New York Fringe Festival...I'm all spermed out...

Hello all, this will be my final blog entry for my internship Spermalot: The Musical. It has been a decently long road this summer, full of new experiences, new friends, new contacts, some ups and downs, and great experiences all together. New York was a great experience all around. Two hundred and one shows were chosen to perform at the New York Fringe Festival this year, so it was quite an honor for us to perform there. One of the downers to the trip was that our show was somewhat of an underdog in the festival. It is always easy to get the word out about your show when the festival is local for your production. So basically, it was kind of hard to get word out and around about our show. We did as much as we could, what with handing out flyers and verbally intriguing local New York residents.

There was one thing that got me a little confused during this festival. I kind of went into this festival blind folded, not knowing what to expect and thinking that since it was New York that most of the shows would be amazingly done. Ironically there were multiple shows that were either horribly written, the acting was not up to par, or a combination of both. One show (I'll be nice and not give the title) was basically a softcore porn; i.e. they they had full frontal nudity, softcore sex scenes, etc. Hell, they even put plastic on the floor at one point in the play, spread baby oil all around, and then asked if any audience members would care to come up on stage and join them. The catch was that any audience member who decided to take a part in this had to be fully nude, just as they were (you can't make this stuff up folks). Sadly no audience members joined them, at least during the show I saw. Now this may sound fun to some, but the show was basically like a train wreck in the fact of it was so bad you couldn't look away. Now I'm telling you all this because this particular show had multiple sold out performances. So hey, I guess sex really does sell. The group I was with were not the only ones with this opinion, considering more than half the audience left at intermission.

Something else that was kind of off was the fact that for most of our performances there always seemed to be someone in the audience taking notes. Now this is very normal because most of the time the people taking notes would usually go home and write a review of your play/musical saying whether or not they enjoyed it. The thing was that we ended up only getting one or two reviews and they were towards the end of our time in New York. Oh well i guess.

There were six of us that ended up staying in the Brooklyn/Bronx area for the week. Unfortunately the venue we performed at was over in the Manhattan area which ended up being something like a little less than an hour to get there using the subway. This was our main source of transportation throughout the entire week. We had two SUV's, but please believe me when I say that you never want to get into rush hour traffic in New York. It seems as though, overall, New York is basically one gigantic tourist attraction. One must keep this in mind if ever thinking of moving to such a place.

I really enjoyed the overall New York experience because it help me realize what it would feel like if I ever decided to move out to there to pursue any dreams I may or may not have. In conclusion, I would say that I had a pretty wonderful summer doing this show. Starting off my first fringe festival experience in Minnesota and ending in New York was great. I had a few doubts after getting a part in the musical because it was actually my first musical that I had ever been apart of. I am glad to say I was apart of it. Thank you Comedy Co-Operative and Theatre...for a Change for allowing me to be apart of this production. I have nothing but helpful experiences and great memories to take out of this internship.