Show of the Living Dead!

Oh my freakin' God!

I just got done with the worst performance of The Front Page... ever!

It's not that we in the cast did anything wrong (though, to be fair, we weren't picking up our cues as quickly as we should have been in the first act). It was just a night that conspired against us. Props malfunctioned. The heat up on the stage was sweltering (we turned the air conditioner down in the theatre this week because the audience was getting too cold). And worst of all... the audience gave us nothing back. No laughs, no reactions, nothing.

People who aren't on my side of the curtain don't necessarily understand how important it is for the actors in a show to hear and feel the audience's feedback. David Millstone, who plays the Mayor, put it best tonight in the green room: If this show was a body, the laughs would be the bones. If the laughs aren't there, the show just sits there in a sloppy pile, unable to do anything except twitch.

That's the way tonight's show went. After an admittedly "loose" first act, we all resolved to tighten things up and make the second act clip along.

Nothin' from the audience.

By the time the third act came along, we were racing to the end, just hoping that the crowd would find something funny. We got a chuckle here and there, but overall it was silence until the final line... and then the audience bust out laughing and roared with applause.

Turns out (I heard this from some people who spoke to friends in the lobby) the audience was having a great time... they just weren't vocal. Go figure. A hard night, to be sure.

Ah well... time to put some hurt on the bad guys in Paragon City. 'Night all...

- Harold