INTO THE WOODS... IN THE WOODS

I've always said that it would save me rather a lot of money if we had someone in place to keep a creative check on me. Of course we have our funders to consider, Ofsted to impress and policies all over the place to keep us on our toes and make sure everything runs smoothly; I'm not talking about that kind of 'in-check'. I mean when I have a bright idea such as 'If we're doing High School Musical 2, we should have a real swimming pool on stage' and my brilliant creative team rally round me and say "OK'! - when it might be best if they get me to reconsider and approach the show in a cheaper and more realistic way. However... that doesn't appear to be the way we do things around here, because everyone wants the same thing - to create incredible and amazing theatre, that not only provides training and experience for our students, but also offers something special and memorable for our audiences.

I suppose we didn't need a real flaming torch in Trojan Women, but it added a sense of risk and danger to the proceedings, heightening emotions and surging dopamine into our armour clad soldiers and grieving widows.

We could have all sat down and watched The Wiz in our studio theatre, then we wouldn't have needed to hire a marquee and paint a forty foot yellow brick road on the courtyard floor, or require the wind turbine machine to create the tornado in the front dance studio, but it complimented the cinema projected opening Kansas scene, and if the audience hadn't moved in to the Emerald City for the second half, who knows where we could have hidden the 12 foot wizard.

5 Money saving hints to self.

1.) When you shoot a film on a summer course, if you don't write in to the script blowing up a coach and having a zombie outbreak in a church, you don't need to get a church, a coach or make-up artists! (Though to be fair I did blag the church from my father-in-law. Though unsure that I told him about the zombie outbreak bit.)
2.) The floor in the theatre is already grey. Possibly don't need to put two tonnes of earth on the floor for Midsummer, or a tonne of Agate Stone for our Classical Performance.
3.) You could achieve the Edexcel BTEC criteria with a performance of some monologues in a studio space, and don't necessarily need the full productions of Les Miserables, Dark of the Moon, Grimm Tales and Love and Infomration in the space of a month.
4.) When you spend time and money creating an indoor forest for your forthcoming Dance Show, Flight of the Fairy, don't take the other show you are doing at the same time which is set in the afore mentioned forest, and perform it somewhere else.
5.) You definitely do not need a real swimming pool full of water on stage to do High School Musical 2.

1 Extra hint, just for me...

6.) Just don't do High School Musical 2... or 3. Definitely not 3.

Metropolis would have worked nicely on the round, as opposed to taking the audience through eleven different locations as the company rotated and repeated complex scenarios; just as Revolting Rhymes is a lovely little show in a school hall, but something seems to make it a bit more special when you take the audience around the local woods to view the three pigs properties. But blacking out the entirety of our front studios and turning the back studios into banqueting suites can be rather expensive. And hiring a wood costs a little more than you might expect. Lesson learned? Not at all. At Bodens we take a show and think what can we do to make this amazing. We come up with a plan, a budget (sort of) and then we sit down and think, what else can we do to make this even better? I get let loose, Rodney goes off on one, and before you know it, we're up to our necks in creative trouble once again.

So we find ourselves rehearsing in the woods. It's been beautiful so far, though the weather is set to turn. But it if does, we have umbrellas, and plenty of them, and in a way, it will just add to the experience. Experience being the important word. We want our college students to be a part of something incredible, in a way they may never again. We always try to engage them throughout their drama school experience and musical theatre training in different ways, and so far this seems ot be working rather well. We want the audiences to remember this show for the talent and creativity, but also for the experience of actually seeing it where it is supposed to take place; though a small use of imagination is required to top Monken Hadley Woods up to Magic fairytale Forest, although it is very beautiful, so just a 'little' imagination required.

Once upon a time, this Stephen Sondheim musical tells interwoven fairytales right the way to their happy endings, before act two takes on a very different tone, and we realise that there can't be happy ever afters for everybody. From 6th - 9th July our talented and hard working full time college students, supported by a very capable handful of part-time performers, will bring this brilliant musical to life in the surroundings of Monken Hadley Wood. We want our audiences to bring a picnic to enjoy while the sun sets over fairytale land and our story unfolds. We would love you to be there, not just to enjoy the show or support these amazing students, but also to help us restore a little bit of the budget that we have gone massively over again. When someone said 'let's do into the woods... (wait for it) in the woods', they clearly didn't consider sound and lighting, the need to generate electricity, or the cost of hiring toilets.

So who's idea was it to stage the already incredibly complex 'Into the Woods' outside... in the woods. At this point in time I can't even remember. If it works out, I suppose it was me. If not...