Variety, Casting, Negativity

Variety, Casting, Negativity
Posted by roezone at 8:33 pm, October 6th 2010.
Another busy couple of weeks.
One Friday we performed with Music Box as part of Theatre Delicatessen's Theatre Souk - an entire abandoned office turned into a variety of performance spaces where the audience pay to see each show. Next Friday was Hoopla and The Scat Pack at The Nursery Festival - a space underneath a Southwark railway arch turned into a very stylish theatre. Both a very different way of theatre running itself and both very entrepreneurial endeavors that inspire me to try out more things, especially putting on bigger one off events and festivals. In fact I think the theatre brain and the entrepreneur brain are pretty similar - both excel at spotting gaps and patterns and then creating something out of nothing.
Fat Kitten vs Hoopla was last night, which is why this entry is short cos I'm knackered. Really really good fun, another packed and lively night and about time we worked together so glad it happened.

Also started casting for a horror coming up. Interesting way of doing it. Previously I've been trying to get shows organised by getting the actors I want and then find a date people can rehearse. This always leads to spending ages and ages trying to find the best rehearsal dates, or even worse doing rehearsals without people there. I've been getting a little frustrated that I'm not actually directing any shows at the moment. So I decided to spin it around and set the rehearsal dates instead and see who could make it. Got loads of replies and enthusiasm, which is great - writing back soon, and this way I get to spend the amount of time on a show that I want to and really do something special.
Another thing that's popped out of this new phase of Hoopla, especially with website and blog, is that apparently everyone (girlfriend and a few friends anyway) perceived me as being very lucky and on a massive wave of impro success. I found this really surprising, and wondered why they couldn't see the huge amounts of time spent in insecurity, doubt, doubt, timid behaviour and hesistancy. Then I realised I don't tell anyone about that, you generally only put organised successful things on a public website. But this also has the effect that people see you a bit different as a person. So for a while I was seriously considering adding a 'insecurity', 'doubt' and 'failures' tab to the Hoopla website to give a more balanced view. I'm also beginning to see why PR people push singers into having a drug problem to make them more 'human'. So from now on Hoopla is known to have a slight secret drug problem, and occassionally gets in fights in Soho bars. Hoopla is sorry about this though, deep down it's still a nice Hoopla, but Hoopla is still a Hoopla after all. You can read more about the dark side of Hoopla on the soon to be installed 'insecurity' tab - featuring a constant twitter feed with such things as 'no idea who is in next weeks show', 'forgot to get front of house again', 'need to put more than Elvis on my ipod', 'why the fuck am I temping you muppet' and 'don't know why I'm doing this, I did Engineering for Christ Sake'.