Reflection on the Final Performance

The biggest strength of our production is the choice of music. As our production is intended to be a musical, the musical elements should be the biggest highlight. I am proud to say that although we don’t have enough time to fully develop our own music writing, we carefully selected some background music to enhance our transitions and non-singing scenes. Besides music, the dialogues corresponded well. For example, in Guy’s monologue, there are two musics incorporated. The first music is hopeful, mimicking the excitement in the movie “Up.” This is echoing Guy’s emotion and also helps me to reach my exiting emotional state as well. When the music stops, it indicates a emotional downward. This is when Guy is finding out the vanity of the “new life,” the futaile of his effort and the childishness of his act. When Guy jump, an extended and massively emotional music plays to indicate the break of Guy’s dream and Guy’s family. Similar in Little Guy’s monologue, the music enhance my emotion. The music not only conveys the emotion but also help me to act out the emotion.

The pauses and the flow were in a comfortable pace as well. In the performance we used close connected dialogues to show a mild conflict between pairs of characters, and we used pauses to convey emotional changes. In the scene that Little Guy leaving his mother, he has many pauses to show his emotional state. At first he feel Lili talks too much about his personal life and wants to control him, which shows some background relationships between the two characters. However, when Lili pauses and tells him to be careful, Guy questions his decision of going away, regretting leaving his mother home alone. After Lili’s last line “be careful don't hurt yourself,” Guy pauses for a long time and tells her in a low and quiet voice that he is going to America. Thus with pauses and subtle body movements, deeper characters can be revealed without using lines.

The lighting of the production was adequate. Although we did not spend enough time to fully understand and operate the light system in our Black Box Theater, we tried to use specific light numbers to created different emotions: heavy, sad, lonely, etc. Example: color change in Guy’s death and The Girl’s monologue in the end.

Coordination of the production needs more work. For example, the scene change was too long because it is hard to move the staircase and the bed. We tried to use the pyriactories to clear the background. However, it slows down the transition of the show. The coordination for the music was also not perfect. In terms of singing, I cracked my voice. One is because I did not drink enough water before going on stage. Thus the preparation is important for acting and singing, too. Another thing that was bad in our production is my hairs, they are too long and I had to fix them many times.

I think one thing we can improve on the plot is that we can add something that indicate Lili killed herself in Nan’s final monologue.