Tag: Nando’s and Nandon’ts: A Musical

Two weeks to go until the show.

Gulp.

But hey, that’s exciting too because…

It’s two weeks to go until the show!

You see, sometimes life’s just a matter of a change in emphasis/font/medication.

There’s not a great deal to say about the show other than rehearsals are going. As my honourable colleague says, we’re exactly as rehearsed as you would expect for the number of rehearsals we have in fact had.

Instead, let’s talk about multi-tasking.

As you may have gathered, Nando’s and Nandon’ts is but one prong in a many-pronged approach to making stuff in Leicester. We’re taking meetings this week concerning a potential theatrical project concerning mental health. Podcasts are being planned (and are already starting to live over on rebelbreedin.libsyn.com and on iTunes).

Plus, if you are interested in appearing in/helping out with a pilot for a webseries adapted from As You Like It by William Shakespeare, please email us on rebelbreedinc [at] gmail.com and we’ll get back to you with details. Also, like and follow us all over that Internet:
Twitter @rebelbreedinc
facebook.com/rebelbreedinc
youtube.com/user/rebelbreedinc
 – it’ll be a laugh. Thanks to anyone who already has, it’s nice to not be shouting completely into the void.

But the most important thing remains Nando’s. We’ve got through the whole play now, and the songs are starting to stick, the lines are starting to go in, and the whole thing is slowly creaking into life (the tango looks good, despite the difficulty it took certain cast members to figure out how to do a lift).

However, one thing these blog posts have been lacking is some evidence of what the show is actually like. Part of it is because it’s still in development, part of it is keeping the surprise, and part of it is not having the time to film and record stuff as well as rehearse. I can offer you the next best thing, though.

Cast member and costumer Olivia Deane is also a talented singer-songwriter. Her website is oliviadean1.wix.com/olivia-deane, and you can find her on facebook.com/oliviarosedeane, or her blog oliviadeane.wordpress.com. However, the best place you can find her is her YouTube channel. Below is her latest song, “Muse”.

With talent like that, how could we possibly fail? Stay tuned!

All is excitement in the world of chicken, and chicken-related theatrical produce. Yesterday marked our first rehearsal with our current cast and script, and everybody has hit the ground running in terms of knowing stuff and not falling off the stage. Plus, our little family is expanding – we’ve added Jasmine Coben the choreographer and Douglas Deans the ukulele player. This is some next level hype, people.

The major issue we’ve had in commencing rehearsal is, as usual, my fault. When you (and when I say you, I generally mean ‘I’) compose songs, you’re basically making them to suit your own voice and abilities. This is fine, except when you give it to someone who has a drastically different voice than you, such as a woman. It’s at that stage you realise the song is ridiculously low or high, the actress loses confidence and the rehearsal grinds to an agonising halt.

The obvious answer to this problem: change the key. What is ‘the key’? Some basic and probably incorrect musical theory for you. Western tonal harmony (that is, British and American non-weird music) is based around the relationship between notes, not the actual pitch of the notes themselves. Therefore, as long as you move all the music the same distance up or down in pitch, it makes no difference what the actual pitch of the music is. If you’re playing a piano or a guitar, it’s a fairly simple matter to change the key, and many experienced players can do it in their heads.

The only issue with this in our musical is that we’re not using pianos or guitars – we’re using the humble ukulele. The great thing about the ukulele is that you can play many of the most common chords you need using very few fingers. The problem with the ukulele is that if you try to play any chords other than these, your fingers look like a spider having a stroke, and you promptly forget how you fingered them. (Also, for whatever reason, it is very difficult to play an E chord on a uke. Which is irritating, because it’s a basic chord that’s VERY easy to play in guitar, and thus features prominently in a wide variety of songs. Bah.) With guitars, you have a thing called a capo that you can put across your frets to easily change key. You can get these for the uke, but I am poor and do not own one.

So, we have the fun task of figuring out which of the few possible keys that the ukulele naturally plays in fit with the songs and the actors’ voices. Luckily, we’re managing to figure it out. This does mean that I have the occasional exotic chord to remember (I still haven’t figured out F# minor), but luckily, now it’s more Doug’s problem than mine.

Next week – the next rehearsal! Full steam ahead for our Nandocas.