So, this will be a subtle diversion in my plans to get all my travel blog posts up to date, but life happens! The story behind this is that, at the first day of lectures back from break, my classmate Shelley said that she had a couple extra tickets to go see a show at Downstage Theatre. Myself and another classmate, Gemma, jumped at the chance to see this show called Live at Six. Free theatre is the best kind and this show was rumored to have some audience interaction and cool technological tie-ins.
Alright, so the show was scheduled for a 6:30 curtain, but we were told that we should get there at 6 because there was a special audience participation bit in the bar. So we showed up, got our tickets and went to the theatre bar, where we picked up a program. In the program were instructions to act like we were at a big media event after party and to look for a woman in a silver dress. Anyone with a smart phone was told to snap some video of her if they could and then email it to an address provided. Well we hung out in the bar mingling and talking about what we'd heard about the show when we see the woman in silver come stumbling in. She was obviously drunk and careening around the room. There was a small camera following her, but also tons of people with smart phones out. After a minute talking with some random guy in the corner she stumbled away. About 10 minutes later, when we were wondering if she'd be back--we didn't really get a good look at her--she came stumbling back in more intoxicated than ever. She even collapsed at one point and some guy carried her out. Shortly after we were all called to enter into the theatre where we see a looped video on youtube playing of what just happened in the bar!
Now we come to the premise of the show. So the title sets it up a little bit: it's two rival news crews who are trying to spin the story of the woman in the silver dress getting drunk at this party. It's a big deal because she's a broadcaster at one of the stations, and the guy who helped her out is a reporter at the other. It's an entertaining look at the behind-the-scenes of story making. The lines are witty, with a lot of kiwi in-jokes. They split the stage area into kind of four sections: there's the two studios (splitting the stage down the center-line) and then the tech side and broadcast side (splitting the stage lengthwise). There's also two balcony areas that serve as the anchor desks of each station.
Probably the coolest part of the show was that it was all done in real time; the show was 2 hours and it played over the 2 hours. In that two hours there was a lot of back and forth about the ethics of the story, what actually happened, how they could find the videos of the events and how to patch them all together. A lot of the action of the piece was centered around this technological side of things, so two of the minor/major characters were the two techie guys who edited together the footage for the news clip. The thing was that there were the computer screens up on stage, and the guys were actually doing it. They had the footage from the real camera that followed her, but then they also put up some of the audience footage. You could tell it was legitimately from a smartphone/not by a professional because it had the typical grainy quality to the video, and it often was jumpy from her to the people around her, trying to get a better angle. My friends and I got quite excited whenever we saw ourselves appear on the screen.
Anyway, the techi-cool part of the show had to be the fact that the "tech" guys on stage put together the footage from our phones and their footage, along with the bits of voice over they recorded onstage into the 2-3min news bit by the end of the show. Everything was projected up the walls in real time, and you could watch them going on youtube, pulling clips down, checking their (character's) facebook, skyping, recording audio, and editing video. It was so cool for that aspect of reality to be incorporated into the show. It really, somehow, reinforced the suspension of disbelief and realism at the same time it broke the fourth wall. Those two were also my favorite actors out of the bunch. The main girl had a few too many tactics that she repeated, and the main guy seemed to only play his obstacles (but that I think was more a fault of the way the character was written than the actor). The techies actually had a task to do, they did it, but at the same time you could see them get distracted and make fun of the newscasters, or get distracted and go on facebook, or even play a game. They were so fun to watch!
Overall, it was a really interesting use of technology available to include the audience in the show, bridge the fourth wall while bolstering the reality of the show. Some of the acting, unconvincing to me, was made up for by just the awesomeness of the video inclusion.
Next post will be about traveling, I promise! Hope you enjoyed my diversion =)
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