Not Just A Comedy

This comedy version of Romeo and Juliet is the most successful project I have done for this class. When we watched the videos, even ourselves felt so impressive and funny. The main purpose of this project was to make the scene funny and show the sarcasm of this classic love story. Compare to our first rehearsal, it was much better after we made some change. From this project, I learned many performance skills, and I also realized my problems. 

The performance was successful, because we achieved our goals——making it funny and sarcastic. As a comedy, the performance must be hilarious, and we also added sarcasm elements to the comedy. We showed how ridiculous this love story was in modern people’s eyes, and we also showed Romeo’s immaturity. For example, their first meeting was a mistake. They met in a club, and Romeo was just attracted by Juliet’s face. Their love was not true, and it would not last long. Moreover, we also satirized Romeo. Romeo was such an immature person. The things what he said and what he did were totally different, and his love to Juliet was not that sincere. For instance, in the balcony scene, Romeo acted so brave that he was not scared of death at all. However, when the nurse called Juliet, he just went hide under the desk immediately. He actually was not as brave as he said. In addition, when Romeo tried to stop the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt, he just used a “lecture style”, which did not help anything, but made Merutio and Tybalt bored. Consequently, even though this performance was a comedy, I think we were more successful on creating a such immature Romeo. 

Music also played an important role in this scene. When we were performing different scenes, the music was always changing. Firstly, music helped the audience understand the settings. We set our first scene in a club, and Juliet could not even hear Romeo. If we only perform without the music, the audience would not be able to understand what we were doing. Secondly, the music also underlined the intense or the relaxing atmosphere. In the fighting scene, we have two songs. One is intense; one is relaxing. When Tybalt and Mercutio were quarreling, the intense music just made the scene more real. Since Romeo started his “lecture”, we changed the song to a soft song. Once Romeo finished talking, the intense music was playing again. When Mercutio was dying, the soft music was playing again. The change of songs made the scene so funny, and I think this was the smartest idea in our performance. In summary, without music, it would be harder for audience to understand the scene, and the whole performance would be less hilarious. 

Compare to our first rehearsal, our scene was much better this time, and I also improved my own performing abilities. Firstly, when we first rehearsed our scene, the music was too loud. We watched our first video together, but we could hardly hear ourselves, because the music was too loud. This time, we fixed this problem, and we put the speaker close to us, not to the audience. Secondly, memorizing the lines was helpful for us to make more body movements. After the first draft, we realized that memorizing the lines could make our scene better. Even though we still held the paper while we were performing, we could say most of the lines without looking at the scripts. This literally made our scene smoother. In addition, I learned a lot when I was doing this project. To make a funny comedy, I watched many videos. I found acting was really important, and body movements were important for acting. Then I tried to memorize the lines and made more movements when I was talking to myself in the balcony scene. However, it was not successful; I kept forgetting my lines, because I was nervous. Also, I found that I was not good at acting; I could hardly get the right emotions of the characters. Or even if I knew what emotion I should express, I just could not act that way, so I have to work on my acting. In short, after fixing our problems, I was so satisfied with our final performance, even though my acting was still not good, at least I learned things from the project. 

In conclusion, as far as I am concerned, our scene was successful. We made it funny, and we also showed our analysis about the story and Romeo in our scene. I really learned much from this project. From researching to performing, everything had to be done by ourselves. I was not good at acting, but I was trying hard. I will keep working hard on improving my acting skills.