Fab gig Monday night in Nottingham at Stuff - The Student Theatre Fringe Festival.
The Socks have actually had three bonus preview shows of Eurovision Sock Contest that we didn’t even publicise ourselves and have all been sellouts and great gigs: Otley last Monday, Neath on Saturday, and Nottingham on Monday. The show’s really shaping up, and should be even brighter and shinier in time for the advertised show at Ludlow Fringe this Sunday.
Otley was organised by Roger Poulter, and I'd managed to schedule the night before a day of classes in Leeds. The big surprise for me was finding that the venue, a cafe in the village centre, is run by Tony Wright, former lead singer with Terrorvision, who I recognised instantly. There were two Edinburgh previews on the night, the first being Alex Leam's highly enjoyable Joy Of Decks, all about his time as a mobile DJ. Then the Socks gave them Eurovision.
The big success of this preview run has been that audiences are getting Eurovision who've never seen the Socks before, and taking to it well from the start. I'm not having to throw in old favourites or fall-back material. And, unlike the over-complicated multi-charactered storylines of Roll Up and Superheroes (with their various Nicole Kidman, Killer Clown, and Racist Brother characters to keep track of), the audiences aren't haven't to wrestle with anything hard to follow. It's just a string of new funny songs, linked with sketches. We should keep it this simple more often.
One takeaway from Otley was an observation by an audience member afterwards that Deep C Diva and Ignore The Song might come away as transphobic. I hadn't even considered that, but as a result I have subsequently edited the song and the material before it, to make sure it wasn't being misinterpreted.
Saturday night in the Neath suburb of Cimla was another surprise one, this time organised by Paul James, and populated entirely by the locals from the estate for whom this is essentially their social club. A community-supported wine-bar style pub in a shop unit, everyone knew each other, and I was worried, during the excellent support set by The Great Baldini, that they might not warm to the Socks slightly less populist style. So I had crowd-pleasing routines, inc Magic and Michael Jackson, all ready to go in case. It wasn't needed, and they warmed instantly to the Eurovision Sock Contest format.
The improv song, where the punters choose a country that we're not otherwise doing in the show, is an interesting variable every night. In Cimla they chose Wales, and the subject matter was a local story about a woman called The Cimla Gusher, from which the Socks got great laughs, to the tune of Max Boyce's Hymns & Arias. The winner of the Sock Contest, in both Otley and Neath (and so far most times) was the UK's Fine Fare singing Stick Your Brexit Up Your Arse.
Between Neath and Nottingham's Stuff Festival I was able to do some writing and editing. Most significantly a whole verse was removed from Ignore The Song, and a lot of the gag material tightened up. When it came to performing, the student audience was amazing. No one had seen us before, they warmed to us instantly, and were full of laughs throughout. The improv song was China singing about spaghetti and toilet paper, and most noticeably the vote at the end gave us a tie between France and Germany. France is routinely the least popular song, opening the show as it does, so that was a very pleasing result, helped by my changing the material beforehand to make it more audience-facing. Mind you, I'd done the same with Deep C Diva, the penultimate number, and she got fewer votes than ever, so what do I know?
You can catch the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's brand new hour-long musical comedy extravaganza The Eurovision Sock Contest live on stage in a series of previews, in the run up to their return to the Edinburgh Fringe in August.
See them now at:
June 18 7pm - Ludlow Fringe
June 23 - Grassington Festival
Sun July 3 6.15pm - Derby Bar One
Fri July 15 7pm - Beverley Puppet Fest
Sun July 17 3.25pm - Sheffield New Barrack Tavern
Sat July 23 - Bedford Fringe
No comments:
Post a Comment