Fifty / Fifty

Hi folks!  Yesterday Goblin Market closed. It was one of the most beautiful shows I've ever done, and I learned a tremendous amount from it. We did get one more great review from on of my favorite bloggers- young Ada Grey- link here! Here's a little taste:

"People who would like this show are people who like goblin fairy tales, feminism, and fruit. I think people should definitely definitely go see this show. It had so many good elements to it, like the singing and the acting and the story. I loved their production of Coraline last year and I hope to see more of their productions in the future."

Speaking of future productions...I'm just about done nailing down the rights to my next project. I also have been tapped to direct a show next season with another theater company, but I can't announce it yet. More detail soon!

On to other things. One interesting thing about Goblin Market was the audience experience of the piece. Everyone was uniformly blown away by the music (our two actresses sounded spectacular, especially together, and we hired a band to perform the original orchestrations). But in some areas the audience reaction was anything but uniform. In particular, we had one technical element that we'd thought out months in advance and took substantial effort to accomplish: our set had a bunch of creepy Victorian dolls on shelves at the back of the stage. During the musical number "Here They Come," in which one of the sisters becomes a goblin that tempts her sibling, she starts a chant that goes:
"Cat like and ratlike / ratel* and wombat-like."

*A ratel, by the way, is the proper name for a honey badger. I know, I didn't know that either! Wikipedia did though.

Anyway, the first two times she chants that, we rigged some of the dolls so that their eyes would light up. Awesome, right? It would be both a cool callback to the glowing doll heads we used for the ghost children in Coraline, and flirt with the idea that the chant is calling up some kind of malignant spirits.

Here's the thing though....this happens during a really intense part of the show, when both of the actresses are very busy with business downstage center. And talking with audience afterwards,would you believe that about half of them never even noticed that the doll eyes lit up at all? And keep in mind, this isn't exactly a subtle effect:

Go figure.