I have wrapped up my run here in Victoria. My 3:30pm show yesterday had a decent little audience which featured volunteers, performers Alex Dallas and Ryan Paulson, and some real-life paying audience. I had my first standing ovation for Rebel Without a Niche! Usually for me a standing ovation is when someone gets up to leave, but not this time! Now, granted, it was only one guy in the front row who took part in the ovation. I think he tried to spearhead a real audience ovation, but it didn’t work.
Afterwards the volunteer house staff presented me with a flower to show their appreciation of having me there. Isn’t that nice? It may be nicest thing that’s happened to me on tour. Thanks! I do think that Fringe Legend/Queen Alex Dallas was a little jealous, though.
After the show, I said to Alex, “Okay, you’ve seen it now. Do you have any idea why I’ve been raked over the coals on this tour (regarding reviews)?” She said she had no idea why, and said that when she was watching the show she, too, was baffled by why I had gotten some horrific reviews. “Even if I didn’t like the show, I would at least give it three stars because it’s well-crafted and you can tell that you are a trained actor.” She did like it very much and her suggestion was to “take things further.” She brought up the example of my Cableresque! parody and how I could take things to that level of extreme.
In Victoria I had people come up to me and quote the show. “I had a dream about you!” “Crawl fish!” A gentleman came up to me yesterday and told me how much he liked the show, but he didn’t understand why my audiences were so small.
Alex said it’s possible that my show is being unfairly compared to TJ Dawe’s Slip Knot, another show about jobs. It’s nothing at all like my show, despite what a reviewer here said. That reviewer said that Slip Knot is a multi-character show. I don’t think that person ever saw Slip Knot because TJ is a storyteller and not an actor who jumps around and does tons of characters like you’ll see in Rebel Without a Niche.
I talked to Shirley last night from Train Your Man, and she, too, offered her support regarding my show and the unfair treatment it’s gotten, and encouraged me to keep doing what I’m doing. It was very sweet of her, really. I have to say the reviews haven’t discouraged me too much, but it disappoints me that they prevented so many people from coming out and seeing the show.
All you have to do is look at the reviews here in Victoria. The reviewer who reviewed my show in the Colonist wrote a review of another show where he said he stopped paying attention halfway through the show. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if your job is to review plays, then the least you can do is do your job and pay attention to the entire play. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.
Then there is possibly my favorite review, which was the review of the Pajama Men in Monday Magazine. In it, the reviewer said he only wished there were more than five stars to give. The rating they gave it? Four stars. If they made a mistake, can the rest of us add a star to ours as well?
I enjoyed Victoria. People were nice. I had banana bread French toast of the first time. And the second time. Man, that was good. Major props to (I’ll fill in the name of the restaurant later).
Now I’m at the library and I’m going to walk back to my billet’s house, get my stuff, catch a local bus, get another bus that goes onto the ferry, float to Vancouver, ride on that bus to downtown, take another local bus to my new billets, and…
It all begins again.
