So when I was leaving for Edinburgh, I promised a few friends I'd blog about how we've been doing instead of worrying too much about e-mails. A few days in and I finally have a couple of minutes spare to get this set up so here goes....
For those who are reading this and blissfully unaware of what this is all about, I'm over in Edinburgh producing a comedy show by John Gallagher and Matthew Smyth who are, it turns out, very funny men. The show's called 'A Betrayal of Penguins' and you can find out a little about it here and here.
So Ben (our tech and penguin) hit Edinburgh on Wednesday morning at stupid o'clock. After much crankiness and occasional spurts of overexcitement from myself, we popped along to a Pappy's Fun Club preview show, which turned out to be just as amazing as we'd expected it to be. On Thursday morning, the guys had their first taste of Edinburgh performing by doing a five minute set at our venue's launch in the early afternoon. Despite an odd mix-up with the MC which left everyone feeling a little awkward for a few seconds, the set went great and really set us up well with the venue folks. We also saw a group called Original Tempo who put on one of the coolest performances I've ever seen with an excerpt from their show 'Shut Up, Play!!!'. We're all creaming ourselves at the prospect of seeing them live properly in the coming days.
We've had a couple of teething problems with the venue which included two attempted tech rehearsals which were double booked and a slightly bizarre situation where there's more tickets for sale at the box office than there are seats in the venue. The lads also performed at the venue's second launch where loud talking (to the point that the acts were inaudible) was somehow encouraged by the MCs. However, everything's pretty well ironed out now and the guys working at Sweet Venues are all really cool which makes everything pretty forgiveable.
So, as regards the actual show, we've done three performances and sold out two so far. First day, we were great on the streets flyering but only got 26 into our 42 seater space. There were 42 in on Saturday and we got extra seats in today to allow us to have 51 in. It's getting a bit cramped, but I suppose that's a nice complaint to have. All this means that we're getting closer to eliminating the last of the financial risk of being here and it's looking like there's a chance that this could be a rather successful run. Matt and John have been performing really well, particularly on Saturday when a nice lady from the Edinburgh Comedy Awards was in. (Not that we'd get ahead of ourselves enough to think that we'll be hearing back from them.)
Sales for tomorrow (Monday) are already strong so we're looking forward to another nice day one the streets. Today was really cool and I even managed to get an amazing penguin balloon made for me by a balloon modeller. People here are mad for penguins which is proving rather helpful. We also have great t-shirts with our penguin logo which arrived on Saturday morning which are making life much easier.
In other cool news, the other show Ben and I are working on 'No Blacks. No Jews. No Dogs. No Irish. All Welcome.' by Keith Farnan has sold out three days on the trot now. It's a great show so if anyone reading this ends up in Edinburgh over the next fortnight, you should check him out too.
I'll check back in tomorrow with a less wordy update and maybe some pictures.
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