Essay about 39 Steps Live Theatre Review

Once seated, we saw that the stage was mainly bare with a chair on the left hand side of the stage. This suggested to the audience that the play would be non-naturalistic unlike, a west end theatre production.

I’ve adored theatre for as long as I can remember. From writing plays throughout elementary school, to being involved in Drama Club in middle school, to performing in community theatre in high school, and to visiting the theatre as often as I could from the very beginning, theatre has always been a part of my life. Every aspect of it engages me: the directors working to bring their vision of the show’s scenes, choreography, or music to life, the actors transforming into different characters through their expression of dialogue, song, or dance, the costumers and set-builders transporting the audience into the setting and time period with their artistry, the backstage tech and crew working quickly and precisely to keep the show flowing to curtain call, and the orchestra bringing the show to life through music. There is nothing like the experience of live theatre, both as a member of the audience and as a member of the cast and crew.

The development of English pantomime was strongly influenced by commedia dell'arte. This was a "comedy of professional artists" travelling from province to province in Italy and then France, who improvised and told comic stories that held lessons for the crowd, changing the main character depending on where they were performing. Pantomime mainly incorperated song, dance, buffoonery, slapstick, cross-dressing, in-jokes, topical references, audience participation, and mild sexual innuendo. The general movement within Pantomime creates physical theatre as the storyline is presented to the audience mainly through lifts, dance and slapstick, although performers also use their voice throughout.

I selected this play mainly because I love the way Thornton Wilder chose to break the fourth wall. The fourth wall is the space that separates a performer or performance from an audience. The Skin of Our Teeth doesn’t just break the

Leigh’s statement that ‘The edge of the stage is not an invisible boundary over which the actor must never step but a garden wall across which the actor gossips and flirts with the public as if they were neighbours’ seems to have captured the very essence of audience acknowledgement that is so present in the play Pseudolus. Neither cast nor script of this comedy by Plautus seems particularly bothered by any notion of the fourth wall, and the play is rife with both blatant and subtle character acknowledgement of the audience. Indeed the notion that the fourth wall is some sort of impenetrable barrier between performer and audience seems absurd when one examines the aims of theatre and performance as a whole, and Pseudolus circumvents and breaches this supposed barrier with a variety of means

The play was well interpreted by all whom were involved. Steven Wrentmore, the Director, kept the 1920’s feel by dressing in all 1920’s costumes and everyone spoke as if they were living at the

For our critiquing assignment in our Introduction to Stagecraft 1, I ventured to downtown Toronto, to a small indie theatre called, The Unit 102 Theatre. There I saw the production of MISS; written by Dora Award-nominated playwright Michael Ross Albert who wrote such works as Tough Jews, The Spadina Avenue Gang with the Storefront Theatre. The set takes place in the aftermath of a shocking accident in a boarding school classroom, the story explores the tenuous connection between a high school teacher, her fiance, and a troubled student whose lives have been irrevocably changed by tragedy caused by a miscarriage, an affair, and the fear of the consequences that are not yet revealed, and finally, murder. This is a one act showdown between three

Since I have prior knowledge about this famous play, I did not have a hard time figuring out which actors played a specific character. When all the other characters came onto the stage, it was easy for someone to believe that they were the character stated in the program due to the costumes. The actors were attempting to make you believe they were the real characters, something that could have worked if the execution was better. If the actors practiced more and thoroughly knew their lines, making the character their own without losing the integrity of each character, the audience would be gripping out of their

First off, with two of the actors having written the play (Martin and Ticheno), it took on an innovative acting technique. Since they had written the lines themselves, the actors were fluently able to become their characters. This makes it easy to tell from the first scene on as to what type of characters the actors are

Monty Python often relied on direct address to the audience, often calling attention to the silliness of the actions performed and to the artificialness of the medium which is something that is directly correlated to the Carry On

The set and props where very compact and were built and moved on and off by the cast because they are designed to be transferred by one person. The props where all cleverly done, for instance they made a bridge out of three ladders, a train out of four boxes and a house from just one door. The door I thought was one of the best props used because the cast managed to make a fairly small stage appear huge just by moving the door and pretending each time that it was a new room every time they passed through it. At one point in the play Richard and Pamela ask the scottish landlords for a sandwich and they come back with a loaf of bread cut in two with one slice of lettuce in the middle, this was such a simple idea but made a big deal and a laugh out of it

Starting off my group tried to use the list of movement vocabulary. That didn’t work out so instead we decided to focus on what our theme or story would be. Eventually we settled on two topics, unrequited love and love at first sight.

with the power of the audience in the play as well as the story seems

This semester I have experience many live musical performances. Some of these performances have let me down but for the most part, these performances have been everything I ever expected. My two favorite performances this semester were Festival Vallenato and Ultra Music Festival. Although these two types of music are different in every way possible, the people and the performers are exactly where I feel I am in the right place.

Rituals and theater, which are both cultural performances, have similarities such as serving the purpose of entertaining teaching the audience, belief from audiencce, use of props, use of space, and repesentaion. Since during this time period many commoners did not know how to read, the church had to present these rituals in order to teach them about events in the bible like the Crucification of Jesus Christ. Similaritly, a play will serve the purpose to teach the audience a certain idea that the playwright believes is necessary for the audience members, the audience vary depending on the time this play was written, to learn or understand. Unlike a play, which has no certain time frame to be perform, a ritual is perform during certain time of the liturgical year; for example, the passion of the cross