Coming down and catching up blog ::
I remember way back last year and the years before that when the staff of the Brave New Workshop handled a bazillion small details for the improv festival and that allowed me the free time to do things like blog daily during TCIF - well no more! The idea seems almost laughable now. Having time to just sit down and write during the fest?!? Psshaw.
The improv festival happened at HUGE for the first time and I wanted to stop several times and document what was going on and my thoughts on it, but given that most of the days I didn't have time to stop and eat or speak in complete sentences, that just wasn't going to happen.
The short version of the story is this: The improv festival happened and it was a fucking blast.
The longer version is always a mix of the same things - it's a blur, I'm incredibly excited, it's a blur, I stayed up way too late, the shows are so incredible it makes your brain hurt, everyone is leaving town and I barely got a chance to talk to anyone, the final show is upon us and then the space is suddenly...shockingly quiet and empty.
This year has been scary in a lot of ways but this past weekend has been both the thing that we have been holding our breath for and the thing that I wondered if we were ready for.
I had to wonder in the weeks leading up to the Festival what the impact of HUGE would be on the vibe of the weekend - since we now run shows all week long, every week, the TCIF is no longer the one big chance to catch all these groups in the same place. It's still a pretty crazy dose of improv and I had no worries that the quality of the shows would be top-notch but I wondered if we hadn't diluted or lost one of the things that made the Festival a big, special annual event.
Such is progress - as it turns out my worries were entirely unfounded.
The comparison to previous years isn't apple-to-apples since we seat half as many people as the BNW did for us - but I think we were actually up in numbers and we had standing room only more often than we didn't. Even the 10pm Saturday show, which usually suffers as everyone migrates to the CC Club to get the party started, was packed to the walls and we had to turn people away - so it seems that we've managed to raise the level of enthusiasm for improv overall, which has always been the goal of the festival and the theater.
Yes, there was one night I got home after sunrise. Yes I worked from early in the morning until late into the next morning most days. And yes, the shows were mind-alteringly great. I can breathe again.
Every year before this one I came out of Festival weekend with a bi-polar level of determination to get the theater open and a crazy kind of anger that we hadn't been able to already - like witnessing TCIF was just proof that we needed to do what we did and irrefutable proof that it would kick ass to have this year round.
This year I came out of the weekend tired, happy and just as fired up as ever.
Nobody has fun like we do. If you missed it, you missed out.
Lucky for you we do it every day now. Come see.
1 comment:
"Nobody has fun like we do." is the best sentence in the world and true. Thank you for awesomeness. :)
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