School of Rock Review

      School of Rock must be the most amazing play I have ever seen. It is a story about a girl Dewie who likes rock, accidentally becomes the substitute teacher and how she breaks the rule of traditional learning at school and leads her students to shine on the stage. It is really an impressed and colorful musical play, which makes me have a reflection on the current project we have been doing in the class and also come up with some new ideas for further improvement. 
       The most intense feelings I had while watching the show was bright and colorful, which was a sharp contrast with the first performance we had on this Thursday. The play was a combination of many different components. From the "appearance" of the show, such diversity was expressed in the various kinds lights, music or props, which might be hard for us to apply in our own play because of the time limit. But from the "inside", such visual shock was brought by the actors' performing skills. In comparing with our unemotional monologue, actors' emotions were thoroughly expressed from their different ways of performance including not only singing or dancing but also their change in tone, facial expression, body language ... I was impressed by how Lexi, the girl who played the protagonist Dewie, at the same time with memorizing maybe hundreds of lines so well also can distinguish which emotion should be expressed where or which body movement should be show where. Lack of body language and emotion is always a big problem that I have met since I played the first character Juliet. It is hard to substitute myself into the character itself. All the characters' personality was successfully built up by the actors' vivid performance. As what I mentioned in my last blog about the first draft review, too many monologues was a big problem in our play and I was thinking that if I should change some of them into dialogues. However, as I watched some monologues placed by Lexi in the show, I would not feel any boring or monotonous because they were singing and kept moving around, which indeed inspired me a lot. Although I am not a good singer and the basic tone of our play itself is relatively sad and flat, which might not need too much active or "bright" performance, we still can add many other components into our monologue instead of just standing at a fixed point with a fixed gesture. For example, when I shout that "she is that irresponsible and indifferent mom", I could point my finger toward the direction where my mom just left or throw my schoolbag on the floor to express my anger or grievance. Maybe add some sad background music also could be a good way to enrich our monologue. 
       Overall, School of Rock is really a great play. All the students did a great job. I learned a lot from their performance and I will try to adopt all the things what I learned into our play.