One of the things I focused on for this project was figuring out where the pauses in my speech should be. I could not always have them in the most natural places, because it would make the song structure of the original text more evident. The length of the pauses was also important. Making them too long disrupts the flow of scene and makes the audience uncomfortably awkward, or could give the impression that you forgot your line; but pauses that are too short can go entirely unnoticed and does not provide enough time for a clear shift in emotion.
Since I already had most of the monologue memorized in song form, my other biggest concern was the staging of it. At first, I was not sure how to frame the scene, which in its original form is a mother talking to her son, as a monologue with only me on screen. I considered directly addressing the audience, but it did not feel personal enough; I considered saying it to an invisible person on stage with me, but it was awkward and had me facing away from the audience. I eventually chose to frame this as the mom talking to herself after looking at a photo album that reminded her of when her son was younger, which avoided the pitfalls of the other options.
If I were to do it again, I would try to involve some more physicality like Rei did in his monologue. I would also want to start speaking at a higher volume so the audience could move clearly understand me (and then adjust the rest of my volume accordingly).
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