Monday 29 September 2008

Cheadle Hulme

(From the Rock Blog...)

The Rock Cast's first away event was a great success. After a very early start (the day before for Bill!), the team arrived a Cheadle Hulme for a Rock from Scratch day organised by Paul Barnsley and 'Heart Notes'.

During the day Roger and Annie trained a choir of over 90, while Helen rehearsed the cast separately. Roger and Annie found the time invaluable, discovering what are the 'accident blackspots' in the musical, and which bits will be good to work on with the choirs at previsits. The cast worked incredibly hard - particularly the understudies who had a chance to really work at the drama.

At the end of the day we put everything together, and performed the musical to one another, even including small bits of drama. Bill, as Cornelius, had memorised the narrations from the vocal score, which gave the overall performance great coherence. Looking forward to putting the drama in now!

If you'd like to see photos of Cheadle, and the cast rehearsals, click here

Friday 26 September 2008

Rock Premiere

The Rock Premiere Weekend in Birmingham on 1st and 2nd November 2008 is coming up very fast indeed. The three performances are at the Adrian Boult Hall:

Saturday 1st November at 7.30pm - nearly sold out
Sunday 2nd November at 4.00pm
Sunday 2nd November at 7.30pm

Please encourage as many people as possible to come. Tickets are £10, or £8 concessions and groups of 10+

Since Bognor Regis...

... so much has happened!

We've spent a week at Lee Abbey in Devon, another at Wydale Hall in Yorkshire, and yet another at Treloyhan Manor in Cornwall. These were wonderful weeks of fun and fellowship, learning a musical from scratch to perform at the end of the week. If you sing, play an instrument, or neither, and fancy coming on holiday with CMM, please contact the CMM office for details of our holiday weeks next year. The dates are all on our calendar down the side of this blog.

We have also all been on holiday - Helen has been to Scotland with her family, Annie has spent some time in Cornwall and visiting her family in Somerset, and Roger and Mary spent 10 days in Weston-Super-Mare.

Rock previsits will soon be upon us, so please pray for Roger and the team, and also for all of the choirs rehearsing around the north of England ready for the first tour. It's getting close now!

Grovelling apologies...

I am so, so sorry for the lack of update on the two CMM blogs and website. I've sent some updates for the Rock part of the main website through to Alex, our webmaster, so there should be some more up to date info on the tour soon.

Rock Rehearsals are going well after a slightly shaky start, and we had our first rehearsal combined with cast and dancers on Tuesday. Most of the songs have been marked out now, so we simply need to practice and refine things. A huge thanks goes to Darren Close, our producer and Sally Jones and Gill Johnson, the choreographers for all their hard work.

The cast have their first away mission tomorrow, at a Rock from scratch day in Cheadle Hulme. After the scratch choir have spent the day learning the musical, we will be performing a concert version of Rock at 3.45pm. Should be great fun.

Other aspects of Rock are going well. Please pray for all the tour 1 organisers and those responsible for selling tickets. It'd be fantastic for the choirs to be able to perform in front of a full house.

Roger recently wrote this in an email:

"I’m thrilled to tell you that we have recently had two tremendous“Tasters”, at
Exeter (Crediton) and Weston. Considering these are both Tour Four venues and
there is a long way to go before they even start rehearsals, it was so
encouraging to see such large numbers and the great excitement and “buzz”amongst
them all!"