This week is both a celebration and a relief. After much work and stress, Drawn Dead is complete and live at the 2015 Elgin Fringe Festival through this Sunday. I have three more shows over the next three days, and then this experience will be over.
Work on my show ramped up as the final month approached, because as George Lewis says, there’s nothing like a deadline.
After much experimentation and rewriting, I decided to pretty much keep the original first half as is, with minor revisions, while rewriting and rerecording the bulk of the second half, including a brand new ending. The original ending was a hastily assembled solution to get the show up. This time around I had much more time to figure out and craft a more fitting ending. I also carefully went through and edited plus cleaned up bits and pieces of the old recorded audio.
Compared to 2013, where I finished the show for Seattle Fringe thinking, “Well, if I do the show again I can rework it then,” … I now have a finished product I feel confident taking to other festivals as-is, or anywhere. Enough friends in Chicago who couldn’t make it out to Elgin expressed an interest that I could do the show in Chicago at some point down the line, and now that could probably happen with as little as finding some space and someone to stage manage and handle front of house.
But after the last couple months, I’m looking forward to the break… even if by “break” I mean “still practicing improv and some sketch during the week”.
Improv doesn’t require as much outside work in comparison. You show up and play, whether you’re in a class, a rehearsal or a show. Workshops obviously require more work, and I still want to offer my Improv Diamond workshop in Chicago once this is done.
During the past month I also wrote my first sketches with Elliot Northlake as our sketch duo Sam and Elden for our four week run at the Annoyance Chuckle F*ckers series. The run went very well, we’ve got another show coming up, and are looking into subsequent gigs. We demonstrated an ability to quickly assemble and prepare sketches in a single rehearsal, and finished the run with about 30 minutes in raw material plus several ideas for other sketches.
So, I won’t be in a hurry to book anything else, but I’ve got a lot going on that I’m looking forward to.