BEHIND THE SCENES: James And The Giant Peach At Polka Theatre

Over the last few weeks I've been rehearsing James and the Giant Peach at the Polka Theatre as the assistant director. Tomorrow is our dress rehearsal and then we open to the public on Friday. It's very busy at the moment as we put the finishing touches to the show and experiment with our many successively larger peaches, six in total.

We started rehearsing three weeks ago, our first task was to get to grips with the songs. They're all really catchy and we were soon all singing them in the shower and on the Tube. Over the first weeks of rehearsals the show director Roman Stefanski worked on the blocking of the act one and we had a visit from David Wood who adapted the Roald Dahl book for the stage. He gave us his insight into the story and what it took to put the play together.

At the beginning of the second week we all went to see the set, a giant peach stone, in The Warehouse. Then Roman concentrated on the blocking of the act two whilst I did some work with the actors on movement. We worked hard on getting each of the insects to have different mannerisms that reflected how we identified each insect, so earthworm slithers, centipede wriggles and spider scuttles.

Meanwhile the brilliant props makers, costume makers and set builders were really busy getting everything ready for the show. Whilst many heads were being scratched over exactly how we could get the peach to grow to it's giant size.

Over the third week we started to concentrate on each section of the play in more detail and polishing it off. It was a very hard week and we did do a lot of really great work and it was very rewarding. On the Friday afternoon we invited a group of children from a local school to come in and watch a run of the play, it was great to have a live audience for the fist time. They all really loved the show and we were very happy.

Then at the beginning of this week, we moved into the theatre and began to work on the more technical side of the show like lights, sound and the actors got to work with the actual set for the first time, it looks amazing! We're nearly there now and there will be a big sigh of relief when we open on Friday but a lot of excitement too.

James and the Giant Peach runs until Saturday 13 February 2010 at the Polka Theatre, Wimbledon.

 

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