Hello!<\/p>\n
I\u2019m Steve Roe, producer of Music Box Improvised Musical. That\u2019s my funny face staring back at you. Of all the headshots I\u2019ve got, that\u2019s the most normal looking! I had to go into comedy as my big head is unsuitable for any other style of acting. I once performed in an impro show with the mantra \u2018natural natural natural\u2019 only for someone to come up and say “wow I loved your massive cartoon characters, you pull such weird faces!”, and I thought “no, that\u2019s just my face”.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m here to give you a behind the scenes look of our show building up to Edinburgh, then doing Edinburgh, and then after Edinburgh.<\/p>\n
At first this will probably take the form of thinly disguised attempts to market my show at you while I attempt to write witty anecdotes about \u201cflyering on the royal mile\u201d or such Edinburgh things.<\/p>\n
At some point though I\u2019ll write a blog while drunk at 3am in the morning after spending the night dancing badly in C Venues. And then all hell will break loose, and I might actually be interesting to read. I predict this will happen on the fifth day of the first week, based on previous experiences.<\/p>\n
Until that point, here\u2019s some background and what I\u2019ve been up to:<\/p>\n
Taking an improvised musical to Edinburgh is quite a foolhardy endeavour, as there are already some well established improvised musicals in Edinburgh (Showstopper, Baby Wants Candy, No Shoes). We could have made a children\u2019s version, or found a niche, or a unique selling point, but we thought we might as well just go about it in a headlong gung-ho fashion.
\nSo instead we\u2019re hoping to somehow subtly grow a reputation as the free-flowing young British upstarts, with different musical styles and character acting away from the normal musical theatre styles.<\/p>\n
To assist this message I\u2019ve recently been investigating and purchasing advertising. I came up with an advertising master plan, but when faced with the actual costs we\u2019re now carrying out about 1% of this plan. I now feel like all I\u2019ve done is stick two postage stamp sized music box logos on the internet, and an A4 piece of paper on a lamppost somewhere in Leith. In the future I\u2019m instead going to save up to buy a big Music Box airship to fly around in.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m now looking at other ways to advertise for free or cheap. High impact low cost, blah blah blah blah, in fact it\u2019s hard not to turn into some kind of late 1980s marketing yuppy. This included investigating out how illegal it would be to make a massive banner and hang it on the cliffs near Arthur\u2019s Seat overlooking The Pleasance.<\/p>\n
Other than that we\u2019re putting the show together. Being improvised it\u2019s not \u201crehearsed\u201d as such, more practiced similarly to how a football team practices various skills so you\u2019re ready to use them in a match. If anything we\u2019re match fit, as we\u2019ve been doing a huge amount of shows this year, in fact far more than is sane or normal. It\u2019s more normal to just rehearse a show from scratch in the 1\/2\/3 weeks building up to Edinburgh. Instead we\u2019ve been performing about 3 times a week for a year in the build up, and have actually had to take a rest in the 3 week build up to prevent madness. We\u2019ll find out if this approach works.<\/p>\n
At some point however I know I\u2019ll be stood in front of an audience and reviewers, in Edinburgh, about to improvise a musical I know nothing about. At the moment that feels terrifying. Luckily our last London show last night at The Miller seemed to go down well, which has calmed my wildly fluctuating pre-Edinburgh moods.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve also been sorting out lots of promo gigs. One of these has been the Virgin Money street stage. I initially wrote to them with a list of all our available dates, thinking I\u2019d get some of them, and they wrote back offering us all<\/u> of them. As impro is based on saying yes we\u2019re now having to become street performers too, which we haven\u2019t done before. I like the challenge of that though; if we\u2019re no good the audience can just walk away. I find it fascinating how the venue and audience can alter the actual show, especially in improvisation.<\/p>\n
Although the nervous butterflies are still there\u00a0 I\u2019m now looking forward to Edinburgh. It\u2019s where I got together with my lovely girlfriend two years ago, and we\u2019re now going to be performing together, AND I get to stay up late with friends without having to worry about getting the Northern Line home. Talking of which I\u2019m up for meeting new people at the Fringe so if you bump into me say \u2018hello Steve, I liked your blog\u2019, and we\u2019ll have a drink, my round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Edinburgh Blog 1 Hello! I\u2019m Steve Roe, producer of Music Box Improvised Musical. That\u2019s my funny face staring back at you. Of all the headshots I\u2019ve got, that\u2019s the most normal looking! I had to go into comedy as my big head is unsuitable for any other style of acting. I once performed in an[…] <\/p>\n