What not to do after a show you feel did not go well & you had a small house.
You have a very small house, in a small house.
The show did not go as well as you wanted it to.
You missed some physical technical elements in your show.
Maybe some cues were off.
The show is over and the audience has had time to standup and is moving towards the exit. Suddenly the performer comes out. I said to myself, “the show is not over” then I understand that it was. The performer starts apologizing for the show to a few people he knows in the audience. Making statements belittling the few audience members that did make the grand effort of time and money to see this performer and did this while the audience was still there. It made me feel like I was a plate of crap. I felt sorry for the people in the audience at that point. We were a good supportive audience.
It is not often I have been criticized with an audience, for being part of a small audience. This audience was. Understand - yes I know we all have had bad shows at times. We’ve all had audience that just do not laugh – respond or do anything else except breath. We all have shows where nothing goes right. But never go and belittle your audience in any way or yourself. Except of course unless that is your clown and that’s what you do.
What do you do? Stay back stage, suck up the experience – change out of your costume, pack your props. Mentally go over your high points and low points in your show and set a few goals to work on for the next show.
Most experienced performers have had packed houses and houses with audiences in the single digits - hopefully more than one person. When I was in the middle of my 6-month run of my solo show in LA doing the AERO SHOW, which was Critics Choice in the LA Times. The president of the Vaudeville Museum told me there are no guarantees in theatre. You can have bad reviews and a full house or great reviews and an empty house. Some nights I had 6 people the next night would be sold out. But when I did have only 6 people I gave those 6 people the best show I could and some of those shows were my best shows. Some of those people came back several times. The fact is that every person tells an average of 10 people about the show they saw. So those 6 people told a total of 60 people – which helped the pack future houses.
Enjoy the small audience – you never know who is sitting in your audience.
If you go out to your audience after the show - praise them for being wonderful and supporting you. They paid to see you with their time or their money or both.
Be positive. It goes a long way.
Stanley Allan Sherman
What are your thoughts?
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2 comments:
That's great advice Stanley!
It's easy as a performer to fall in the trap of "I felt this way, so everybody must feel this way."
I've fallen into this trap myself, and regret it now.
The best thing you can do is Suck It Up and control what you can control. Your energy. Your timing. Your ability to put the best show you can out there.
Adam
Clownlink.com
My Clown Festival Blog
Adam,
It is easy for performers to go over the edge when things are not going well. We all have to develop our own personal way to deal with it. This goes to our technical help when that goes badly.
Solo shows or two person shows are not solo and two person shows they always involve the technical help. The only thing worse than attacking your audience is attacking your technical help because they can do very bad things and laugh about it.
Sometime when I go into a new theatre and find some money on the floor I always give it to head technical person figuring it most likely dropped out to there pocket. This also establishes some trusts.
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