We held auditions for Grit on Saturday at the Princess Theatre in Torquay.
It was a culmination of two years of work for us – fighting, coaxing, nurturing, patiently (or impatiently) waiting, negotiating, bartering, wheedling, showing-by-doing, looking for funding, looking for more funding, teaching, training, showing up, and celebrating.
Artistically, it’s the culmination of about 10 years of thinking about this show. It’s been a long time coming.
Meg and Jade and I have been working on a rough framework for the Grit script – a loose skeleton which we’ll use in the devising process to turn into a fully-formed show with the company’s creative ideas and improvisations and writing. Part of this early process has been lots of lyrics writing on my home computer. LOTS of song lyrics. Some good, some bad. Some just starting ideas. Some more developed rants which have been incubating for a long time. We’ve tried devising full musicals with young people before, and we know that the songwriting is the bit that takes the most time… it needs a bit of toploading, if we’re going to pull off a fully-finished, polished final show.
Or, at least, it usually takes a long time. The songwriting.
But on Saturday at auditions at the Princess Theatre, we handed Joe and Taz and Elley a page of song lyrics and gave them about 20 minutes in a corner of the Princess Theatre seats to turn those words into a song. Here’s what they made.
So that bodes well.
Post written by: Erin Walcon