12 hr musical

For our musical theatre assessment the class presented the idea of putting on our own musical within 12 hours as opposed to doing a presentation. We felt that we would benefit and learn far more by going through this process than simply reseaching information and presenting it to the rest of the class. It was going to be a real test of how we could work as a group under such a huge amount of pressure. The point of the musical was the development of the process and the journey we went on in order to create it as opposed to the final product, which the majority of the audience was unaware of. As a result there was a complete lack of support from audience members. Despite the final performance consisting of forgotten lines, repeated lyrics and improvised dancing it was the fact that we had worked and battled through as a mini community to even reach the final product at all.

There were many times throughout the 12 hours when we wanted to throttle one and other, but it was the support and encouragement of the rest of the group that pulled us through and gave us the courage to carry on. The extent of the pressure to write, direct, design, organise, rehearse and choreograph a hours show was extremely high. It was difficult to manage how to distribute the time we had fairly so that everyone got a fair amount of time to rehearse with the resources they needed. This was a problem that arose during the day. As a large group the chorus needed far more time to rehearse singing and dancing with the piano, but this was not given to us and as a result we were cut out of the singing all together, despite spending several hours learning the lyrics for multiple songs. The dancing was also extremely out of time as we had rehearsed using a C.D to dance to and the switch to live music confused the counts and beats of the routine.

The significance of the day was on the team work that was required to get to the end product. I learnt a lot form the experience, including how to deal with emotion and how to effectively disagree with something without wasting hours argueing about it. It gave me a real taste of drama within a community where issues will arise and disputes will occur. It was one of the experiences that I have learnt most from whilst being at university.