7.26.2005
First weekend is in the books!
Well, the audience reactions have been varied and I'm not sure why. After a successful but unenthusiastice opening on Friday, we dipped to the depths of hell on Saturday. The crowd of about 65 just sat there. No laughter at all. It was very hard to get them to laugh at any verbal jokes.
I checked to see if the actors could be heard and there wasn't a problem with that. On Sunday, I talked with my parents who were in the audience with my uncle and they said they couldn't understand anything. It was the English accent.
Wow! That threw me for a loop. They said that they couldn't understand all the words because of the accents. I worked really hard on the accents. I even brought a person in during the fifth week to see if the accents were good or needed some work. The consultant said for the most part, the accents were very good. He was particularly impressed with our Brindsley and his Liverpool accent.
I struggle with the accent. My theatre professor, Arthur Feinsod told me in an e-mail later that he rarely uses accents because of the comprehension gap. I still feel like we had to use an accent, but I think we could have flattened it out and made it closer to our own language. We would have lost some of the colloquial jokes but people would have been able to identify with the characters and situation easier.
There is nothing I can do at this point in the process. I cannot tell the actors to cut the accent because that could ruin the rhythms of the show, make them self-conscious, and lose me a lot of friends. Their confidence is more important than my vanity. So I keep the info to myself.
On Sunday, we had the best time, and the best audience. Nearly 120 people came to see the show and they laughed almost all the time. It was amazing and quite satisfying.
After the Sunday performance, someone came up to me and asked where I got the play because they wanted to do it somewhere else. That's very nice to hear.
This is what makes theatre and all the hard work worth it.
I checked to see if the actors could be heard and there wasn't a problem with that. On Sunday, I talked with my parents who were in the audience with my uncle and they said they couldn't understand anything. It was the English accent.
Wow! That threw me for a loop. They said that they couldn't understand all the words because of the accents. I worked really hard on the accents. I even brought a person in during the fifth week to see if the accents were good or needed some work. The consultant said for the most part, the accents were very good. He was particularly impressed with our Brindsley and his Liverpool accent.
I struggle with the accent. My theatre professor, Arthur Feinsod told me in an e-mail later that he rarely uses accents because of the comprehension gap. I still feel like we had to use an accent, but I think we could have flattened it out and made it closer to our own language. We would have lost some of the colloquial jokes but people would have been able to identify with the characters and situation easier.
There is nothing I can do at this point in the process. I cannot tell the actors to cut the accent because that could ruin the rhythms of the show, make them self-conscious, and lose me a lot of friends. Their confidence is more important than my vanity. So I keep the info to myself.
On Sunday, we had the best time, and the best audience. Nearly 120 people came to see the show and they laughed almost all the time. It was amazing and quite satisfying.
After the Sunday performance, someone came up to me and asked where I got the play because they wanted to do it somewhere else. That's very nice to hear.
This is what makes theatre and all the hard work worth it.
