2.2
This scene between Friar Lawrence (Glenn) and Romeo (Johnny) is an interesting little beast. There's a lot of story packed into this page and a half. There's also the problem of the speech the Friar has to give at the top of the scene. First off, it's boring, but you can't cut it out completely because you need to establish that the Friar works with flowers and herbs and that's why he knows how to make the "dangerous zombie potion"(or the one that make Juliet look dead) from the fourth act. So, we're starting to work with how to make this information more interesting. It's going to take some work, but I think we're already on a good track with it. The scene itself was wonky until I told Glenn to just hold center as Johnny bounced around the stage around him. Once we did this, the dynamic of the scene was much easier to discern and much clearer to the watcher. These guys have found some very fun moments in this scene, and some very unexpected moments as well. We were working the first part of the scene, where Romeo comes in and the Friar doesn't automatically see him has always been a bit of a puzzler to me. We decided that if it's not quite light out then the Friar wouldn't exactly be able to see who he's talking to. But, next time around, Johnny snuck in and put his hands over Glenn's eyes. It was just childish enough to really show Romeo's age, but it also, in one moment, gives a very clear idea of the relationship between these two characters.
1.2
It's two, two, two scenes in one! Luckily, this two scene debacle is a lot shorter and easier to sort out than last nights scenes. This one went very well. We got the blocking sorted for the whole thing fairly quickly, which meant that I was able to let Paris (Bobby) and Capulet (for today, my stage manager Angelina) go. Though, I suppose it just meant that Angelina could go back to being stage manager. This scene is odd in the sense that the beginning of the scene is all exposition explaining where we are in the story and the end of the scene is the same, except funny. We worked a bit of comedy into the beginning of the scene by having Peter (Paul) sleeping until he's told to do something. It's subtle, but it does tie the two halves to the scene together fairly well. Johnny (Romeo) also found an interesting dynamic in the latter part of the scene that brings out an interesting note about Romeo. He gets caught up in his "emo" anger so much so that he doesn't quite come out of it when he finally starts talking to Peter. It makes for a very different sort of scene than how I've scene this played before.
3.5
We were missing Jay (Capulet) to work on these next two scenes, so we didn't do a whole lot of character work and mostly focused on getting the blocking solid. In that sense, the rehearsal was a very successful one. For this scene specifically, we only worked on the last part of the scene, also known as "Capulet family fun time." Since I had already worked the portion with Romeo, we were able to skip over that portion of the scene for tonight and just block the last part. We tried it a couple of ways and established a blocking that looked neat and tidy while still giving Jay room to play around once he gets in there. Because we didn't have Jay, we took some time to work a little bit on how women interact with other women. We'll get to that more tomorrow, but I figured since we had the time, we should start it now. And, that little bit of direction actually helped the scene quite a bit.
4.2
This scene is very short. It's maybe a page long, maybe. It has basically the same shape as the other scene, but is much more polite and "happier" than the other scene. I put happy in quotes because Juliet is certainly not happy about what she is having to do. We had so much time to play around with this scene, that I tweaked the Nurse's (Wagoner) blocking several times until we got it right. The scene is simple and lovely; one calm moment in the surround storm that is the last half of this play.
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