time on Monday (15th Aug), finally getting the actors together and hearing the play read all the way through for the first time. It's always a strange experience for me, hearing your work read out. The sight of seeing my play performed does often make me feel light-headed. I guess it's because I'm watching the world I've created in my head for so long, now playing out in reality. So I look forward to Monday 5th September, when the rehearsal process officially begins!!!!
17 days of rehearsals down and 7 days to go before the curtain goes up on the first performance of ‘All Join In’. We had our first full run through this afternoon and it is definitely shaping up to be the full throttle extravaganza of excitement that is says of the tin. We have sketched out the outline of the piece and now we have a lot of colouring in to do. The making of the show has involved quite a lot of devising by the company and so there are a lot of ideas flying around the room like sparks from a Catherine wheel but Roman, the skipper, is safely guiding us through with his vast experience of how to tame a room full of actors! Our brilliant Music Director Ben has been very forgiving of the wrong notes that we keep on singing and Nadia our DSM is keeping a very detailed note of who says what, where to whom with what and for how long as well as what is meant to go where, when and why!
We still have a lot to learn; intricate lyrics, meaty harmonies, a menagerie of instruments and plenty of puppetry as well as remembering not to eat too many biscuits before practising some of the more energetic routines – we had ginger snaps today! Biscuits remain a heavy feature of rehearsals despite the fact that we exhausted the biscuit budget in the first two days, last week we even rescued some unopened and slightly out of date custard creams that had been thrown in the bin when things got a bit desperate. Within the cast we are all getting a little bit nervous as curtain up approaches but Charlie is keeping our spirits up with funny Irish accents and impressions of Welsh typists, Charlotte is keenly keeping us no more that 10 minutes off our schedule, Christopher is into double figures with his success rate of ideas and I haven’t dropped Mandy’s saxophone for almost three weeks now!
There is a lot of hard work yet to come but the fun of it is that I get to work with a lot of very talented people who let me make a lot of noise, play a lot of instruments, spill water all over the stage, be the tail of a dinosaur, do some Irish dancing, a wellington boot version of ‘Singing in the Rain’ and puppeteer Mrs Armitage’s dog Breakspear, who we call Shakespeare back stage! One of the most magical things about this show; especially with the magnificent design, sets, costumes, props and lighting, is that it actually feels like being in a Quentin Blake picture book and I’m sure the audience will feel that way too especially when we get you to all join in!
By Ben Glasstone, Musical Director
So, we are four days in to rehearsal for All Join In and having a very happy and productive time of it so far. We need to try and get all of the music and songs learnt as early on in the process as possible so that it becomes second nature to the cast and they can then get on with adding all the other layers of performance – acting, puppeteering, mime, dancing, handstands etc – without forgetting their tunes and harmonies. This focus on music means that we’re only quite slowly progressing through the structure of the piece – in fact by day 2 we were still basically on page 1, which made some of us feel slightly nervous! But the company are so full of ideas and enthusiasm (not to mention talent) that I have no doubt we’ll get to where we need to be by the time we need to be there. We have a rehearsal room full of instruments (guitar, keyboard, saxophone, cello, ukulele, banjolele, harmonica, penny whistle, violin, drums and melodica at the last count) and have been “all-joining-in” from morn till eve, including during tea-breaks. Apart from music the thing that seems to bond us most strongly as a company is a shared love of biscuits. In fact we have been demonstrating this passion so exuberantly that we were today informed by our DSM that we had “broken the biscuit budget” and from now on would have to pay for our own malted milks and jammy dodgers. Pah!
All in all it’s been a really enjoyable first week and each time we go back to Quentin Blake’s brilliant illustrations we are inspired with new and more outlandish ideas for our stage versions of his stories. At some point we’ll probably have to stop coming up with new ideas as the designer and prop-makers may decide they’ve got their hands full enough without having to come up with another string of sausages or giant pair of tongs. Anyway, so far so good...
Well, as is so often the way, what I have ended up writing is what I was expecting, and not what I was expecting. I thought when I started this I was going to write about football, that being the thing that Brazil most means to me. And so I have, but the story I've ended up telling, although fundamentally about football, doesn't feature it very much. I thought for a while I was going to write about a version of football played in Brazil and other South American countries, called Futsal, which is an indoor smaller scale version of the actual game. In reading about it, I came across a true story about something else entirely, and that's what I've ended up using as the inspiration for my story. But I've taken one small true bit of history, and then used it as the springboard to imagine something else - two moments, ten years apart, which tell us something about the beginnings of football in Brazil, but mostly how one culture can both simultaneously absorb, and yet remain distant from, another. It was fun to write, but before I deliver it, I'm going to wait a few days, then read it through, and edit it - check it's all as good as it can be. I'm going to read it out loud, too, because that's a really good way of checking that you haven't made any awful mistakes, or repetitions, and that you've written it as well as you can.
The thing about writing is, you spend most of your time not doing it, even when it’s your job. But that’s okay. It’s one of the odd things about being a writer, that maybe only 5% of your time is spent writing, and most of the rest of it is spent thinking up the ideas in the first place. I think that’s the way to do it, because if you spend enough time doing the thinking and planning bit first, when you actually get round to the writing, it should be easy. Or at least easier.
Now, that’s not to say that it’s always plain sailing. Sometimes your ideas set off okay and then don’t lead to anything. That’s been the case with my Brazil story. I’ve had a couple of dead-ends, so far. And sometimes the ideas just don’t come, no matter how much you try to encourage them. And that’s the time to sit around, staring into space, eating chocolate biscuits, telling everyone you’re being a writer.
Eventually, with enough thinking and a lot of luck, the right idea will come along. I think I’ve found that now for my story, and pretty soon I might even write it. But only when I’ve done enough planning and thinking. And eaten enough chocolate biscuits.
