After their first crack at the digital theatre PR whip, ‘Are we doing all we can?’, theatre/twitter meet-up Twespians rounded up another panel to tackle ‘Pushing it to its limits’, supported again by the lovely folks at Mobius.

With the digital world being so important, do we need to rethink the tried and tested methods that so many still rely on today? Can we learn from what people are doing in other disciplines? Is a fundamental shift required in how we perceive audience, community and promotion?

This month’s panel included:

Chris Unitt – Head of Social Media at Made Media, editor of Made in Birmingham and board member of The Other Way Works. Also blogs over at ChrisUnitt.co.uk.

Lindsay Watson – Digital Marketing at Cameron Mackintosh. Tweets over at @lindsays_tweets.

Luke Murphy – Co-founder of Twespians and Digital PR manager at 33 Digital. Also blogs at @lurkmoophy.

Ben Matthews – Founding Director of Bright One Comms, Co-founder of Twestival and Freelance Digital PR Consultant. Also blogs over at @benrmatthews.

And chaired by the lovely Eleanor Turney – Web Editor of A Younger Theatre and freelance journalist for The Guardian, IdeasTap and The Stage.

Proudly sponsored by Mobius: Supporting dialogue within the theatre industry.
Recorded at the Old Crown Pub at 33 New Oxford St, London on 21 November 2011.

http://www.twespians.co.uk

http://www.meetup.com/Twespians/events/39035102

Hosted by Whatsonstage.com deputy editor Andrew Girvan, the latest Twespians Fringe event brings PRs and journalists together with a panel discussion on ‘Theatre PR: Are we doing all we can?’

PR has been changing as an industry at the same rate that Twitter changes trending topics recently. Is theatre PR keeping up with the moving industry? We discus the good side and bad side of current theatre PR, where we can move forward and where we need to trim the fat in an industry that Lyn Gardner refers to as ‘criminally undervalued’.

The event combined a combination of questions from Andrew, the live audience and Twitter.

The panel includes Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out’s Fringe Theatre editor and veteran recipient of the good, bad and ugly of theatre pitches; Honour Bayes, theatre editor for Fourth wall and a critic and blogger for Exeunt, Whatsonstage.com, and her own site, Theatre Workbook; Amber Massie-Blomfield, PR Director at Mobius Industries and battle scarred warrior on the front line of theatre PR; and Alexander Fleming the Senior Marketing Manager at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Proudly sponsored by Mobius: Supporting dialogue within the theatre industry.
Recorded at the Old Crown Pub at 33 New Oxford St, London on 19 September 2011.

Twespians.co.uk
Twespians Meetup
Photo credit: Twespians.co.uk and is of another Twespians event. I’ll update when I get a picture from last night.

Now that I’m a year on from graduating LIPA’s Music, Theatre and Entertainment Management degree I thought it was probably safe to publish my Management Research Paper, titled Towards defining a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Abstract

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival, an event with a 60 year history which remains three times bigger than its nearest competitor.

This paper examines a number of semi-professional companies presenting shows at the 2008 Fringe, their work competing against 2,100 other shows for the attention of audience members, press and promoters.

As an open access arts festival any show can be produced at Edinburgh under the auspices of the Fringe. The charity responsible for the co-ordination of the event, the Edinburgh Fringe Society, publish a yearly guide briefing participants on what to expect from their Edinburgh experience. Using that document and the possible outcomes from a Fringe run it proposes as a framework, this paper seeks to better understand how producers in semi-professional companies define and measure success.

The remainder of the literature review examines the unique arts marketplace that exists in Edinburgh during the Fringe, the increased competition the Fringe faces for visitors and companies from other festival cities and highlights the box office problems which marred the 2008 Fringe.

Research was undertaken through a series of interviews with the producers who presented work at C venues during the 2008 Fringe. Although each of the companies interviewed approached the Fringe in different ways, with particular contrast in dedications to commercial and artistic objectives, it has been established that there were a number of common factors in how the companies defined their success.

Through this paper’s research it was discovered that developing a piece specifically for presentation at the Fringe was of key importance. Whether committed to artistic or commercial success, it was clear that for all of the companies interviewed financial success was signified by managing to cover production costs, generation of further profits being rare.

It became clear that a successful Edinburgh Fringe for the semi-professional companies examined was one which allowed them to build relationships with audiences and promoters and take their work to the next stage of professional development such as a regional tour or a London fringe engagement.

Towards defining a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Photo credit: zoetnet on Flickr

I have used my blog to write about Glee before. Seeing the buzz the show was generating in the States I have to say I was intrigued as to whether the show would hit the mark on this side of the pond. At this point there is really no question about it, Glee is huge business. The show has rewritten music marketing and I personally believe is one of the best promotional tools musical theatre has going for it at the moment. So imagine my surprise when I heard the show would be dedicating its Halloween episode to Richard O’Brien’s 1975 cult classic, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Musical marketing genius. Here’s why:

I would almost go so far as to argue that Glee has rewritten the rule of music publishing. “The Glee Effect” has led to weeks when 25 songs on the Billboard Top 100 Charts have been songs from the show. Not only do recordings of numbers sung by the cast, released straight after that week’s broadcast for sale on iTunes, but original recordings of the songs the show has covered see huge sales.

Neil Diamond’s 1969 hit “Sweet Caroline” saw sales triple after being featured on the show. The show has also reintroduced songs back onto the playlists of iPods, clubs and radio stations a like. Song writers and music publishers have been laughing all the way to the bank. Repertoire owners have been knocking down the show’s door offering entire back catalogues for exploitation, knowing that massive sales figures will follow.

Glee also manages to walk to thin line between pop music and musical theatre with enviable skill. With Broadway faces such as Lea Michele (Spring Awakening), Matthew Morrison (Hairspray) and Idina Menzel (Wicked) to work with and piano-led arrangements to level the playing field between traditional pop numbers and those from shows, Glee manages to blur the genre edges in almost every episode. Its great to hear musical theatre numbers sung on TV every week and being watched by millions.

Don’t get me wrong, the auto-tuned to hell, vocally thin renditions do not excite me as performances, but the fact that musical theatre songs are making it on to mainstream American television and being watched by millions, without the ghettoisation which the musical genre is normally faced is something we should not be sniffing at.

Which brings me to The Rocky Horror Glee Show. For those of you counting (or perhaps just wanting to know where to “find” the show on the internet) it was broadcast as season 2, episode 5 on 26 October 2010, just five days before what is surely America’s most commercially motivated “holidays”.

In the UK theatre scene it is fashionable to have a moan about Andrew Lloyd Webber and the closeness of his relationship to the BBC. There is an argument that the reality casting shows which he has produced are little more than series-long adverts for the shows which eventually end up in the West End and then tour the country.

To be honest, its a pretty convincing argument. As well as introducing or reminding audiences of the musical that is being cast (its not as if they’re high art, you just need to make sure that housewives up and down the UK remember “Over the Rainbow” and “He Needs Me” come from a show for which you are about to try and flog thousands of tickets a week) the reality casting process also has the advantage of giving audiences buy-in to the casting process. By making audiences feel they have some ownership over the cast member they voted onto the stage you generate an incredible connection between potential ticket buyer and your chosen star.

Llord Lloyd Webber even cheated with his last reality casting round, both the winner and the first runner up will play the role of Dorothy at the Palladium in Spring 2011, you don’t even need to have voted for the loser to feel like you owe it to them to see them on stage, just make sure you book for the right Tuesday night and the whole of Wales can see their reality show cast-off of choice in the ruby slippers!

The real strength of what O’Brien has managed to do with Rocky Horror is to get it out of the musical ghetto. Ken Davenport quotes a Broadway press agent whose adage was to “get your coverage off the theatre pages of the paper”. O’Brien has had the majority of his musical reproduced by characters tweens love on a show they genuinely think is cool. He has smuggled an entire musical on to the TV screens in millions of households around the world.

Within the first five minutes of the episode the script writers had already taken the opportunity to educate viewers that the Rocky Horror experience might regularly come to a cinema near them, complete with the audience participation, singing along and costumes which made the movie famous. If this wasn’t happening in small town America, I would be genuinely shocked if there aren’t independent cinema operators now wondering if its time to welcome late night screenings back into the repertoire, the profile of Rocky Horror having been lifted amongst business as well as consumers.

It is also important to mention that the Rocky Horror Glee Show was not what most American TV has programmed to expect when parodying an established cultural product, this was nothing like a Simpsons retelling. The songs of Rocky Horror were melded around a normal Glee episode plot, the on-stage action interspersed with the school-based dramas we see week on week. Just because you have seen the Rocky Horror Glee Show does not mean that you have seen the entire musical. There is still an element of discovery there for the audience to overcome, still an element of wonder into just what the hell this Rocky Horror Picture Show thing is.

The performances that Glee gave us for Halloween were cleaned up, but it is probably naive to expect that mainstream American television would have gotten away with anything else. Jayma Mays’ rendition of “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me” was not a performance Susan Serandan would have recognised, somehow ending up with Matthew Morrison showing his bared chest whilst Jayma Mays remained fully clothed. Perhaps the television producers know their gay/female audience just a bit too well.

By having Amber Riley play Frank-N-Furter the producers also completely dodged the majority of the transexual references which lace the original piece. Glee might be filled with singing jocks, openly gay choir members and a cast pushing 30 all playing high schoolers, but apparently the idea of a man dressed in a basque, fishnets and suspenders was just a step too far for Fox this halloween.

All credit to Richard O’Brien for managing to sneak an entire musical onto television screens all across America, and indeed the world. Definitely the musical theatre marketing coup of the year in my opinion.

Photo Credit: Probably borrowed from Fox. I personally borrowed it from homorazzi.com

You might wonder why it’s all quiet on the Western Front. By Western Front I mean my blog. On 19 July 2010 I took up the job of Acting Deputy Editor at Whatsonstage.com, the UK’s biggest theatre website. I can say without doubt that the reason I got the job was because of this blog, but I admit that should not be a reason for not giving it enough attention now.

The real reason that I haven’t been updating my blog as frequently as I would like is because I am spending all day blogging at the moment, writing news stories, reviews, gossip pieces, interviews, introductions for photo galleries and video stories. On top of that I am also editing and uploading reviews, features and interviews.

Having spent all day writing I find it really difficult to write when I get home. I am also spending a lot of time at the theatre in the evenings. If you want to know what I have been seeing, have a look at the shows page of this site. The shows I have been seeing are up there, mainly in chronological order.

For a link to everything that has my byline over at Whatsonstage.com, have a look at the page listings below:

• News Stories
• Interviews
• West End and Off-West End Reviews

Photo credit: Anujraj on Flickr

You can read my five-part blog about visiting Amsterdam, created entirely using my iPhone 3 at girvgoesdutch.tumblr.com

It’s been far too long since I’ve managed to get a post up on here. The main reason for that is that I’ve recently started working for Whatsonstage.com as their Acting Deputy Editor. Its a fantastic job, and one that I would not have been able to get without the experiences that posting on this blog and interacting with all of you have brought me.

The purpose of the five blog posts which proceed this one, which you might have noticed were quite a different style of post to my normal ramblings about the state of theatre and social media, were actually part of a bigger experiment to see if I could create content on the go at the same level of quality as I can when sitting at my Macbook. All of the Amsterdam posts which I uploaded before this one were created entirely on my iPhone.

At the time I was writing the posts I was working entirely on iPhone OS 3. Since then Apple have updated the whole iPhone line including pushing the new iOS 4 to devices like the iPhone 3G I was working on. Improvements in iOS 4 include spell check and up to 5X digital zoom on the camera. Features like multitasking and video aren’t enabled on the 3G, probably a very good thing given the way that my phone slowed to a crawl on installation of iOS 4. Luckily Apple have since updated the operating system to 4.0.1, making a monumental change to the phone’s performance and everyday usability.

The major issue I had with the iPhone was the lack of physical keyboard. The blog posts were by far the longest pieces of content I have written on my phone, I normally make a point of not doing anything more strenuous than texts and short emails on my phone, normally having my Macbook in my bag for anything longer or more complicated.

The iPhone keyboard is mighty impressive, the way it manages to join the dots, compensating for the fact that the only way to type on the thing it to tap madly away at it and then watch it almost magically form words out of the mess, is outweighed only by the software’s shortcomings. Problems which I occasionally noticed whilst writing texts suddenly became major issues which really held me back when I was trying to create longer posts. The predictive text does a wonderful job of compensating for mistyped keys in almost all cases, except when you accidentally hit either the return, backspace or shift keys. The fact that what you are writing can be so thrown off by the phone adding random line breaks or capital letters can be truly frustrating.

I was uploading my content through the WordPress iPhone app. This was another weak link in the chain of content creation. I had already set up the WordPress app to work with my blog and had used it to tweak posts, mainly whilst commuting. Whilst the app might work quite well in some respects, in others I found it really confusing. When you try and hand code hyperlinked text, not an easy task on the iPhone keypad, the app does eventually pop up and offer to help you insert the link. From what I could tell there is no way whilst in the full page editing mode to tell it that you want to add a link, the only button which is obvious is the photo button, which works totally counter intuitively but eventually lets you add a photo into your post which you can copy and paste to the right point in your post.

I also had to go into a previously posted blog entry and find how to hand code the page break code to stop the entire posts showing on my blog homepage. This involved going into my blog through Safari and playing copy and paste from there, not an easy task given the particularly flaky wifi I was contending with at my Amsterdam hostel, part loading pages and taking an age to switch between editing, source and previewing views – all of which I needed access to!

The only other issues I had that I was planning on mentioning in this post was my lack of ability to edit images on the go. If I had been searching for an image editing app in the comfort of my own home I probably would have spent a few minutes on different app review sites working out how their prices and functionality compared. As it happened I went for the first app I found which said it could crop images. If I was going to blog on the go then the images I posted with my blog posts would also have to be cropped to the 16:9 ratio I’ve been using across the rest of my site. Amsterdam is an incredibly beautiful city so taking the pictures was not an issue, but getting them from the phone’s gallery into an app, after a quick search in the store I went for an app called Cropulator [iTunes link] which did the job but was no where near as easy as throwing an app into Photoshop would normally be. The resulting images were eventually cropped to 16:9 but sizing remained an issue. Actually getting the photos into the posts using the WordPress app was also an trying task.

The lack of multitasking on my current iPhone really hindered the amount of research I was able to do. Whereas my normal blog writing process might involve having a few dozen Chrome windows open, checking the names, spelling and links, it was a huge hindrance to have to exit the WordPress app, Google something quickly in Safari and then have to copy and paste the results back into WordPress, all the time waiting for apps to load, close and connect to the internet. It was a very stilted way of working and something I would not do out of choice.

All in all I managed to turn round five passible pieces of content using nothing but the phone I had in my pocket. There is a photographers saying, that the best camera to have is the one you have with you. I made a point of not taking my Macbook with me to Amsterdam because I didn’t want to have to secure it in the hostel or have it on my back as I went exploring the city. The best blogging machine I had with me at the time was my phone and that was what I used. I have to admit that I went back and did some light editing on the posts once I was back on my Macbook, knowing that they were going to exist on the site for quite a while and that people might not necessarily acknowledge they were the fruits of mobile labours.

The other thing which I did not dare to do was any kind of site maintenance. Knowing how hard it was to get onto my site through Safari and how often the free wifi I was using would drop out, I wasn’t really in a position to do anything like update plugins or take advantage of the 3.0 upgrade WordPress made available whilst I was away.

An experiment I am glad I undertook, and something I learnt a lot from, but something I wouldn’t want to repeat in a while. I’ll be clinging onto my Macbook for dear life. Thank you very much.

You can read my five-part blog about visiting Amsterdam, created entirely using my iPhone 3 at girvgoesdutch.tumblr.com

Having spotted in my Rough Guide and cycled past it on my bike tour I was determined to consume the theatrical offering of Boom Chicago, an English language comedy/improv/cabaret venue in the heart of the city’s cultural centre.

There isn’t much English theatre on offer in Amsterdam, and neither there should be, if a culture is to be represented, examined and better understood through traffic on the stage then it should be done in the mother tongue, how else is it to speak to its audience? It could be argued that Boom Chicago fits within this statement as more tourists performing to tourists. The mainly American accented cast had a Dutch speaker amongst them and made enough Dutch language and political jokes to keep locals feeling that they were in on something the rest of us weren’t, but the main comedy offering was one of universal appeal and was genuinely funny.

I wasn’t quite sure what format to expect from the company, my guidebook talking only of comedy and my ticket saying cabaret, but Boom Chicago do a fantastic job of combining both improv scenes with prescripted and well worked scenes, some of which they drop audience members into for good measure.

The show I saw on Tuesday night, Upgrade or Die, had a technology bent and as well as allowing the troupe to poke fun at the likes of Facebook and Google, it also allowed them to show off some of their increadible technical expertise.

I have seen other improv and comedy companies presenting work in their own spaces. Some of the best Theatersports I have seen were on Vancouver’s Granville Island where the company operated from their own space. Edinburgh’s Improverts also operate out of their own theatre with their midnight shows at the Bedlam Theatre but neither had taken full advantage of their surrounds as much as Boom Chicago managed. Combining their quick witted improv with short sketch films shown on a large video screen cyc, the show combined acting with live video minipulation and online trickery.

The actors regularly made trips into the audience, most tucking into the venue’s table service bar and restaraunt, and were able to draw attention on unsuspecting audience members not only with a roving mic but with a camera as well, the product of which was shown of screens across the venue.

It was this clever use of multimedia, often a taboo in anything but massive scale theatre, which lifted the show from clever and well excecuted improv theatre and sketches to one of the best live comedy shows I have the pleasure of watching. Where at other venues I have been impressed with the quality of the improv, the laughs the performers were able to draw from their crowd, or the speed at which the tamed techie was able to whisk a suitable accompanying tune from iTunes, Boom Chicago go the extra mile, improvising and getting big laughs across stage and screen, not only in English but Dutch as well. Well worth a watch.

July 24, 29, 31, August 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19

Weekdays: Dinner and seating 18:30. Show starts 20:15

Saturdays: Dinner & seating 19:15. Show starts 21:00
Tickets €20, VIP tickets €35
Add €4 for Saturday shows
www.boomchicago.nl

This is the video from my Contemporary Issues in Arts Management conference paper, Will digital innovation be the future of theatre? The paper was delivered as the penultimate module of my Music, Theatre and Entertainment Management degree at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. To find out more about the conference, as well as the abstracts of all of my classmates delivering papers, visit artsconferences.co.uk.

There were a huge variety of papers, all covering contemporary issues which interested those speaking. They covered a range of topics, including music sync fees, social media and the evolution of the live music industry. To read the abstract for my paper as well as a little bit more about the topic itself, have a read of my previous #CIAM post. You might also want to follow the #CIAM hashtag on Twitter, where a variety of links are posted reflecting the reality young performing arts managers think they will be facing upon graduation.

This is one of the first bits of video I’ve ever published, normally working on the basis that its too much like hard work to record, edit and encode. All that gets far easier when you start using tools like the Flip camera which let you transfer video via USB the same as you would your digital photos. I don’t think we’re quite there yet but as much as most of us now have massive photo collections spread around the web, I think the video revolution is probably pretty close too.

Below you will find a link to the full text of the presentation, as well as the Prezi I was presenting with. To find out more about Prezi, a web based Powerpoint alternative, check out my post about it here.

Video credit: Cinematography by Connie Brice