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Within any performance, there are always improvements that could be made. If we were to do this performance again, I would consider incorporating much more research into the performance about musical theatre itself, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s background and his work, and further research into his collaboration with Tim Rice.

We might have benefitted from being more creative with our characters and choosing a character that does not suit our personality in order to further demonstrate our acting skills. It could be considered that choosing a character that suited our personality was too safe and could hinder our final performance as we have not differentiated ourselves from our character quite enough. In the future, I will consider choosing a more challenging character to show off my acting ability.

In order to prove that we fully understood Andrew Lloyd Webber’s style, it may have been beneficial to use a song that is not from a musical and perform it in his style. This would show a greater understanding of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his work and suggest that we can apply his style to a wider range of music.

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Our final performance went well, we managed to run through the full performance with few mistakes. We could have benefitted from better preparation and more group rehearsals to polish the performance and properly discuss sound and lighting, and polish the songs and dances, but the main structure of the performance presentation was successful.

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We decided to take on the advice given at our formative assessment and began our further research by expanding on points made already in our script, going into more depth in order to support our facts.  We expanded upon the points of flashy spectacles, vivid melodies, and forceful and dramatic staging, giving more research ad examples as Mr S asked the students more questions.

We also decided to include a video of Starlight Express to further demonstrate Andrew Lloyd Webber’s techniques. This would be played in the background with us still performing as the video played behind us.

Finally, we conducted some research into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s collaboration with Tim Rice, how they met and the work they created together. We discovered that Andrew Lloyd Webber received a letter from Tim rice, informing him that he had heard Andrew had been looking for a partner. Andrew and Tim met and began working together from this point.

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After several rehearsals, we felt happy with our performance presentation, and requested our formative assessment for some constructive feedback. We were advised to add more research into Andrew Lloyd Webber and some information on his collaborations. We were also advised to elaborate on points that we had already made in the script. We therefore gathered as a group and conducted further research to add into our script.

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After writing our initial script, we gathered together as a group to rehearse. We timed our performance and found that it was too short at only 11 minutes. We therefore decided that Ben would sing a song from ‘School of Rock’, to better establish his character at the start of the performance. We also realised that we would need some background music during the scene where the students were attempting to choreograph a dance for ‘Revolting Children’. We tried using the same song and acting silently while demonstrating a few dance moves during the song, but this seemed to dreg on too long and therefore we decided against it, instead replacing ‘Revolting Children’ with thirty seconds of ‘Smart Gallery music’ where we would act silently while discussing the dance. We then go on to perform our dance of ‘Revolting Children’ and conclude the performance with the school bell ringing and class ending as Mr S storms off stage, irritated by Summer’s ‘know it all attitude.

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It was realised as we were writing our script that we would need to gather some sound material. We had decided that we would use a classroom noise at the beginnings of the performance as the students were coming into the classroom. We would also need a backing track for the song ‘Pharoah’s Story’ and finally we would need the track for ‘Revolting Children’. We used our lessons at university to gather the appropriate tracks so that we could use them in our performance. We recorded the tracks from our phones directly to the computer, where we named them accordingly in order to make them easily accessible for the sound technician. We also created separate sound scripts and lighting scripts, indicating in large font and bold writing the appropriate times in which to change the sound and lighting effects.

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The characters (IMDB, 2018) were decided as below:

Ben —> Mr S with sarcastic attributes

Michelle —> Freda with a ‘rock chick’ personality

Helen —> Summer with a ‘know it all’ attitude

Jodie —> Tamika with a shy personality

Jessica —> Sophie with a lazy attitude

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Before writing our script, we had a discussion within our group to determine what characters we would like to play within the performance presentation. We decided that we would prefer to play characters that best suited our current personalities, and as a result of this we researched which characters in the school of rock best matched our personalities.
After deciding on our characters, we began writing the script for the performance, thinking carefully about what information each person should give, according to their character.

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We conducted research both individually and as a group and gathered together to discuss which pints we would like to include in our performance presentation. We mostly found information about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s life, and his style within musical theatre. We attempted to capture his ideas within our own performance, including key aspects from our research by using song, dance and acting in line with the musical theatre genre. We decided to use songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, but also use one song that was not created by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and apply his techniques while performing to the song in order to show our understanding of his style with lights, sound and dance. We chose to use the song ‘Revolting Children’ from the musical ‘Matilda’, as we felt that this would be a strong dance in which we could use lighting effects, acting and dancing to create a fully ‘flashy spectacle’ as our research suggested was his style.

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This quote was found which perfectly summarises Andrew Lloyd Webber’s style. We decided to incorporate this quote within our script as our foundation for demonstrating his style within our performance presentation.

'Lloyd Webber’s best musicals were flashy spectacles that featured vivid melodies and forceful and dramatic staging. He was able to blend such disparate genres as rock and roll, English music-hall song, and operatic forms into music that had a wide popular appeal. In addition, Lloyd Webber was an astute businessman, founding in 1977 the Really Useful Company (later the Really Useful Group), which managed all his productions thereafter.' (Britannica, 2018)

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Andrew Lloyd Webber has written many musicals, some of his most famous musicals include Cats, Joseph, Starlight Express, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, Jesus Christ Superstar and School of Rock. (Andrew Lloyd Webber, 2018).

We decided that we would use ‘School of Rock’ to create the school setting for our performance. We would have a teacher character and four students characters from ‘School of Rock’, where the students would learn about Andrew Lloyd Webber. We would incorporate the song, ‘Pharaoh’s Story’ from ‘Joseph’  which one of the students would lead while the other three students sang the backing vocals.

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'With his impressive array of commercially and artistically successful shows, Lloyd Webber is one of the most important composers for the musical theatre in the last decades of the 20th century. Both his innate gift for melody and his ability to create music, which live up to the dazzling special effects characteristic of so many of his shows, have contributed immensely to his worldwide success.'

This quote perfectly grasps the reasoning behind choosing Andrew Lloyd Webber as the practitioner who’s work we wanted to showcase within our performance.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on 22nd March, 1948 to a musically inclined family. His mother was a piano teacher father was the director of London College of Music. He played piano and violin and began writing his own music at the early age of 6. He studied history at university but eventually dropped out to follow his passion, studying musical theatre at the Royal College of Music. He wrote his first musical, ‘The Likes of Us’ in 1965 with Tim Rice, but became truly successful in his later musicals. ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’ was their first truly successful work that the pair did together, and as a result have received multiple awards for their work including Tony’s, Grammys, Oscars and Olivers. (Biography, 2019)

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We have chosen the genre of musical theatre. We explored a variety of options for our performance style, but we agreed that it would be beneficial to all members in the group is we performed in a school style setting, allowing everyone the opportunity to speak and share research within the performance. Our original idea was to set the performance up as an Andrew Lloyd Webber master class, however this was quickly changed as we felt that it would give the teacher character the most to say and it would be unfair for the other members of the group. Finally, we settled on a school setting, and decided to incorporate characters from one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, ‘School of Rock’. This would ensure that everyone had an equal opportunity to speak within the performance and we would all have a specific character that we could perform as throughout the performance presentation.

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BBC Bitesize explains musical theatre as a style of theatre that uses a mixture of song, dance and dialogue in order to tell a story. (2018) Musical theatre is the genre that our group has decided to perform in, incorporating Andrew Lloyd Webber’s techniques within our performance. We therefore had to ensure that we used each aspect of musical theatre in our performance; song, dance and dialogue.

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Our assignment is to create a 15 minute performance presentation which displays performance skills and relating theory to practice. Our task is to choose a theatre practitioner and demonstrate his or her work within a performance.

This Padlet shows the research and reflection of the performance presentation, including a brief biography of Andrew Lloyd Webber, research into the style of musical theatre and a performance log of our group’s progress through the weeks leading up to our performance.

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The Editors of Encyclopedia Britanica. (2018) Andrew Lloyd Webber. [online]. Britanica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-Baron-Lloyd-Webber-of-Sydmonton [Accessed on 6 November 2018].

Furness, H. (2017) Andrew Lloyd Webber becomes first composer to have four Broadway shows at once since Rodgers and Hammerstein. [online]. The Telegraph. Available at:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/10/andrew-lloyd-webber-becomes-first-composer-have-four-broadway/ [Accessed on 6 November 2018].

Kantor, M. (2018). Andrew Lloyd Webber. [online]. PBS. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/andrew-lloyd-webber/ [Accessed on 6 November 2018].

Really Useful Group. (2018) Music. [online]. Really Useful Group. Available at: https://www.andrewlloydwebber.com/music/ [Accessed on 6 November 2018].

Biography.com Editors. (2018). Andrew Lloyd Webber Biography. A&E Television Networks. Available at: https://www.biography.com/people/andrew-lloyd-webber-20825129 [Accessed on 4 December 2018].

Starlight Express (2015). Promo - Bochum Starlight Express. [Online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSmx7SJTQuA [Accessed on 6 December 2018].

BBC Bitesize. (2019). Musical Theatre. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/bitesize/guides/z2hr7ty/revision/1 [Accessed on 3 January 2019]