Romeo and Juliet - Rehearsal 7

2.1
In this first piece of the balcony scene, a slightly tipsy Mercutio (Zach) and Benvolio (Hollinger) go searching for Romeo only to give up and go home.  Because I'd worked on this scene for a class with Zach as Mercutio before, it was much effort to get this back up to fighting speed.  All we had to do was get the the blocking to fit with the new entrance and exit and get Hollinger up to speed.  It all came together very easily, with the final cherry on top being Benvolio having a "torch."  In our version, torches will be flashlights.  (Side bar: in modern day England, flashlights are actually called torches.)  Playing darkness in this scene means that when Benvolio is actually paying attention to Mercutio, he has to find him with the torch.  It's pretty sweet.

2.3
This scene is sort of a beast.  It's a lot longer than it looks and there's a lot of complicated things that go on.  We spent quite a bit of time getting the blocking just right.  With only five people onstage, you'd think it wouldn't be so hard, but there is a lot of motion to this scene.  With Mercutio riding around on Romeo's back and the Nurse getting handsy with Mercutio, there's a lot going on.  The first part of this scene, when it's just Mercutio, Benvolio and Romeo, came together fairly easily.  It took some working to get their placement just right, but their initial instincts were good enough that we could tweak their staging within the boundaries that they'd already created.  I find that makes things easier.  If you can let the actors go where they want and then keep the blocking as close to that as possible, things keep more consistent down the road.  So, we got the boys being boys, though it took them a bit to really get into the fun and motion of this scene.  They hung back and very much focused on the words rather than giving motion to their speech and interacting physically with each other.  Once I told them to take the scene to 11, they started to get the pace and pysicality of the scene.  Then, when we brought it back down, they were able to keep the pace and interaction without forcing the scene to be too ridiculous.  We then added the Nurse (Wagoner) and the crazy level rose.  The end of this scene, after much toil, is now as funny as the beginning (even more so, I'd say).  Again, it took a lot of finesse to get the comic timing just right, but they're coming along.  I'll tell you, if there's one thing I'm learning from this process, it's that there is truth to the phrase "dying is easy, comedy is hard."