"How Did The Show Come Out?"

There is so much going on right now...so many creative projects but that's the New Year isn't it?

So to complete the last big project before trying on the next one. I want to write what I learned and what I wish I had done on my annual theatre show.

In the end, I sold 174 tickets out of a possible 196. I gave none away, which is terribly unique for me. I have a tendency to not believe I'm worth money, so I start downplaying my worth. In translation, I beg people to come to my shows.

This is year I priced my tickets at $19. I think children's shows sell for under $10. So I priced it so that I could sell half price tickets all over.

Luckily, I live in a large city and there are agencies that do this. A major company called Goldstar sold nearly half my tickets. That made life very easy for me. I generally need about 10 or 12 in an audience for the comedy point I'm looking for, that is, where people are not self conscience to laugh out-loud.

I also listed my show everywhere and I mean everywhere I could find. This takes a lot of time. Usually it means signing up for a site, filling in the categories and submitting. This can take 10 minutes to 30 minutes per site. It's good for me in the long run because my clown name will come up much higher when people search. So good for my wallet, hopefully.

I also built on my shows from previous years and looked at my show that I do 250 times a year. My regular show is not designed for a theatre, so it takes work to adapt it. And what I found this year, it takes a lot of trial and error. Doing a theatre show, you don't have the fallback of things like balloon animals when my show is not killing. As much as I can make people laugh, there are times, nothing works. That's life on the edge.

In a theatre, you must have a connecting theme. This is something to keep working on for myself, I tend to jump from one routine to the next. Having done some stand up comedy this is the transition part of an act. When George Carlin talks about an escalator handrail going slightly faster than the stairs and then goes into the department store routine, this is seamless. It's the hard part of any comedy show.

And blessings be upon my son Dustin. I tend to ignore things lights and sound, they are a total pain to me. He pushed it and created a lighting design and a sound design. He's 14 and he just created this stuff because he's smarter than me. But as he said to me, that's what makes it a theatre show...

This year's theatrical show was big for me, I succeeded in getting over some big humps. I was able to get a large audience. I built on older routines that worked and wrote them in a way that would work in a theatre. I got over myself and let my son push me to create lights and sound. I found a nice price point for people to come to a theatre.

It's a lot of work, I can see why people don't do this all that much. I ended up making some money, which is cool. But I now know how to make a theatrical clown show. I've rented theaters probably 10 or more times. That represents maybe up to 100 theatre performances and it's taken me this long to get it.

You never stop learning.