Romeo and Juliet - Rehearsal 9

3.1
We only did the end of this scene today.  Ya know, the part after everyone is dead.  It's fairly straight forward as far as blocking goes, but the guys had several questions about character and motivation that we were able to address because the blocking was so simple.  Jay (Capulet) and I took quite a bit of time to talk about character motivation and the fact the he doesn't talk for this whole scene.  We talked about how he would react and how he can logically be in this scene and not tear someone's head off.  In the end, I think we got to a good place with his character in this scene, or at least a good jumping off point.

4.5
We were both halves of this scene out of sequence for the rest of the night.  First, we worked on the portion of this scene that no one ever puts into a production: the musicians.  There is a funny little bit with Peter and 3 musicians at the end of 4.5 that is cut from every production because it is so incongruous and makes absolutely no sense right after what's come before.  Everyone comes in and finds Juliet dead... and then the clowns come out and have a good laugh.  It's weird, so we're not trying to make it anything but weird.  I'm letting the scene be this odd comic moment.  I didn't have a strong reason initially (except that the scene is rarely performed), but the more we worked on it, the more I got the sense that this scene was there to remind the audience that this could still end well.  This show could still wind up a comedy.  I didn't have this thought until I got home after rehearsal tonight, but this feels right.  It also makes this odd little scene make a lot more sense.  Other than all those revelations, it took much longer than it should have to get this scene blocked.  Folks were very unfocused tonight and this being a comic scene did not help matters at all.  But, we got through it and the scene actually looks pretty decent.

The other part of this scene is the sad part. It was rather rough getting through this scene the first time, but once we got one run in and got the blocking down, we started working on character motivations.  All the guys in this scene had some strong opinions about how their characters would react to the situation.  We started to work with all of them to form a cohesive picture that still allowed all of them to react in their own ways.  It's, of course, still a work in progress, but we made some good headway into character motivations and reactions and we had plenty of time for them to be able to start to ask all the character questions they needed answered.  All in all, a productive start.