Limelight Theatre

Fantastic news – Limelight weekly classes are returning!

After over a year away we are thrilled to announce the re-opening of Limelight weekly classes!

As many of you know, we had to stop our weekly classes when we moved up to London. However, now Jonny is back in Taunton and is getting ready to start new classes which he hopes to get underway in Febuary.

We will be opening two classes – one for ages 7 – 13 (school years 3 – 8) and one for ages 14 – 17 (school years 9 – 13). We are extremely excited and our registers are already filling up!

Both classes will be working towards a show that will be performed towards the end of the Summer term and the success of this first term and a half will dictate if Limelight stays open in the next academic year (fingers crossed!)

Looking forward to seeing everyone soon!

 

Despite not managing to fit in a ‘make a musical in a week’ course this Christmas we did have a great time earlier this week on our two day course where we not only worked on a performance but also devised the entire show! Admittedly the show only ran at about 15 minutes but in 12 hours of working time this really is no mean feet!

We spent most of Tuesday devising the show by choosing, at random, a setting (The jungle), A problem (monsters) and a solution to that problem (cups of tea). From there, we went through a huge range of ideas before landing on ,what came to be, the plot line of our show –  ‘Dinner Tea in the Orange Jungle’. Then, through improvisation, we created a (slightly bonkers) script and selected four songs that would feature throughout the show. On Wednesday we put dance routines and musical staging in, learnt the songs, found some bits of costume to add to the mix and rehearsed the piece to performance standard, all before 4:30 when the group performed to their audience.

It was a great couple of days and it is something that we definitely hope to do again in the future but for now we say goodbye to 2106 and welcome in 2017 where we will be starting a whole new chapter of limelight which should include the return of weekly classes!

See you all next year!

The other big thing we’ve been up to recently is Summer Musical!

During the holidays we ran two weeks of our summer musical – ‘Back to Life’. The very first show we have ever done to use original songs (written by our own Jonny Leach)!

Both weeks were huge successes and we were so pleased to see the two different groups do such a fantastic job. We had a great time working with the amazingly talented kids we were lucky enough to have with us. However, the highlight of the rehearsal process for them seemed to be going to Tesco in their costume at lunch time! It was a super busy week for us, as this show also incorporated a huge amount of brand new costumes that were frantically being made all week (with a great deal of help from our fabulous seamstress (my mother) and some of the parents and participants (sometimes even in their breaks).

Our first week ran into a few technical difficulties when we arrived at our performance venue to find we had no lighting! However, the kids coped superbly and still managed to pull off the mystery and poignancy of the show under house lights.

The second week were lucky enough to have full stage lighting and also did a stunning job to bring across all comedy and and tragedy of the show.

After the success of these performances we are hoping to take the show to the Edinburgh Fringe next year with an adult cast so well done all involve – you inspired us!

Now we are beginning to get over the stress of the show we have already started thinking about what’s to come at Christmas. Can’t wait!

We have had a mad few months since our last blog post but now I finally have five minutes to sit down and write something new! We’ve had two big events since Easter so I have split this mighty catch up into two parts starting with our residential weekend:

Residential is something we have tried to get organised for the last two years so we were thrilled to finally pull it off this year.

We spent the weekend in Monksilver Community Hall with 11 of our fabulous ‘biggies’ singing, dancing, playing games, eating lots and doing a lot with post-it notes.

Our theme was ‘Musical Theatre Timeline’ so we did a lot of learning about musicals through the ages and put together a short performance featuring bits of songs from Anything Goes (1930’s), Oklahoma (1940’s), West side Story (1950’s), Hair (1960’s), Chicago (1970’s), Les Miserables (1980’s), Rent (1990’s), Avenue Q (2000’s) and Hamilton (2010’s).

As well as all of our learning and rehearsing etc we found time to fit in a tonne of games, a ‘nature walk’ around the beautiful countryside we were surrounded by, a BBQ (complete with toasted marshmallows), and a little celebration on the Sunday for two of the girls 14th birthdays!

All in all it was a pretty great (if exhausting!) weekend. Thanks to all the kids who came and made it such a fab experience.

 

 

Looking at our last blog post I realized that I never posted anything at the end of our Easter musical!

We had a fantastic week and the show was one of the best yet! I was impressed enough listening from backstage but watching the recording that evening I was overwhelmed by the performances of this fabulous group.

Just a few weeks on now and we are into planning for our Summer show. We have had so much interest already that we have decided to run two weeks in summer so, fingers crossed, we will fill them both up. We have already landed on an idea and we are excited to get started writing. It looks like there is even a possibility that this one will include original music! (Although, we have been known to be a tad over ambitious in the past so we make no promises).

We got off to a great start today at our first day of Spring Musical!

Our script for ‘Dr Evil’s Evil League of Evil Versus the Freedom Force the Musical’ seemed to go down very well with our fantastic cast. We were extremely impressed with all the kids who did a great read through and some really impressive auditions. As always, it was tough to cast but we are really pleased with how it has turned out and, judging by the start of rehearsals this afternoon, we are going to have a great show.

Looking forward to tomorrow already!

 

With only three days left until the Start of our Spring Musical we are in musical madness making last minutes adjustments to the script, editing music, creating reference tracks and sorting out a whole host of other things!! We can’t wait to see everyone again and see what they make of our newest show!

We were lucky enough to have a great afternoon/ evening yesterday working with the majority of the cast of our version of the Hunger Games from last year. We got our last few pick up shots done and now we may finally be able to finish it after almost a year! Then we just have the other two classes films to go!

Now to get through Easter and then roll on Monday!

 

It’s been just four weeks since the last holiday school and we’re diving straight into the next one! Plans have been underway since about an hour after the last show and today I had a nice long train ride to get working on the script. Getting very excited already. Expect hundreds of emails, tweets, face book posts and goodness knows what else as we try to fill up two weeks of Easter with out the majority of the year 11’s who are sitting this one out to concentrate on revising for their exams. (It’s almost as if GCSE’s are more important than making a musical in a week.)

We have also been doing more work on the films from last years summer term which are still hanging over our heads! They maybe taking for ever but they do look good. Hunger Games is all finished now, just the other two to go. It looks like we are going to need to try to squeeze in a few pick up’s over the Easter holiday’s.

Keep your eyes open for more up dates.

What a fantastic week we have had working on ‘The Tale of the Nine Kingdoms’!

We had a great time with a massive cast of 29! We were so pleased to see lots of our regular Limelighters, including a few who couldn’t do the course but turned up over the week to say hi or watch the show.

This show was one of the hardest we have ever done – difficult harmonies, complicated lyrics, mad dance routines, long scenes and even some live music! Everyone involved in the show worked so hard to pull it off and we had a few comments from our audience that it was the best one yet! During rehearsals the group was an absolute dream. We had a huge age range, with children from 6 to (almost) 16 who all worked together brilliantly and helped each other to create a fantastic performance.

Even on New Years day, when everyone was exhausted we still managed to get some of the most fantastic recordings we’ve ever done to put on the end of the video of the performance.

We were also fantastically lucky to have help during the show from one of our former performers. Thank you to Lucas and everyone else who provided us with costumes, meter rulers, video cameras or anything else.

Already looking forward to Easter! Hope to see you all then.

The script for Winter musical is all finished!! Now just a few little tweaks to make and then we can get printing, all ready for the first day in just two weeks time!

I had a fun evening on Friday working on some choreography for the show. It’s so nice to have a dance studio to do this in rather the kitchen/ living room!  Not sure Jonny enjoyed himself quite as much – listening to the same few lines of the same couple of songs over and over again can’t have been overly thrilling. However, he very obligingly filmed bits of it for me so I could make this little choreography teaser. If you’re as excited as we are, take a look at what’s in store.