10/6/2015

R & D Update

So, as we suspected, putting a new musical together is, as our character Gram would tell us: “Bloody hard work.”

We are currently in a room at Freedom Studios, thrashing out the detail of draft 2 of #ChipShoptheMusical and getting it on its feet.

In the room, we have a talented and committed team, who spend as much time working out how our characters place the salt and vinegar, as discussing overarching story structure.

We’re working towards a word-in-progress sharing with an invited audience next week, but we’re also working out how we will rehearse and create the final show (which features grime, jazz, choreography and real fish and chips served by our cast to the audience, who will watch the show in a real fish and chip shop).

This part of the work is vitally important – we want to make sure we get the right people in the room at the right time, when we come to rehearse for our tour in spring 2016. We want to make sure our script and our score are in perfect synch. We need to meld jazz, grime and chip shop choreography and we need to give our audience an experience they’ll never forget.

Some things are working really well already – our actors are developing their characters, our choreography in terms of chip shop life is beginning to make sense. But marrying music with lyrics and story and character is the massive challenge we knew it was going to be.

Building movement sequences that become dance-like, but still need to come from character and location and story, require painstaking, meticulous team work.

Each artist in the room has to put themselves on the line every day. Try different things, take risks, be prepared to fail.

That way we can work out how we are going to succeed at making something glorious.