R&D Project in Manchester - Day 9
Creative Director David Gibb shares his thoughts on day 5, week 2 of our R&D project at Z-arts in Manchester, to explore adapting ‘Luna Loves Library Day’ by Joseph Coelho and Fiona Lumbers into a musical stage show.
So today we had the first scratch performance, sharing all our hard work over the last two weeks. The day started inauspiciously with Rob Green having an accident with a smoothie, which meant that his one and only shirt had a couple of great big stains on it. In the film Notting Hill, a similar incident results in Hugh Grant’s character eventually getting to marry a film star. All that poor Rob got was my own shirt. As with everything this man seems to wear, it instantly suited him. As for me, I’m not sure mint green was my colour.
The rest of the morning was less dramatic. We ran the piece twice through, and then spent a an hour or so tidying up and refining some moments. After lunch we ran it once more, and then set about arranging the room theatre style and getting ready to welcome our guests.
I set about creating a ‘booked themed’ playlist as walk in music, and got really into this, until Nicki wisely pointed out that with 15 people attending we probably weren’t going to need that many songs. Still, I was particularly pleased with Elvis Costello’s ‘Every Day I Write The Book’.
Then, finally, 3pm arrived. As well as invitees from other organisations, I was really pleased to see that our guests included many of the Z-arts staff who had looked after us so fantastically over the last week.
After a quick introduction from myself, our designer Nomi Everall talked them through the design concept for the show. Watching Nomi create this over the week has been a real treat. Here is the finished design concept which the guests were given as part of their pack:
Finally the time had come for our performers to strut their stuff. As they sang their way through the slick 25 minutes they had rehearsed with so much focus and energy, it was a such a joy to see the modest audience won over almost immediately. They laughed in all the right places and I think even a couple of tears were shed, which was more than we could have ever hoped for.
Rob, Becky and Nicki excelled themselves, and the feedback afterwards was really fantastic, with everyone saying how much they wanted to see it as a full production. It was very strange to be leaving Z-arts. It’s been our home for the last 2 weeks, and by the end we really had started to feel like part of the furniture. Hopefully we’ll back there again some day soon!
Tom from The Spark, and Liz and Helena from Z-arts
Tomorrow we head to The Story Museum in Oxford to do it all over again and also to film it to send out to programmers and producers who were unable to attend either performance in person.
Till then.
This R&D project is a commission by Z-arts, supported by Big Imaginations.