Three posts are barely a corpus to base any type of analysis upon, but looking over what I've written so far, two out of three concern impossible or improbable challenges. I began this blog without a thematic plan, and I'll maintain my lack of plan for as long as it makes sense. But if something begins to recur in the blog, then perhaps it is something worth exploring, if not something in need of exploration.
So impossible tasks. How about putting on a show with five weeks of preparation time before house opening? This is raw stuff, the show only closed a week and a half ago, but it's something that I'm thinking about, and insofar as I have anything at all to write about it will be things that I'm thinking about.
I'll avoid mention of the title of the show and key players in this drama, for fear of Google uncovering this and revealing my location to anyone with any vested interest in the show. Because for all anyone involved knows, I was a devotee of this particular theatrical experience and it would be unprofessional to be seen as otherwise. For the purposes of the blog, I shall refer to the show itself as "The Lady in the Portal", but I doubt I'll need to.
I'll say firstly that on the whole, the show was a good one. The acting was uniformly of high standard, the production elements while not perfect certainly did their job and given the restricted time span it was an incredible feat just to get the thing up and running at all. If I were a paying audience member I doubt I would've been disappointed, especially if I had seen it at one of the showings that were well attended.
I wasn't a paying audience member. I was a stage manager and operator, and in this capacity I had the perhaps unenviable privilege of witnessing the performance some 18 times over three weeks.
If you partake of any cultural work 18 times in three weeks, you would be forgiven for noticing flaws. Especially if you had access to the text and other raw materials that contributed to the creation of said piece.
There were flaws.
It wouldn't be of much benefit to recount them here. As I said, the production was a victim of lack of time. Given several more hours of rehearsal and textual analysis, a bit more research and homework, perhaps the flaws might've been found and ironed out. Who can say? Ultimately, it wasn't possible and it didn't happen and that's just how it goes.
What may prove valuable to note is that the show was, for all it's other virtues and flaws, not very well attended. I doubt the flaws that I saw were seen by the audience. Perhaps they saw other flaws? Fact is, marketing and publicity did not open the door to crowds at the beginning of the season, and word of mouth did not build to an incredible snowball that saw full houses towards the end of the run.
My instinct was that it was the wrong show, in the wrong place, for the wrong people, at the wrong time of year. It was a talking head intellectual exploration of Stalinist Russia and poetry featuring a dystopian metaphorical future. In youthful and vibrant Greens-voting Brunswick at the beginning of a cold and dreary winter. Maybe an amazingly good rendition of the Lady in the Portal would've attracted numbers, but there was little to amaze in this production.
I could go on, but the lead character herself says it best herself in the show: "I need the clash of swords when I go to the theatre! Heroism, spectacle! If I want timidity I can walk down the street."
In this day and age, on Sydney Rd in Brunswick, there's less timidity on the street than in that show. Who can blame the paying audience for giving it a miss?
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