Rent - Beginning Rehearsal

When we started the rent reheaslals, we spent a lesson on actually choosing what we wanted to base our workshop unit on. Where as a lot of people in the class are into musical theatre, the class wanted to work on a musical that we could easily workshop in terms of style and the ways we can stage things. Someone suggested Rent and rather quickly people started to agree and were really up for it. There were some people in the class (including myself) had no idea about Rent and the story or even the characters. After this the people who knew the musical told us about it, telling us about the characters and a basic outline of the story. Once it was decided that we would do this workshop unit on Rent, we were given the first few pages of the script (just the song lyrics including the monologue at the beginning of the musical) and we were split into groups to see how people found certain characters (weather they found the vocal range achievable, weather they felt that they could achieve it, weather they wanted to go for that part etc). For my character in this "tester" session, I liked to play the character of Roger as he has a rather louder voice and it would be something that would have been challenging. However I did like the character of Collins as he has a similar voice range to me and I could adapt to his singing.