what makes a good variety show
This past Wednesday and Saturday, I performed in two variety shows. The difference between them has really made clear what differentiates a good variety show from a suboptimal one.
Firstly, one wants to have a theme, or some kind of coherent set of standards for booking the show. One should not book a combination of, say, comedians and Serious Opera Singers. When you put a Serious Opera Singer on the stage right after a comedian, everyone is waiting for a punchline. Like, they're waiting for the opera singer to start off singing opera, but then the music would change and she would rap or do a striptease or sing really funny lyrics in an operatic singing style.
Secondly, performers who perform funny songs should not make the song last longer than the joke. Dark Show performer Adira Amram is a master of the one-minute funny song. If the entire song is "I wanna have your baby, and it's gonna be ugly," then she'll just do a forty-five second song and then move on. If the entire song is one joke, it does not need a traditional repeat-the-chorus-five-times structure, just the same as how a non-musical comedian wouldn't tell the same joke five times.
The show I did on Saturday featured not one but two Serious Opera Singers. One was Totally Serious and accompanied by a Serious Art Guitarist who basically raped an acoustic guitar on stage while Emoting in a Dark and Serious Manner, punctuated by Dramatic Silences. The other opera singer, however, knew what was up -- she did a traditional opera piece, but she was wearing really ridiculous glasses (big plastic joke ones with fake cartoon eyes painted on them) and singing over a background tape of, um, sex noises. It went on rather too long, but, for an opera singer in a variety show, it was very well-adapted.
For me, the found gem of Saturday's show was Thaddeus Rutkowski, a spoken word artist who did two pieces, one about his fetish for women in bathing caps (their latex-wrapped heads drive me mad!), and one from the perspective of a man who steals other people's socks from the dryer, defiles them (I'll leave it to your imagination, but he referred to his "argyle destoyer"), and returns them to the dryer.
Firstly, one wants to have a theme, or some kind of coherent set of standards for booking the show. One should not book a combination of, say, comedians and Serious Opera Singers. When you put a Serious Opera Singer on the stage right after a comedian, everyone is waiting for a punchline. Like, they're waiting for the opera singer to start off singing opera, but then the music would change and she would rap or do a striptease or sing really funny lyrics in an operatic singing style.
Secondly, performers who perform funny songs should not make the song last longer than the joke. Dark Show performer Adira Amram is a master of the one-minute funny song. If the entire song is "I wanna have your baby, and it's gonna be ugly," then she'll just do a forty-five second song and then move on. If the entire song is one joke, it does not need a traditional repeat-the-chorus-five-times structure, just the same as how a non-musical comedian wouldn't tell the same joke five times.
The show I did on Saturday featured not one but two Serious Opera Singers. One was Totally Serious and accompanied by a Serious Art Guitarist who basically raped an acoustic guitar on stage while Emoting in a Dark and Serious Manner, punctuated by Dramatic Silences. The other opera singer, however, knew what was up -- she did a traditional opera piece, but she was wearing really ridiculous glasses (big plastic joke ones with fake cartoon eyes painted on them) and singing over a background tape of, um, sex noises. It went on rather too long, but, for an opera singer in a variety show, it was very well-adapted.
For me, the found gem of Saturday's show was Thaddeus Rutkowski, a spoken word artist who did two pieces, one about his fetish for women in bathing caps (their latex-wrapped heads drive me mad!), and one from the perspective of a man who steals other people's socks from the dryer, defiles them (I'll leave it to your imagination, but he referred to his "argyle destoyer"), and returns them to the dryer.
posted by JenIsFamous at 3/07/2005 01:34:00 PM
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