Personal Development

Throughout the production of ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ I went through a lot of development. I originally felt that I was struggling with the accent I needed for my character, a soft southern American accent. It was quite a hard accent for me to grasp, especially because I usually find accents easier to do generally. I thought that I wouldn’t get the hang of it, but after lots of rehearsals and running through my lines I started getting a lot better and managed to keep it consistently throughout the play. The consistency in particular was my biggest struggle whilst preparing for the show. I felt very happy that I got there eventually.

In addition to this I was trying to think of my facial expressions, did I have to move my face any differently to highlight my stiffness. I did try some different ways of doing this whilst rehearsing, only it was extremely hard to do so and say my lines. As well as this I thought that the audience probably wouldn’t be able to see this nuance from their seats. So, I only did these facial expressions when I needed my jaw to rust, which hopefully the audience could see properly.

My costume was a weird one and I did half to work around it. Underneath the suit was a little small for me, so it was rather tight. In one sense this was difficult to move in and in another it actually helped my performance because it limited my movement and that works in my favour in my role as the ‘Tinman’. On the other hand after wearing it for a couple of hours I was very uncomfortable and then I had to wear a big box on top of it as well and made it nearly impossible to move. Nonetheless, it did make me move really slowly and that worked well for the character.

I did often have to adapt some of the things we had originally planned to do for our performance. For example, when I was hit by the ‘Cowardly Lion’ the original thought was that I would fall over. This became impossible to do in my costume or it would break. Instead, I had to spin away from the hit in a comedic way. Another example of this was the instances where our characters would be sitting down, like when the ‘Wizard’ was handing everyone their wishes, everyone was sitting down. Once more due to my costume this was impossible, as I would not fit in the chair. Furthermore, the box that made up my costume was slowly getting more and more damaged with every show. It wasn’t just me using it, we had three different casts using this costume. We got to the point that during intervals we would have to tape it together, just so it wouldn’t fall off of me or snap. Nevertheless, the rest of the costume was fine, the shoes fit me perfectly even without laces and the hat was on nice and tight, so it wouldn’t fall off. All in all I would give the costume a 10/10, it felt very authentic to the original ideas and allowed me to get further into character. The costume really brought everything together for me, my character felt even more real and with the addition of makeup I looked amazing.