Friday 16th January 2015 - The New Girl In Town (Ongoing)

Friday 16th January 2015
The New Girl In Town

Today we started rehearsing for the new girl in town ensemble. As a group we decided to split certain parts of the lyrics up so that the whole song wasn't sung by everyone, we had small solo parts. At first we had to change some of the parts around because it wasn't as good as it could have been, for example I was finding it hard to sing "after school" so we changed around to make sure that it sounded better. This also adds more variety to the performance, these are our parts:



Jaydee
Paige
Emily
Charley


Hey look out for that moving van
Driving down our streets
You better lock up your man
Before he meets
The new girl in town
Who just came on the scene
The new girl in town
Can't be more than sixteen
And she's got a way of makin'
A boy act like a clown
Wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo
We don't know what to do
'Bout the next girl in town
The new girl in town
Seems to dance on air 
The new girl in town
She's got the coolest hair
You better tell the homecoming queen
To hold on to her crown
Wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo
Or she's gonna lose it to
The new girl in town
She's hip, so cool
I'm gonna get her after school!
And yet we'd like to be like her
'Cause she's the kitten
That the cats prefer
The new girl in town
Has my guy on a string
The new girl in town
Hey look she's wearing his ring
I can't stop crying and so
In my own tears I'm gonna drown
Wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo
Cause he wants to rendezvous
With the new girl
We kinda sad and blue Yes it's true girl
We'd like to say...
To the new girl in town
The new girl in town
Wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo
From out of the blue girl
This town's in a stew girl
What a hullabaloo girl
She ain't just passing through girl
She's sticking like glue girl
To the man I though I knew girl
Wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo,wo-oo
Hey look out for that moving van
Look out, look out. Look out, look out
She was...the new girl in town

LyricsZZ.com:Hairspray Lyrics http://www.lyriczz.com/lyrics/hairspray/47346-the-new-girl-in-town/ (16th January 2015)

We did this by firstly singing along to the song with the lyrics, this was so we could make sure that we know the timing and intonation of the song before singing it without the lyrics. After this we started singing it through with just the backing track. We also started looking at where we could add in harmonies so that we could make the performance interesting I the second half on the song, there is a faster part that we decided that two people could sing at a higher pitch and two people could sing at a lower pitch.

In our next rehearsal we are going to work in the dance studio so that we can use the mirrors to help us when choreographing some simple movements that we can do when singing.

Friday 23rd January 2015 - Today we started looking at different choreography ideas, however we only had about 15 minutes to rehearse so we were just trying different things out. We found out that doing little jumps was not a good idea to do when we are singing, as we all found it difficult to make our singing sound smooth whilst doing this. Our focus for out next rehearsal is to look at choreography without singing so that we can come up with a simple routine and perfect it, before we start singing the song whilst dancing.



Friday 30th January 2015 - In this rehearsal we sung through the song a few times, but we mainly focused on working on harmonies. This is so we can add more variety in the performance instead of just singing monophonic, when doing this we had some trouble with pitching, because we kept on singing each others parts, however once we had rehearsed it, our pitching was better and our harmonies worked well. As well as this we had to work out our timing in the last part because originally we counted it as 7 beats, however it is 6 beats, once rehearsing this we got the correct timing with each other and the music. Our target for next rehearsal is to continue developing our harmonies and work on characterisation throughout the performance.


Tuesday 3rd January 2015 - Today we focused on the harmonies that we worked on last rehearsal, this was to make sure that we were singing them right. Like last lesson we had some issues with this, for example in the ending it took a few run-throughs to get them how they were supposed to sound. After this we worked characterisation, this is because the song is upbeat and quite energetic therefore we had to work on making our facial expressions and movements as energetic as the rhythm of the song. To do this we came up with simple choreography with the use of the mirrors in the dance studio, this helped us with characterisation because there was direct movements that we were doing that stayed within the time period of the song and the tempo and rhythm. However when doing this I found that it was harder to sing the correct harmonies as i was focusing on the choreography, as i practised this more with the rest of the group it began to get a little easier but we still struggled. To make sure that the choreography doesn't affect the quality of our singing we are going to rehearse more and keep going over it until we are used to singing and dancing at the same time. We wanted to have simple choreography in the original musical the characters are also doing simple movements that they do whilst singing. This is so our performance looks more interesting to the audience and we are not just standing in a line singing.