Fringe Festival – Day 6
I dwell on bad reviews.
I know it isn’t healthy or productive but whenever I get a bad review, all I think about is what I could have done to make that show an enjoyable experience to the person who hated it so much.
Of course it is impossible to please everyone all of the time but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to make the attempt. One horrible review for “A Brief History of Irish Music” is upset that we didn’t play enough Irish music.
The stuff I really take personally is the stuff that makes me question what I did wrong. We had a pretty uneven show on Wednesday night.
OK. It was pretty bad.
The reviews reflect that, which is fair.
But they also say that our music was “OK” and that we don’t seem to enjoy the music.
That sucks because I know that our music sounds really good and we do love playing music. Lots of other reviews for our show say so. That means we completely failed to sell ourselves to that audience on that particular night. I want to go back and change that experience for them. But I can’t.
At the Fringe, I always say I’m trying to write a four star show. I mean, I like getting five stars but to me, five stars is a great show. I don’t try to write great shows. Feels like too much pressure.
I try to write good shows. But when someone calls my show bad, I dwell on it.
Which is why I have a difficult time panning anything. I know how it feels. And it sucks.
Fortunately, I have no plans to pan the three shows I saw last night.
So here’s where my thoughts about an off night come from. This improv show has a great premise (the audience draws props on chalkboards and the performers integrate those props into the show) and the performers are very good.
But the show felt a bit off to me last night. I felt like they weren’t using the chalkboards enough, for one. With such a great premise, it felt like they needed to do a better job taking advantage of it.
I would bet that nine times out of ten, this show is completely fantastic from beginning to end. Yesterday it was a little uneven. Because I know how good it must be most of the time, it still gets a strong recommendation.
I went to this show on word of mouth and while it didn’t connect with me, I can see how it resonated with others.
The show is a dramedy about several people dealing with a recent unexpected loss. Having been through a similar time in my life, I could certainly relate to the raw pain they were clearly all feeling.
I think that the show may have been done a disservice by the Fringe time limit. Another fifteen minutes might have helped bring together the disparate story lines.
Now, I didn’t love this show. I went on the recommendation of someone who thought it was the best show at the fringe.
Conveniently, we can both be right.
Best show I saw last night and one of my top five of the Fringe so far.
This show combines very clever dance numbers and stories (told by Courtney McClean) that are all inspired by the horror genre. Some are funny, some are creepy, all are memorable.
There was not a slow moment in the entire show. Not a moment I was disengaged or thinking that a dance had gone on just a bit too long.
We had a lot of intriguing choices for our final slot of the night but we settled on this one and boy am I glad we did!
More Fringing tonight! Can’t wait!
Grail Diary 