Another great day with the students and staff of Once Upon A Mattress today! Today’s lesson was entitled: ACTING A SONG, and looked at why it’s important to  apply scene analysis techniques to songs and just how to do it. Highlights of the day included:

SONG TYPE: we spend the first half of the day looking at song type e so we were better able to analyze how a song fits into the overall picture of the story. We discovered that each song has two types associated with it: a structural type and character experience type.

• There are 4 different Structural Types:
  1. Ballads – usually a love song or song with great emotion. Usually slower in tempo.
  2. Charm Songs – meant to get the audience to like a character
  3. Comedy Numbers – main purpose is to produce laughs
  4. Musical Scenes – seamlessly blend dialogue and song OR is a dialogue through song between two or more characters
• There are 5 different Character Experience Types:
  1. I Am- any song that explains a character, a group of characters, or a situation
  2. I Want- any song that tells us what what motivates a character or reveals a goal/dream
  3. Transition- a moment of change
  4. Realization- the “A-Ha” moment where a character come to a new realization or insight
  5. Decision- after a lot of thought the character comes to a conclusion
• We also learned that in traditional musicals, usually character development happens during the songs and plot is developed during dialogue. So if we don’t apply scene analysis techniques to a song it important character development is lost and makes the story harder to follow, hence why it’s so important to do.
  BONUS: In jukebox musicals it’s the reverse since the songs is already taken from found material.

• Whenever we are on stage singing to the audience, we want to create an imaginary character from our character’s world to sing to. This gives more purpose to the lyrics and allow us to create an objective.

We workshopped “An Opening For A Princess”, “Finale” and “Yesterday I Loved You” by identifying who we were talking to, what our objective was and then applying tactics to each line. It was a lot of fun, but don’t take our word for it… check out the video below to hear from three cast members Ryan Johnston, McKenna Green and Brigitte Lindell!

Check back to tomorrow to find out more about Day #4 as we focus on n telling a story through movement.