That may be why the first bit of the show was a little loose.  However, I managed to pull it out of the fire, and we had our best audience yet (in size as well as responsiveness).

Our Victoria hosts, Jed and TJ, came tonight and at least told me that they enjoyed the show.  I had another couple of laughers, which was great as well.

My only complaint about the audience is that someone was drinking Starbucks in the front row (I’ve had a front row drinker in every show so far), and I had asked Front-Of-House to make announcement about that, and they hadn’t.  Otherwise, they were superb.

A few things marred tonight’s show, most of them to do with the show before us taking a fuck of a long time to load out and clear the dressing room for me.  Now don’t get me wrong, they were as nice as could be, but aside from being a cast of 20 which filled up the dressing room nearly ten minutes past the point that I needed to get in it, they made a mess.

The venue’s one backstage washroom looked like it had flooded and had fake blood and dirt on the floor; I had to mop it in order to use it without tracking fake blood onto our WHITE set.

Just as I was going to take my place in the wings, one of the zombie show personnel noticed a red spot on the ass of my white pants… it turns out that there was fake blood on the chair I’d sat on to put on my boots.  The two remaining zombie folk did their best to scrub it off my butt, but the result was still a red stain that was visible from the audience (an audience member mentioned it after the show), and it left a small red mark on the seat of the chair.

The UVic students who mostly people the zombie production were super nice, but I can’t tell you how stressful this was—I didn’t get to the wings until the house manager was actually making the announcement that starts the show, and was all too aware of the remaining pink stain on my ass.

Despite this, I had a great show and still adore all the super nice zombies.

I’m still not satisfied with the first few moments of the show.  I think I had it at some point, but I’ve never felt good about it since we opened in Edmonton, after our July tour break.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s not working anymore, and I’m not sure what to do to fix it.  But I did pump as much energy as I could into it, and I didn’t flag… not then, and not at any point in last night’s show.

I had thought the audience would be loaded with fellow Fringe artists; but it turns out no one I knew was there at all.  No matter: it kept me chugging through at full blast, despite a front-row sleeper mid-way through the play.  In general, the audience was responsive and attentive, and I felt I had certainly earned the applause at the end of the show.

Three stars, but I don’t know what the James T. Kirk crack is about, unless it’s the crack the reviewer is smoking.

Not a terrible review, though, considering how I felt about Monday’s show.

http://www.mondaymag.com/articles/entry/2010-fringe-reviews-f

I call this photo “Bones… Spock… you’ve got to help me!”

It’s taken me two days to get this up (we opened on Monday night), because we tend to get home quite late due to the necessary late night schmoozing we need to do every night.  In Victoria, a bunch of local bylaws prohibit us from handing out flyers to hip people we see walking down the street (soliciting: $x00 fine), so our only chance is to crash other shows’ lineups and flyers the people who come to the Fringe Club after 22:00 every night.

Monday began for us with our technical rehearsal, which meant that we were at the space from about 14:00ish (sometimes they let you in early) to about 20 minutes before the 18:45 show tech-ing.  This gave me about 10 minutes to prepare before I went on.

David Bukach, a local photographer, was in attendance, photographing the show in exchange for free  tickets, so we FINALLY got good photos of the show with projections and stage lights.

Each space in each new town that we perform in has its own quirks, and the Metro in Victoria is no exception.  It’s a real Theatre venue, so it has practicals and headsets and specials that were hung especially for us.  The drawback here is that the gap between the lip of the stage (as defined by the lighting) is about 4 meters from the audience, which is double the distance we’ve had at any other venue.

Tech-ing just before the show sounded great!  And it was from a setup/takedown point of view, but it turned out that it wasn’t so good for me.  In retrospect, I think I needed more time to process the distance between me and the first row of seats. 

Being an out-of-town company, our opening show was also sparsely attended (if forced to guess, I would say about 9 people), which will hopefully change as word begins to spread to the local audience (we have a good buzz among the other artists and volunteers, it seems).

These two factors (distance and small house) may have contributed towards what I felt was a very… something… show.  I’m still not quite sure what happened.  I did not give a low energy performance: I pushed it, and I felt actually hit some moments better than I ever had before.  The audience wasn’t bad: they were quiet and attentive (a bit too much so; most of the jokes fell off the edge of the world).  But I felt like I never quite reached them, never quite connected with them.

(Another small drawback of the space is that the aisle for the audience is not centered with the stage, which can be confusing when one is standing at the forward extreme of the stage with no reference points; I found myself wandering a little too far stage right at times.)

I have my next show tonight, and I really hope that having had a day to let the opening performance sit will help me really knock this one out of the park, no matter how few or how many people are there.

We drove out of Edmonton two mornings ago in our touring van: Vanessa.

We said a fond farewell to our host in Edmonton, Lois Pawl, as she loaded us up with extras and treats as she had during our entire stay (three or four french toast breakfasts during the two weeks we were with her!).  We bid farewell also to Caesar the Greyhound.

After almost heading towards Calgary by mistake, we righted our course and beelined for Jasper National Park.

Ramona was overjoyed.

We continued through, stopping constantly to see the sights, including…

The Athabasca Falls

Mount Kitchener

The Athabasca Glacier (that’s it in background)

And then, we finally arrived at our campsite and Ramona set up our magic tent that only takes two minutes to set up (including pegging down the two cables on the side), and two minutes to fold up… and can be done by one person.

We had an amazing campsite.

I’ll post more later.  I don’t have  access to the other photos right now.

I’d hustled my ass off all afternoon to do whatever I could to boost our audience numbers.  I wanted to go out on a high note.

So we had 52 people in the audience tonight (I calculate that there were supposed to be 56, but four people must have bought tickets and were late.  There was one walkout, but he’d been checking his phone.

I spent probably about 5 – 6 hours flyering this afternoon, specifically to get a younger, noisier crowd.  Did get younger (some mother came with her 9 year-old!).  Still got very quiet.

Josiah again said that he felt they were listening; which seems true.  I had no sleepers that I could see.  But they were very unresponsive, although they laughed at some of the jokes.

Anyway, we loaded out tonight, and are spending one more day fringeing (or at least, I am: Ramona needs to take Vanessa the Van in for a checkup tomorrow).  After that, there’s a party tomorrow night at 20:30, and then we’re off bright and early on Monday for Victoria (but first, camping near the Ice Fields in Jasper!).

A great note to leave Edmonton on!

Today’s audience was really quiet again, but intent.  Josiah once again heard people saying they liked it as they left the building.  But almost NOTHING got a laugh today.  Not even the “Ladies, gentlemen… racoons” got a giggle today.  Only last Sunday’s evil audience was worse for that.  Thinking they were bored, I pumped everything I had into the show, resulting in a broken voice and a very sore back.

(The broken voice may also have been caused by the thick smoke in the air which has been blown in from the B.C. forest wildfires.)

The chair didn’t slide today: Ramona shored it up with some non-skid patches and it stayed put.

Today’s audience was quiet again, but they weren’t frowny like our Sunday audience, and I was able to, as we used to say in Theatre school, “bus’ a cap in its ass” and avoid the vampiric leaching effect that I felt on Sunday.

A technical problem has surfaced over the last two performances.  I think the vinyl for the floorpiece is wearing down and getting slick, because in shows four and five, the chair moved back early in the show (I think during the decompression scene when I lean against it), which it never used to do.  I know the chair moved back, because I preset it myself, thinking that yesterday’s problem was a chair misplacement, and when I went to open it, it touched the back flat again, which it is not supposed to do.

So, the audience was quiet, but our tech, Josiah, said that he heard people saying they enjoyed it as they walked out (something he did not hear on Sunday).

It’s getting hard to flyer lines now, because so many people have already got all their tickets for the rest of the Fringe (Edmonton allows shows to advance sell 100% of their tickets with no additional surcharge).  I’m still doing it when we pass a line, but today my friend Robyn was driving through on the way to Vancouver, so I spent a few hours in the afternoon with her, since we haven’t seen each other in 12 years.

Tomorrow’s a light day: show at 18:15 and we’re seeing only two or three other shows.  We will probably sleep in in the morning and then do laundry and such: both Ramona and I were exhausted today.

Great show today.  We papered the house and tried to get artists in, rather than what Ian Goodtime calls “the CBC greyhairs”, who are old people who just sit there and frown at you because I suppose they expected “a proper play”.  Not all old people are CBC greyhairs: our host, in whose house we are staying, is 74, and more open-minded than most people a third of her age.

What we’re finding in Edmonton, based on the reactions of audiences of shows we’ve seen or otherwise know of, is that people in Edmonton are pretty tolerant when it comes to content, but you frustrate their expectations of STRUCTURE at your own peril.  They don’t expect Neil Simon, but they expect the structure to not challenge them very much.

In any case, I had a few glitches in today’s show (like forgetting to turn the chair on at the start of the show), which I covered gracefully, because I was in the zone thanks to a super-supportive audience (including the big dude from The Supervillan Monologues who guffawed at every joke—even the ones I thought would never get a laugh).   It was a nice cool day (high around 16 degrees), so the venue was pleasant.

Ramona and I also took in 4 more shows, which I will have to blog at more length about later.