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Thoroughly Modern Millie - 2002 Tony Awards

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Forget About The Boy - Thoroughly Modern Millie - 2002 Tony Awards

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When tasked with finding two musical theatre songs that reflect love, hate and other such themes found in West Side Story, I was immediately drawn to one of my favourite musicals, Thoroughly Modern Millie, to begin my search. Set in the 1920's, it tells the story of a vivacious young woman who has left her small hometown to seek her fortune in New York City. In the context of the time, this sort of thing would be seen as a bold move - she is rebelling against the expectation to stay at home and raise a family. However, the 20's were an era of mass empowerment for women. Haircuts became stylishly short and boyish, just as skirts became shorter too. It also became increasingly common for women to get jobs as secretaries and stenographers, allowing them to have an independent income and not have to rely on marriage or family ties to afford the cost of living.
This is exactly what Millie does, and when Act Two opens with a heart broken Millie sitting amongst her fellow female stenographers, a riotous chaos ensues.
Upset and irritated that the young man she is feuding with keeps calling her, Millie is told to "Forget about the boy" by her colleagues and to get herself a canary, instead. The women then come together to sing a passionate and furious number about their various relationship woes, reflecting comradery, love, relationships (and their complications), feminism, anger and rebellion, all of which are themes that run throughout West Side Story.

The second part to this task was to find another song, but this time a solo. After skipping through Spotify playlists of "Musical Theatre Solos" yielded little inspiration, I took to browsing the web for ideas. This time I opted to delve into the deeper themes presented in West Side Story, such as racism, prejudice and violence. One song in particular caught my eye, that song being Supper Time from Irving Berlin's 1933 musical As Thousands Cheer. I read that it is, for the most part, a light-hearted "newspaper musical" with various headlines, current events and even the weather forecast included. However, it takes a sinister turn when silhouetted bodies hanging from trees can be seen, and a headline tells of numerous black men being lynched by mobs of white men in the south of the USA. Berlin wrote this song especially for Ethel Waters, and her performance can be described as nothing less than devastating. It still to this day serves as a much needed reminder of the dangers of mob mentality and blind prejudice, enforced on many by brainwashing.

Reference: https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/VIDEOS-Five-Broadway-Songs-That-Confronted-American-Audiences-On-Racism-20160118

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Thoroughly Modern Millie - 2002 Tony Awards

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Before we went about setting the first number for our show, we read through the lyrics to get a feel for the song. Attached is a document detailing the lyrics, the highlighted parts being my lines. The plan for the song is to set it partially removed from the context. As we're not actually performing West Side Story, we don't have to involve characters or even the Jets at all, allowing us to strip the material right back to its skeleton. Analysing the song in this way shows its insightful comments on the structure of modern society, and how it fails underprivileged young people. This is such a fantastic message to be putting across to our audience as 60 years later it's still just as appropriate. Possibly even more so, where in the recent years the media has been very quick to criticise the generation of "Millennials", and paint them as burdens to society. Take for example, The Economist's now infamous tweet asking the world, why aren't millennials buying diamonds? And various articles detailing how millennials are "killing" other once revered industries. This kind of attitude can be really damaging to young adults, with many people forgetting that millennials have been failed by society more times that society has been let down by them.
The story told by the song at first glance appears to be that of a young person (or persons) being passed through the whole social system, only to be spat out at the end and wind up back in trouble with the local police officer again. It demonstrates how certain groups in society are quite often just left behind, as it can be easier to say it's somebody else's problem than to provide the support that a community should.

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Today, we set the choreography for Gee, Officer Krupke. We were able to do this really quickly and efficiently as the whole group had a really good level of focus. The lack of talking between directions made a huge difference, compared to other rehearsals where people have been chattier. Having a director / choreographer was probably the most crucial thing allowing this rehearsal to run so smoothly and effeciently. Especially when creating a very visual, physical theatre ensemble number such as this it was incredibly useful having someone on the outside who could see all ten of us from an audience perspective, move us around so that we were in the perfect position. This also meant however, that we as performers had to match this with exceptional spatial awareness for us to be consistent.

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In this lesson we were split up into groups (I made up a pair with Byron) and given situations to improvise, our focus directed onto getting a message across to our audience. This message was to get our audience  to question global cultures and segregation within global society. This of course is quite a broad and deep subject, so before we began to improvise a scene we decided to create some circumstances to give our improvisation a back bone. Quite simply, as an idea I suggested that possibly the easiest way of showing how absurd some of our cultural norms are we should use juxtaposition, in the form of two teenagers from different planets having a conversation. Through this we could play around and question the capitalist structure of our global communities, and how simply the idea of different countries creates segregation and indifference amongst the people of this planet.
From teacher and peer feedback we were informed after showing what we had worked on we were advised that our scene needed to pick up the pace, having quite a lengthy introduction when Byron's character needs to be established as an "Alien" much earlier on, to keep the narrative rolling.

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Now that I have two characters both from improvised scenes, I decided it's time that they become polished and more grounded, allowing me to think more accurately about my character's choices than when initially improvising the scenes. Therefore I have begun to create a character map for both, very different characters.

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Jerome Robbins, originally Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, was born in 1918 to a Jewish family living in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Soon after, the family moved to Weehawken, New Jersey, and his father and uncle opened the Comfort Corset Company in Union City. The family had many connections to show business, and they legally changed their name to Robbins in the 1940s. Today, he is famed for exceptional examples of his choreography, such as Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I and West Side Story. His style evolved to be uniquely inventive whilst still harking from traditional ballet, meaning he became a pioneer in dance. There are arguably five notable strong influencers of Robbins' style, who were all key figures during his life and training.

As his first dance teacher, Senia Gluck Sandor had a massive influence on Robbins' style. Robbins was 18 when he was introduced to Sandor by his sister, and he was soon taken on as an apprentice at Sandor's company, Dance Centre. Being a contemporary company, it was at this time when such free, imaginative dancing could really impact Robbins. Sandor had a uniquely theatrical, eclectic and expressionist style, an influence you can see clearly in the dances in the West Side Story film, which was both directed and choreographed by Robbins. The dancers' moves are so expressive and not only create a mood over each whole number, but carry emotion in every single step. For example, the wacky head nods featured in Mambo show in an instance cockiness and pride, a prime example of expressionist theatrical style learnt from Sandor.

Known as the psychological choreographer, Antony Tudor was a more classical inspirational figure with his skillset centred in ballet. He spent many years training under Marie Rambert, the infamous pioneer of modern ballet. Tudor’s specialty was always creating psychological stories in his ballets, and this undoubtedly affected Robbins ability to storytell through dance, as well. It can be said that Tudor was a unique teacher, entirely a law unto himself. He praised very few dancers as true Tudor stylists, and taught that “The movement is the meaning” translating roughly to, do the steps without adornment or interpretive alternation, and they will prove expressive. This of course would be a problem if you didn’t happen to know what the steps or gestures mean, and thus Tudor’s methods proved curious to many. As well as this, many of Tudor’s ballets had exceptionally dark plots and subject matters including sex, rape and violence. This could be seen as inspiration to Robbins pushing him to more challenging subjects, although Robbins delved down a more political focus.

Agnes De Mille, another student of Marie Rambert’s was most famous for her choreography in musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. As this would suggest, she was yet another highly theatrical influence on Robbins. Born to a well connected theatrical family, she loved acting from an early age but was told that she was not pretty enough to pursue it. When she started dancing when she was much older, she found that she was not flexible, nor did she have the body of a dancer. However she used all of this to her advantage and proved to show immensely powerful characters in her dancing. Robbins became involved with De Mille at a pivotal time in his career - in 1941 she gave him his first ever successful role in her ballet, Three Virgins and a Devil.

Choreographer George Balanchine was perhaps the most influential figure in Robbins’ career, Robbins looking up to and admiring through their many works together. Balanchine was born in St Petersburg, Russia but moved to America to go on and become the foremost choreographer of the twentieth century and the architect of classical ballet in America. His legacy lives on in the New York City Ballet, which he co-founded and he and Robbins were so close that when Balanchine died, Robbins took over as artistic director of the NYCB. It was their work together on The Firebird (1949) and Pulcinella (1972) that was most recognised. Again, Balanchine had a very unique way of doing things, seeing himself as a practical craftsman, and not an artist-genius. His most iconic creations were avant garde and modern, showcasing his neoclassical style, but he also reworked The Nutcracker and Americana. Unlike Tudor, who often presented choreography that went against the music it was paired with, in Balanchine’s ballets music was always primary. He created a total of 29 ballets to Igor Stravinsky’s music, and always used music - no matter the composer - to provide form and framework for the choreography, through the rhythms and structure of the songs. In many of his ballets, the emotion included was never literal, and was heard telling one of his dancers, “Don’t worry about your soul. I want to see your foot”

Another influential figure who couldn’t go without mention is Leonard Bernstein, who unlike the other notable influences was not a dancer or choreographer, but a composer, pianist, lecturer and author. Their work together is evident, most infamously in West Side Story but also in On The Town and Fancy Free. Their partnership was so well matched as they both came from a similar background, and thus were closer in their stylistic and creative thinking. Bernstein was one of the first American born and bred conductors to gain praise internationally, raising him to a level where Robbins and Bernstein were a recognisable partnership, even household names. Not only was he hailed the saviour of American Musical Theatre, but before this was the youngest music director ever engaged by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

In conclusion, these people clearly influenced Robbins in his life and work, and their legacies still remain today. There is of course no end to the amount of people who had in fact left impacts, big or small, on Jerome Robbins, as the ripple effect of life touches us all. This is just a small collection of those who not only left their mark on Robbins, but left their mark on history as well.

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Our main idea for this quick improvised scene was to show the different types of circumstances that can commonly be associated with gangs. For instance, crimes like drug dealing and graffiti-ing, we also took inspiration from post code gangs by looking into how gangs are territorial. Carl, Sophie, Megan, Chloe and myself decided to set our scene in a prison, each of our characters having committed crimes whilst involved with gangs, been caught, prosecuted, and sent to the same prison. The inmates sit in a semi-circle in the TV room, bored of the programs they start discussing how each of them came to be in prison. Through the use of flashbacks, we had each character act out their backstories with the other inmates switching into the supporting characters in the mini scenes. Although this was an efficient format for divulging each characters backstory and we workshopped this material in this lesson, I found myself feeling that it lacked inspiration with the flashback format being boring, cliche and unimaginative. Therefore, next lesson I am going to put forward these ideas to the group and we will work together to either improve the scene, or do what I think will be best which is to change the scene entirely, keeping it simple. Another thing I felt needed improvement was the language that was being used - the problem being no one sounded like a convicted gang member.

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Changed it, much much better dynamic now, younger characters with one older youth community officer
In this lesson I discussed with the group my worries about the scene and although exasperated with the prospect of starting again, I motivated my classmates by suggesting we ought to keep the scene simple, without over complicating it or worrying about covering everything we could possibly think of as we had done previously. This worked and we did get a scene together fairly quickly

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Research Into Juvenile Community Service

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Research Into Juvenile Community Service

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maybe design set based on this research

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Working on Scripts for Devised Alien Scene

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Working on Scripts for Devised Alien Scene

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Write about feedback, how I'm gonna take it on

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movements, parts, walk on to stage

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Things we changed, making the build up better, more emotional powerful blah blah blah

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getting harmonies down,
sorting out the staging - changed from static and not close enough together to immediately close in together, pathways,  holding hands
no sexual tension and there needed to be. looked like a marriage proposal when it's more like please take my virginity.