On Saturday, September 12, the Senior Ensemble of Riverfront Theatre Company kicked off our 12th season with our first Saturday rehearsal.  Our Juniors will join us next weekend.

The morning was a flurry of registration papers and orientation – we went through our expectations for the season, a discussion of the programme this year, our rules, introducing our wonderful volunteers, and some mingling, before we settled down to a start on Pride and Prejudice in the afternoon.

Jeff got a start with our vocals with a very simple introductory exercise that had a bunch of self-conscious kids singing their names at the walls to test and experience the way sound bounces around in a room.

There was a lot more sitting than our very active clan is used to, but those who have been through this before are hopefully promising our newcomers that the first few weeks are a little slower, because of read-through and blocking. Things will definitely get more dynamic as the weeks progress!

What was lovely to see was the amount of involvement and enthusiasm all day. This is a group of kids ready to get going!

I didn’t get a lot of photos, because we were so busy yesterday. But it was lively!  We even enjoyed some cake over our afternoon read-through.  Our students are all in possession of their casting forms, and have the coming week to read through the rest of the script, and express interest in the roles that have attracted them. It was very interesting to see the characters people are already drawn to playing, just in the read-through! We had a lot of laughs as they had hand-to-hand combat (rock, paper, scissors) for the chance to read certain characters from the first six scenes yesterday!