Rehearsals underway for Rigoletto

Rehearsals are well under way for our May production of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Having had around six weeks of familiarising ourselves with the music we have now taken “to the floor” and started to move the action.

This is always a tricky time initially, as instead of sitting in our separate voice sections with the music in hand and Michael our musical director standing right in front of us to give us our leads we now have to think about positioning, using the floor space, reacting to the drama that is unfolding and trying not to trip anyone up.

Gradually the actual scores will be put down as musical memory muscles kick in, and hopefully attention can then be really focussed on projecting the story by gesture, expression and movement.

It has only been a couple of weeks so we are still in the early stages of production but already characterisations are starting to form. We begin to differentiate the “goodies” from the “baddies” and understand the nuances of the plot a bit more.

Here are a few photos from the second week of floor rehearsal which have been taken by Ruth Harper, the daughter of Jo, one of Heber’s regular performers. Ruth is currently studying for her GCSEs and is hoping to go on to study media and film at college.