Hidee Ho All. I write from merry ol’ London where we are officially off and underway.
We had a small production meeting yesterday morning. It wasn’t official, it functioned as a meet and greet, read through and oppurtunity to hear some of the ideas being thrown around for the performance.
It was wonderfully instructive. The puppeteers Joni-Rae Carrack and Faith Brandon are helping Lily Arnold design the puppet of Jasper, which they will be operating and which we will show in a later post once assembled. The immensely talented Mikey Shearer will voice Jasper, although he will be voicing the Doll from a distance. Jasper will have a small radio inside him from which you’ll hear Mikey’s voice as well as hearing Mikey from elsewhere inside the room.
I got a chance to meet the wonderful Zoe Spurr who will be designing the lighting and production designer Lily Arnold also gave us some peaks into her ideas of utilizing and maximizing the minimalist approach we’re going with.
You must remember, this is a workshop production, not a full staged show. The goal at this stage of development is to showcase the basics. This is the music. This is the story. These are our basic ideas of how to bring it to life.
It is clear that the Director Mark Swetz has assembled a throughly killer team and i will be talking about them in more detail throughout the week as we blog through the rehearsal process. We’ll get back to the pop culture posts after the performance, but during the next two weeks we will be showing how a show at this level of development goes about rehearsing and preparing.
The band has just had its first rehearsal which went extremely well and which we’ll feature tomorrow.