Back to previews

Yesterday I did the my preview after Brighton. It was for a group of people called Italian Meetup, mostly made of Italians in London and people who want to practise Italian, so I knew it was a particularly suitable audience. Script-wise I had decided to remove all the part when I pretend to be a comedian who pretends to be me, I like the idea but it didn't really work, while of course I added more parts since my target this was 50 minutes. At the end I did 45 minutes after forgetting to do a 10 minutes bit. Considering that I have at least 5 minutes of cuts to do I'm pretty much on target. There were some moments, however, when some weak bits were met by silence and confusion, hence the cuts. But generally speaking I'm satisfied. The links seem to hold much better, the show looks more like a show and less like a patchwork of routines and this is helped a lot by the fact that there are more callbacks. The theme is simpler and much better introduced by a new opening, even if there are still some moments when it carries too much weight. Now the next preview will be in Manchester and it will probably be in front of a less forgiving audience. At this stage, however, what I needed was mainly encouragement and I got plenty of it. There is still work to do but I'm now looking forward to the next previews and of course to the "real thing".