How We Chose The Songs To Include

Before we began work on the first song, ‘I Was Born This Morning’, we discussed all the songs that we individually felt could work well in the workshop performance. Personally, I wanted ‘Asleep on My Arm’ and ‘Nerd Love’ to be in the production, as when I listened to them previously, they were the ones that jumped out at me. We sat around the desk, all with pen and paper to hand, and listened to each song, and noted our first impressions or our opinions if we had already listened to the album. After we had gone through each song, we were asked to go home and consider what song we would like to take a lead in, everyone getting their own song so that everyone is of equal opportunity. When we came back for the next lesson, we each put down our top three preferences of songs; mine were ‘Honey’, ‘Asleep on My Arm’, ‘Nerd Love’. We were meant to rank them in order of preference, but I couldn’t decide between them, and Steve wanted ‘Honey’, and so I felt that it made sense if I went for one of the other songs, as I didn’t mind.

Upon being giving the songs, I was allocated the lead of ‘Asleep on My Arm’. We then had to each come up with a persona for our character. All of this characterisation was helping to decide on a narrative and also to help us come up with ideas for the opening number, 'I Was Born This Morning’. My idea for my character was a ‘jock’ style character, the stereotypical sporty character that you find in American high schools. We soon realised that we all came up with stereotypical characters of high school students, and therefore were able to construct a narrative loosely connecting all characters through being at the same high school. This then allowed us to create the opening number, with all of us in character.