The Nerd Nag

So, the performances were definately interesting to be apart of. The overall skeletal system of it, I was somewhat accustomed to due to my dance recitals I've done in the past. Ya got your wings; your upstage and downstage; dressing rooms; a little speaker to hear your cues, and of course your live audience! That to me is definately the part I love most. And the audiences are different every night, which definately held true with this show. Especially since it was a comedy.
Different crowds will always find different things funny. Saturdays are statistically the best, liveliest crowds (in this case LITERALLY speaking, since a lot of our audience was over the age of 60), and Sundays are usually the days we are desperately searching for a pulse. However, to our surprise one of our best audiences during the entire 9 show run, was on a Sunday! They laughed at EVERYTHING, were very enthusiastic clappers.

It was also interesting to note that as a whole, people are afraid to laugh in fear the'yll be the only one's laughing. So there's always a need for an initiator, which we had in a guy named Jarvis. He had one of the loudest laughs I've ever heard. You could even hear him on the speakers downstairs! The days he came to the show he definately helped the initiation!
I played the part of a courtesan (nice way of saying hooker), and there's an entire segment where each courtesan (or pair of courtesans in my case, I played one half of the Gemini) was introduced and did a dance. The dances were pretty risque, funny as well but we wondered, with the age bracket of our audiences just how often we'd offend people. Didn't seem to do too bad. And on good nights we got hoops and hollers even when we were reintroduced in the 2nd act.

There were definately some flubs. Fortunately not too many on my part. I only tripped once (our pants were made of silk and our shoes out of leather), every time I'd go to do one of our dance moves if I wasn't careful, I'd get my foot stuck on my pants for a second, and proceed to trip. We had people get sore throats, get sick, fall on their butts when they were supposed to be aiming for a chair, and on the LAST day of the show, poor little Allison who played Phyllia missed one of her cues. One of the other actors had to come downstairs and tell her, and they had to stall on stage...talk about improv!

Its uncanny how 2nd nature everything becomes because of how many frakkin' times you've done it. And your always trying something new every night to see if it gets more of a reaction. I know the courtesans "background" actions intensified as time went by, as well as our boobs. Say what? You ask? Well, we would get bored waiting between the opening performance and our last number in act 1, so we started experimenting on ways to perfect ourselves. Which ended up delving into the wonders of bronzer. My "twin" even went so far as to draw some abs on herself. Ha.

And one of my favorite parts was when we assembled in a line in the foyer as the audience exited to thank them for coming to the show, and they got to tell us what they thought of it, and talk to us individually. Had a lot of people make comments on our wigs, and ask if we were really twins. :-P Also had quite a few old ladies tell us courtesans that we were sexy, sexy. LOL. All in all it was an amazing experience, and most certainly addictive!