The dangers of easy money

Instapaper pointed me to an except from Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.  The piece is a very funny and obviously heartfelt attempt to discourage all but the genuinely obsessive from attempting a career as a chef: -

Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you're thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens?  If you're wondering if, perhaps, you are too old? Let me answer that question for you: Yes.  You are too old.

 By the time you get out of school—at thirty-four, even if you’re fucking Escoffier—you will have precious few useful years left to you in the grind of real-world working kitchens.  That’s if you’re lucky enough to even get a job.

At thirty-four, you will immediately be “Grandpa” or “Grandma” to the other—inevitably much, much younger, faster-moving, more physically fit—cooks in residence.

To a someone who took up stand-up just before his fortieth birthday there are obvious parallels (the key word is 'grind').  The older you are the more you've gotta want it because so much of life is more appealing than another night of long car journeys and indifferent audiences for very little money.

I also love the way that Bourdain describes his industry's attitude to chefs who took the 'safe' option of a hotel kitchen or country club: -

If it matters to you, watch groups of chefs at food and wine festivals—or wherever industry people congregate and drink together after work.  Observe their behaviors—as if spying on animals in the wild. Notice the hotel and country club chefs approach the pack.  Immediately, the eyes of the pack will glaze over a little bit at the point of introduction.  The hotel or country club species will be marginalized, shunted to the outside of the alpha animals.  With jobs and lives that are widely viewed as being cushier and more secure, they enjoy less prestige—and less respect.

The analogue here is with 'hotel chef' and 'corporate comedy'.

Of late I've caught up with some of the wonderfully talented alumnus of Scenes from Communal Living.  In the eleven months since our last UK show they've almost all gone on to the 'next stage'; winning awards and competitions, getting both agents and amazing reviews of their sell-out shows.

At least two of them have started fielding offers for corporate gigs; Christmas parties mainly and the occasional after-dinner slot at a sales conference.  This is the top of an extremely slippery slope.  The money will seem mind-blowing at first, especially coming on top of all that travel to cool and exotic places but it doesn't take long before a reputation for being a corporate comic means that you 'enjoy less prestige—and less respect.'

And if your peers don't rate you then those fickle, easily influenced people who commission television won't even know you're alive.

Corporate money now = no TV deal later.

Scenes from Communal Living: wrap-up

As it's highly unlikely that Scenes from Communal Living will reappear in 2010, what follows is an assessment of the experiences of last year.

The year broke broadly into four interrelated projects: -

1. The initial Camden run (18 shows over three weeks)
2. Edinburgh (25 shows back-to-back)
3. Sydney (10 shows over a fortnight)
4. The return to Camden (16 shows on consecutive Sundays)

Initial Camden Run

An almost unqualified success. The cast were focused and committed to the rehearsal and performance schedule. The investment in PR ensured a decent level of press coverage. Friends and family made the effort to support the show, some on multiple occasions. The shows themselves were high energy and great fun and by the end of the run we were turning away punters.

This straight-shot multinight run approach may be the best chance that a show like Scenes has in terms of both creative quality and promotability.

Edinburgh

Hard but a 25-show run was always going to be. It was essentially the same cast as the Camden run, many of whom were distracted by other projects. This in turn ate into the rehearsal schedule and also left me with little or no post-show time to correct bad habits once we got started. As fatigue set in things got genuinely unpleasant off stage so it became harder and harder for anything good to emerge on stage. Houses were at the bottom of expectations. It was always going to be hard to achieve decent share-of-mind in the ultimate crowded marketplace, especially as I arrived with no real appreciation of how little love the Festival has for improv.

I don't regret taking the show to Edinburgh but in retrospect there's much I'd do differently: demand more commitment from the cast, perhaps even recast the show entirely and definitely do less than the full month. Also I was guilty of schoolboy howlers like not giving the best quotes from London critics sufficient prominence on the flier.

Sydney

This was really Marko's baby and everything I know is via second-hand reports (including an absolutely stunning review). Marko took a different approach to casting in that he chased a couple of 'alpha performers' then allowed them a lot of input in terms of casting and rehearsal scheduling. This seemed to disrupt his production timeline but the show's overall creative quality was seemingly unaffected. We made the decision to paper the house for the Opening Night in the expectation that this would create 'buzz' and we'd recoup the lost sales in word-of-mouth. This didn't really happen and we left money on the table by giving tickets to punters who would otherwise have paid.

My advice to Scenes from Communal Living's next 3rd-party director is to have faith in your ability to extract great performances from run-of-the-mill performers rather than chase reputations, especially as the Sydney 'alphas' ultimately didn't outshine the rest of the cast. The success of the straight-shot multinight approach was certainly vindicated.

Return to Camden

We expanded the cast and creative quality returned to pre-Edinburgh heights. I had taken a regular weekly slot because I was intrigued by the challenge of carving out an ongoing space in the London comedy landscape. My hubris was aptly punished, especially as I relied on some low-level media contacts, Facebook and fliering as my sole promotional tools. We were old news to both the London print media and those punters who had supported it earlier in the year. Tickets were unnecessarily expensive for a Sunday night show.

In London a 50-or so seat theatre is a promoter's black hole: there's no way that anything less than a consistent run of 90% houses will break even after PR costs have been factored in. The theatre was unwilling to offer much of a discount and I glibly refused to see that as I was going to lose money anyway I might as well have set a loss-making ticket price from the outset and got bigger houses. I also wonder whether the specific nature of the show (scenes always set flat-share arrangements) was a negative for improv fans who will happily turn up every week to watch the same actors work in a more demonstrably open format.

2009 taught me a lot. I'm a little sad about the 2010 hiatus but needs must.

The limitations of the form

The final Scenes from Communal Living was a massive success. We had a full theatre and the huge cast (9 performers) put on a wild and crazy show that left everyone on an absolute high.

As is the way with these things the late night drinking turned into an unabashed mutual admiration session. And as is my way I spent most of the time dispensing unsolicited career advice. Mostly I told anyone who would listen to get free of improv as soon as possible.

Don't get me wrong: I love improv. In 1989 I was taken (dragged) to Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney to see Theatresports and my life changed forever. Twenty years on it is the only form of comedy I know I do well.

Improv comedy makes you clever and quick. It sharpens your comic timing and gives you an innate sense of exactly what the audience wants to see and hear. It teaches you to tell stories with beginnings, middles and endings. Great improv is a joy to watch and an even greater joy to perform.

But by its nature it is not written down and therein lies the rub if you want a career that includes the lucrative avenues of radio, TV and film. With a few especially formulaic exceptions like panel shows and Whose Line is it Anyway? the electronic media needs to see a script before it can produce comedy. Sets, props, costumes, sound effects, music and CGI cannot be specced, costed or sourced without a pre-agreed script.

By the time this pretty obvious bombshell dropped on me I was about five years into my comedy career in Sydney. I was regularly performing, making money and constantly being told that improv was as legitimate a comedic form as stand-up or sketch comedy. This was true only until TV and radio came knocking. When they did I had no capacity to actually write comedy and opportunity passed me by. I was pigeonholed as 'just an improviser' forever after until I moved to the UK and reinvented myself as a stand-up.

Many of my (ex-)cast are already on the radar of British TV and radio. On stage they shine but I hope they realise that won't be enough.

In some strange way Scenes from Communal Living is my little dedication to the comedy I love most. My advice to all improvisers is to remember that it's the one form of comedy that you should only ever do for love.

Willfully unhelpful

This Sunday night is the 60th UK performance of Scenes from Communal Living. We've made a lot of people laugh and I'd like to think that the show will be a useful stepping stone in the careers of our young and talented cast.

34 of those 60 shows were at the same little theatre in Camden. At 4pm yesterday (Friday) I received a curt email saying that as the theatre was closing for Christmas immediately after our show we had to bump out our entire production that same night. That left me with the last hour of the business week to arrange transport for the set. We were their biggest customer in 2009 and the relationship ended with what amounted to a notice of eviction.

Once I'd made the necessary arrangements I did something that I rarely do: I rang to complain. I was duly referred to the relevant clause in the contract signed back in June and that was that.

No best wishes. No thank you. No pleasantries whatsoever.

I wasn't surprised. There was always a sense that the people who ran the theater had absolutely no enthusiasm for our project. Maybe they don't like improv or comedy or maybe they just didn't like me as a person. Their approach was always willfully unhelpful. Sunday night may not be the final staging of Scenes from Communal Living in London but it's certainly the last one at that theatre.

Here's hoping that our last show is good enough to wash this taste from my mouth.

Walking the talk

A strange confluence of unplanned (but hardly unsurprising) absences led me to actually joining the Scenes from Communal Living cast for our penultimate show last Sunday. The goal was to 'not suck' and I achieved that much.

And now I know for sure why my cast so loves the show.

Sydney 3

Congratulations to the Sydney cast

Sydney 2

Early reports from opening night in Sydney are fantastic!

Sydney

The Australian iteration of Scenes from Communal Living opens in Sydney in a few hours time.

This is the moment when I get a genuine sense of the robustness of the show. Is it replicable? Does it work at all away from my direction? If so, how much does it morph and into what? Do I have something that might one day be 'franchisable'?

In other words, do I have the beginnings of a brand?

Comparisons

Last night I ran a workshop with the Sydney cast of 'Scenes'. I only had 90 minutes with everyone there; a ridiculously brief period, especially as 'helping out with the show' was my raison d'être for being in Australia in the first place.

It was their fourth rehearsal. My comparison with the London gang at the same stage is this: -

Sydney's weakest performer is stronger than London's weakest performer but London's strongest performer is much, much stronger than the Sydney equivalent

Given the nature of the overall show I'd rather have London's challenges. Then again, I am always going to be biased towards the cast I chose myself.

Parallels

Last night I sat in on a rehearsal for the Sydney iteration of Scenes from Communal Living. It was only the third rehearsal but the parallels between their work and my London cast at the same point on the production timeline were uncanny. There was the same early reticence to work with unfamiliar people, the same two-steps-forward-one-step-back development of actors who absolutely nailed the audition but also the same wonderful commitment to break new ground.

The portents for the show itself couldn't be better.

The franchise begins...

Sydney

London

Vision v. expediency

We're chasing print deadlines for the Sydney show. This was the week that we hit the place on the timeline where our hitherto irresistible uncompromising artistic vision crashed into an immovable fact: -

no artwork = no poster = no audience

Losing 'week one' of an eight-week project line is still a week lost. We've been kidding ourselves that we'll make it up somehow but this week's compromise is as inevitable as it was predictable.

Every time a supplier or client or collaborator or whoever tells me to stop quibbling and just be happy with the latest draft I feel a little less like the guy with the artistic vision and a little more like everyone else.

Back in the saddle

Last night we restarted Scenes from Communal Living at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. A small house saw a terrific show performed by a cast of three 'veterans' of the Edinburgh and previous Camden runs and three 'Scenes virgins'. Everyone surprised each other and so everyone shone.

It felt like coming home.

On the other side of the world Marko is halfway through casting the Australian run (opening at the Fusebox Theatre in Marrickville on November 3). We spoke at length this morning so far his experiences parallel mine from February and March. This consistency means that once I take the learnings from Edinburgh into account I may yet have something replicable.

This week I have to be in Plymouth for a stand-up comedy gig and Zurich for pharmaceutical consulting work 24 hours later. Only in my world would this be considered normal.

New blood

Illness meant that the 'Scenes' cast was in danger of being undermanned yesterday so I pressganged Albert Howell, an old Canadian mate and a seriously good improviser into the show.

It's a cliche known to every sports fan: the special player who makes it look easy, who seems to somehow have more time and space than everyone else on the field. The really special ones have enough time and space to make the people around them look good.

If improvisors aren't being surprised by what is being said to them on stage they go a little dead inside. They start anticipating, which means they stop living in the moment. An audience can somehow sense that they're now not watching wonderfully spontaneous creativity but rather a sort of badly underwritten sketch show. Even if the laughs keep coming they're nowhere near as heartfelt.

Obviously introducing new blood in the cast reintroduces the element of surprise. If the new performer is as good as Albert then wonderful things will happen.

Last show of the Edinburgh run is at 325pm this afternoon. We start back at Camden next week.

Opportunities for learning

I haven't been able to post for a few days because I've been too angry.

Wednesday's Scenes from Communal Living was so bad I was nearly speechless with rage. The poor audience sat through a procession of tasteless, pointless autopilot 'comedy' that was unfunny in every possible way. Career-damagingly bad.

Of course it was the first show of the run that industry friends of mine from Australia and Canada had come along to watch. This Edinburgh was supposed to be my showcase for improv's possibilities but this was nothing more than an eloquent demonstration of its limitations.

Post-show notes were nasty, brutish and short and I walked away disconsolate.

I found out later that for once the cast took my notes to heart. When I arrived at Thursday's pre-show meeting the cast was already in the room, focused and ready to warm up. That day's show was a good one. Yesterday was the same with equally pleasing results.

Maybe the penny dropped. Maybe my young cast has realised that when you perform on autopilot bad things happen. It's Day 24 of the Edinburgh Fringe but as tiring as that may be, the audience members are seeing the show for the first time.

Halfway

We are now halfway through the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe so Scenes from Communal Living has a day off today. I am still performing in two other shows later but as Scenes is the production in which I've invested the most even on hiatus it's the one that demands most of my attention.

A few days ago I described my frustration at the lack of focus from some of my cast. I'm starting to worry that my actors are splitting into two factions; one still focused on giving the audience a great show worth the ticket price but another that now can't see past personal agendas.

I need to be a little careful here as everyone is performing for free. It's unlikely that we'll put enough bums on seats for the profit-share arrangement to kick in. And as well as performing everyone is fliering for at least an hour a day. Whilst undoubtedly exhausting this the deal we agreed to beforehand.

As ever it's all a question of each individual's motivation for being in Edinburgh. No one makes money and almost no one gets famous so why are we all here? To me the 'correct' answers are to further one's craft, to experience what it's like to perform in a month-long run and to improve one's profile as much as possible. The 'incorrect' answers are all about fun and sociability and bragging rights; for one month a year you're as much a Festival performer as Reg Hunter or Adam Hills. Only of course you aren't.

Alas, I have a couple of cast members who seem to be stuck in this second mindset and if something isn't fun they sulk. Fliering is never fun and I do my best to thank everyone every day for their efforts on that front.

But doing a bad show is no fun either and I've been openly accused of being negative for pointing out bad work in my oh-so brief post-show notes. Our reviews so far have been mixed and I can't argue with the more damning assessments any more than I can wholeheartedly embrace the more encouraging ones.

I need a break from my cast as much as they need a break from me. Tomorrow I have a day trip to London for a consultancy thing. It's a long time since I've regarded the prospect of flying into Heathrow with this much enthusiasm.

So ya wanna be a star?

Talent is so obviously 'cost of entry'. Less apparent is the need for 'emotional intelligence'.

A better day

Every review of an improv highlights the variability of the artform. In the better (kinder?) ones it's mentioned towards the end, in harsher ones it's called 'inconsistency' and raised in the opening sentence. This is the nature of improv and has to be embraced.

I'm doing my damndest to free my cast from the pattern of following every great show with a weak one. This means focusing on the consistency deficit within each show. So every moment with the cast is precious.

Today was a strange show in that we went on 20 minutes late (unheard of at a Festival) because of an issue with a punter in a wheelchair. The actors might have been thrown but weren't.

I'm still too pessimistic to declare the pattern broken but the signs are good.

Frustration

Being a non-performing director at a festival is a very different thing to the same role in a London season and some days it's easy to understand why there are so many solo performers at the Fringe.

The downside of going it alone is of course that you prepare alone, flier alone and spend a miserable 23 hours locked in your own head after a show tanks.

The upside is that your cast (aka 'you') turn up when they're meant to, focused and ready to engage in the task that brought you to Edinburgh in the first place; the show.

Suffice to say, I am learning. Every day I am learning.

Relentless

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is relentless. There are no days off and the second that one show comes down you're already thinking about the next one.

I love it!