Thoroughly Modern Millie: Week 1

Although being the first whole week since school started, we already had work to do. Before rehearsals start we discussed about the set. We decided to have the musical as a vaudeville or a cabaret style, which is a production with a restaurant set-up, where food and drinks are served.
There were various ideas such as dividing the stage into areas, having the audience at a diagonal, raising the stage a bit etc. My ideas was to have the audience in the middle and the stage around the audience.



However, after looking at various set ideas, we combined the parts that work and came up with this:



We eventually ended up with this (with Mr. Meiklejohn's modifications):



I'm very pleased with this stage layout because it breaks out of what the stage originally is (with the audience sitting on the bleachers and the actors performing in front of them). However, the only issue we have is the amount of space. For big musical numbers, we must keep that in mind, especially when the audience is going to sit at tables.

We also discussed that since we are going to make this production like a vaudeville set-up, we thought we might get the ushers to dress up as the maids and butlers from that time. So when the audience walk into the auditorium, it is no longer 2009 and no longer Japan. It will be a hotel in the states in 1922.
For this, I also researched slang for the ushers to use, and I found a site where it has a long list of slang:
http://local.aaca.org/bntc/slang/slang.htm