This is my first blog for this semester. The internship that I have been involved in is with The Story County Theatre Company of Ames and their production of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. I have been working on this project since last November as the Stage Manager for the show. This show is made up of Kids from the ages of 9 to 17. Now that I have given a brief over view of what my internship is I will tell you what we have been doing and some of the things that I have learned along the way.
We held the auditions for the show in the middle of November. We had a great number of kids turn up to try out for a part. I think that the end count was 57 kids in all. The hardest part about the auditions was trying to remember what kid did what. After 57 kids it was really hard to keep them all straight. We held 2 nights of open auditions and then a third night of callbacks. We ended up calling back 32 of the kids. After callback Amber and I sat down and started to create our cast. After about 3 hours we finally got the show cast. Unfortunately some of the kids that we cast ended up not being able to take part in the production, so we had to recast a few spots.
At our first rehearsal we had a read through of the play and played some games to get to know each other better. At the end of this first rehearsal Amber and I both felt really encouraged and happy with our casting choices. For the next few rehearsals we spent the time doing table work, but since we had a cast of kids did explored the play through games and activates. One game we played was all about tactics. We had the kids try using different tactics to get something from one another. We also had the kids come up with back-stories for their character. We also taught the kids about character objectives. Most of the kids seem to really enjoy these games and seemed to learn what we wanted them to.
After the first few rehearsals of games and script analysis, we started to block the play. If you thought blocking a play with college students was tedious try blocking a play with young kids. Because of the short attention span of the kids we spread the blocking over several rehearsals to make it more bearable for the kids. After the play was blocked we went back and started to go through the play and work parts of it.
This brings us to about present time. Last week we started to do full runs of the play. This last past weekend the staff spent it loading the set and lights into the theatre. We hung and focused lights, set and spiked drops and boarders, got props ready, spiked the set, and all of the other stuff that goes along with getting ready for tech week. After that we had a dry tech. So yesterday February 7 was our first full tech day with cast and crew. The kids handled the whole process fairly well. And everything went rather smooth for being a first tech. There are however still some issues with actors remembering lines and blocking. That is a little scary considering that the show opens on Friday. Tonight we have another tech so I will be bloging again here soon.
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