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Adele is working at Royal & Derngate as a resident trainee director through the 2008 ITV Theatre Director Scheme.

Her past work has been primarily involved with new writing, working for companies such as Sherman Cymru, Pentabus and The Traverse and with a host of new and experienced writers including Gary Owen, Claire Duffy and Lucy Caldwell. She recently directed a verbatim piece by Gary Owen for the Connections Festival: Theatre of Debate, which was performed on the Lyttleton stage at The National in July 2008.

Children’s auditions

We're all very familiar with the expression ‘never work with children or animals’. But we at Royal & Derngate laugh in the face of this old adage in casting our Christmas show, The Wizard of Oz. We set about finding the 66 young people of ages between 6 and 11 that will become our three teams of Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz. And this is before we set about looking for our Toto…

The Director, Laurie, has a very clear vision of the Munchkin world, which revolves around the young actors portraying a world full of little grown ups. Being a Munchkin is a big challenge to a young performer: not only do they have to sing and dance, they have to create distinct grown up characters that are as real and as strong as any of the main roles.

With this in mind, we need specific young people who can demonstrate the key attributes of any performer: talent, confidence, character and commitment.
We ended up auditioning over 180 children over a weekend that can only be described as challenging.

Some children are obviously terrified in the auditions, which is not surprising – auditions are scary even to the most hardened thesp. As always the girls out number the boys by a significant margin. We heard ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ until we reached the brink of madness.  But we emerged confident that we had found our perfect Munchkins.

First day of rehearsals

Ah, the first day of rehearsals. Lots of new people to meet. Lots of new problems to be discovered. Lots of free doughnuts and coffee. Let us begin…

Today started, as all rehearsals start, with what felt like everyone at Royal & Derngate gathering for a meet-and-greet with the cast. It’s always great, in these moments, to see how many people it takes to create a show: from the marketing and finance departments to the carpenters and painters; it’s kind of beautiful to see how everyone’s skills come together to make this project happen. 

The cast introduce themselves. Most of these I've met through auditions but first rehearsals always have a strange sense of re-recognising each of them again, ‘oh yes, I remember you…’. Natalie, who’s playing Dorothy, was in Jean Brodie this autumn, so it’s lovely to see her again, albeit with new brown hair instead of her natural blonde. ‘Blonde was too Alice in Wonderland’ she explains.

We have two surprise guests to the meet-and-greet, Parker and Bradley; the two dogs who will be playing Toto. Bradley skids about a bit as he’s not used to the slippery rehearsal room flooring. Both dogs are adorable but I admire them from a distance, as I'm severely allergic to dogs.  Everyone else rushes to give them a quick pat. They are easily the most patted cast members of the day.

The model being displayed.

Sara, the designer, shows the model box to everyone (a scaled down version of the set). It’s such a beautiful design and she’s done a fantastic job of re-imagining the world of the Wizard of Oz. It must be such a hard task as a designer to create a world that is already so familiar to the general public: how to balance the familiar images that everyone knows and loves while creating a new version of our own with its own identity? This has been the preoccupation of the creative team so far and I think we've achieved a great balance, with some lovely surprises for the audience. More about this again…

When everyone's seen the model box, the cast and creative team have a brief chat about the play, in which Christine, who is playing Glinda (the Good Witch) and Aunt Em, drops the bombshell that she’s never actually seen the film of The Wizard of Oz before. I still can't quite believe this…

After lunch we all settle down for the read through of the play, which is such a delight. Laurie the Director gets everyone to read aloud the songs as though they were speech, which is a great exercise to remind everyone that the songs are an essential storytelling tool in the piece and not just showy set pieces. It is also hilarious to hear Ding Dong the Witch is Dead being spoken seriously. Everyone pitches in with Munchkin lines, everyone has an impromptu sing around the table, all the old classic lines are given a cheer; it’s the most fun read-through I’ve ever been to. Now’s the time to have fun as the hard work is going to come over the next couple of weeks in the shape of Munchkins, huge set changes and dogs…

In the next blog, Adele thrashes out the script with director Laurie and the team: