The Music of Sleeping Beauty

Spot the Ukulele

A.H: 

Week three of Sleeping Beauty rehearsals have come to their end, and, as the final week of rehearsal looms, the show is in great shape. The actor’s have asked their “Who am I’s?” and “Why do I’s?” while Lucien and Bendeicte (our movement director’s) have solved a multitude of technical quandaries, from “How would a Thorn fight?” to “How does a shoal of Fish really move?” (read Lucy’s most recent Blog for more details).

However, being a Christmas Show, we have an extra dimension of detail we have to accommodate and seamlessly add to the show: songs. The important task of composing all of the play’s music, including songs, and then the teaching of said songs to the entire cast, complete with their respective harmonies, lies with our Musical Director: Paddy Cunneen. It is a task that requires a Herculean amount of patience as the only way to teach four lines of harmonies to a bunch of actors is simply repetition, repetition, repetition. Needless to say, under his expert tuition we are a well oiled song learning machine! Our routine for song learning goes something like this: gather round the piano; we split into Bass’, Tenor’s, Alto’s and Soprano’s, everyone learns their part of a section of the song, we sing our respective parts altogether, mistakes are made, mistakes are corrected, we sing it again, perfect it, learn the next bit, repeat. Once the full song is learnt we step away from the piano and Dominic steps in as we begin to work on how to integrate the song into the play.  

A song learning session with Paddy Cunneen

Due to the amount of singing in the play a vocal warm-up to avoid injury is a vital part of keeping us match fit. So, every morning for half an hour the whole company gathers round the piano and Paddy takes us through a hodgepodge of vocal acrobatics, tongue twisters and Christmas songs. A lovely addition to these warm-ups has been the staff from all the various departments of the Citz who Paddy invited to join us early on and who have since continued to come back daily and sing increasingly boldly. Our repertoire now spans many-a-genre and includes such classics as: In the Bleak Midwinter, O Little Town of Bethlehem, the anthem that is John Lennon’s Merry Christmas (War is Over) and we’ve even been known to break out into a bit of Bowie’s Life on Mars. So, if you find yourself in need of a choir to fill your Town Hall/ Church/ Cathedral/ Buckingham Palace let us know.

Finally, the theme of music brings us to Here We Stay, which Lucy has already mentioned but as it was, quite simply, incredible it deserves a second mention. A partnership project between the Scottish Refugee Council and the Citizens Theatre, Here We Stay addresses the complex issue of those people who, due to unfortunate circumstances, have had to leave their country of origin and arrive in the U.K seeking asylum and safety. What the cast and Director’s Neil Packham and Elly Goodman have done is go one better than verbatim theatre by having no actors at all, and, instead, have those who were once refugee’s themselves share their stories through the “song[s], spoken word and live music” of their respective cultures. The result is heart-wrenching, eye-opening, and astounding in the truest definition of the word. A vital piece of theatre.

 ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is on at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, from 1 Dec to 6 Jan. For all tickets please contact the box office on: 0141 429 0022, or book online at www.citz.co.uk.