I just finished the first show that closed early in my not-so-notable theatrical career. Nunsense A-Men! turned out to be a 4-week run instead of a 6-week run. A shame, too, because I think the cast really began to jell right at the time that we had to shut it down. Lessons learned from the show:

I need to take singing lessons. I got lulled into a false sense of security when I did my first musical, the Tom Lehrer revue Tomfoolery, because 99.8% of it was composed of melodies (with a trace amount of harmony in a couple of songs). My second musical, Little Mary Sunshine, was a bit of struggle, and I couldn't get the harmonies, but I was able to mask my weaknesses a bit being one of five or six forest rangers. In Nunsense, even though the harmonies weren't overly complicated, I still had monumental challenges. Most of the cast of five were talented musical veterans, and to lag behind like I did was maddening for me and probably tedious for them. There's not much of a learning curve when you have about five weeks to get a show on its feet. I felt like I had a car wreck at the intersection of Expectations and Limitations. I got much better during the run, but still not all that great. I need to get more experience and training so that I can pick up harmonies easier.

Do not, under any circumstances, open a show on Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco. If people are in downtown S.F. that weekend, they're not interested in seeing a show indoors. They want to frolic and cruise and soak up the sun and watch the parade and check out all the free entertainment in the streets. Opening weekend houses were anemic, even if there were only 50 seats in the theatre. The second week was July 4 weekend, and houses were just as small. By the end of the run, we had one sold-out show (second to last performance) and maybe 2 or 3 other dates where we were at least half full. Momentum really couldn't be built at the beginning.

Publicity is essential. Having a dedicated publicity person is paramount. Relying almost exclusively on word of mouth is not advisable. We were in the theatre listings in the S.F. Chronicle, and we also had a small ad space there, but we weren't listed in either of the free weeklies (the Bay Guardian or the Weekly). The only media coverage was in the Bay Area Reporter, a GLBT weekly. The cast contacted friends and family, and that drove a good deal of the ticket sales, but still that's a finite universe for a small cast. By the time the show could perhaps generate some word of mouth, it died on the vine. Lots of avenues weren't explored because of time constraints due to day jobs and the like. In many ways, doing the work is its own reward, but doing the work in a near-vacuum can be like a slow death. So it goes.

I've also really been hating my day job for the last month or two. I'm coming up on four years of employment there, and this is the most pissed off I think I've been. The working conditions, the compensation and the people I work with aren't the reasons. The organization and process have gotten extremely slipshod because of insane deadlines foisted on us from up top. Some suit gets a hair up their ass to get something put together, and all the benchmarks for quality work get subverted and imploded in the name of expedience and penny-wise-pound-foolish revenue speculation. And the people in my department are the ones who have to bear the burdens. There's something to be said for flexibility in a company and its production, but we're not asked to be flexible; instead, we get edicts and then fire-drill work gets dumped on us until our backs break. It's ridiculous. And from the increased numbers of longtime coworkers who've been leaving lately, I can see it's biting the company in the ass a bit.

That being said, I don't think I'll be job hunting for a while - I'd rather not, anyway. I'm going to have faith that things will become more reasonable soon. In the meantime, G and I will be road-tripping up to Oregon in a couple of weeks, and then when I come back, I'll be apartment hunting in earnest. I need this time off. Badly.

Ken Jennings is the man. I jumped on the bandwagon late, since most evenings I've been elsewhere while Jeopardy! was on and I didn't bother to tape the show. I fought for dear life to bring home $2100 (pre-tax) out of Ben Stein's till on basic cable. Ken Jennings has been automatic on the buzzer, unbelievably smart and also a very intuitive guesser. Thirty days, $1M and counting. Every episode I've seen with him, it hasn't even been close. I think it's great that he was able to be on this year, when they lifted the 5-day limit on champions. I keep saying I'm going to try out for Jeopardy!... but I think I'll wait a while.