“It’s the good advice, that you just didn’t take And who would’ve thought it figures?” Alanis Morrissette A year ago, my brother suggested that I make a Kindle version of my book Laund-o-mat at the End of the World. (The typo in the title is deliberate.) It’s a collection of three of my one-act…
The other day, I got an email from Amazon. They were going to be paying me my royalties for my book Laund-O-Mat at the End of The World and Other Fringe Favourites. It was published in 2014 and I was going to receive a whopping $17.95! Whoo hoo! To be honest, I didn’t think I…
It’s the day after the night before and I survived the play reading. It went better than expected. People laughed. Which is good when the play is a comedy… Even if it’s a dark comedy. The actors did a great job reading all of the excerpts! But it still felt weird. I sat in the…
Next week, Theatre Aquarius puts on its Reading Week. The artists in the various programs that Theatre Aquarius supports during the theatre season will get a chance to present an excerpt from the piece that they’ve been working on. My turn is on Wednesday (June 19). It’s always good to get your work in front…
One of the big takeaways I had from doing the Hamilton Fringe Festival last summer was that marketing is important. Really important. How do you get people to go see your show when there are 30 other shows they can see? And a thousand other reasons for them NOT to see it? And how do…
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana I originally meant to write this post a couple of weeks ago, but a Christmas cold grabbed hold of me and refused to let go. Although the cold is still lingering, I figured I better get this post done before January ended.…
The Good, the Bad, and the Mean As artists we put weeks, months and sometimes years into a project and present it to an audience. A reviewer sees it once and, depending on their skill and time pressures, writes something in a fraction of a fraction of the time we’ve spent on it. Sometimes…
The currency of a Fringe Festival is word of mouth. And reviews of shows are what get carried by word of mouth. Tom Mackan is a familiar presence in the Hamilton area theatre scene being a well known director, actor, reviewer and general encourager of Theatre. He won the Theatre Ontario Maggie Basset Award in…
When you rehearse a play, you spend weeks with the same people going over the script, learning lines and testing out blocking. It is an insular experience and after a while, it is easy to feel that you don’t have an objective view about the piece that you are working on. Something is missing… You…
The countdown is on and the campaign has begun! For the next two weeks or so, I will be living, breathing and spouting about the Hamilton Fringe and my show Mommy’s Mask. Let me apologize in advance for getting on your nerves. Advertising for your Fringe show is a delicate balance of informing and annoying…
peter gruner 