Today, Glyn and I visited a museum in
London where we’re likely to be hosting a one-off Mostly Comedy in June (as if
we don’t enough Mostly Comedys to contend with in the near future).
When you’re approached to run a club by a
venue that doesn’t usually stage theatrical events you can never be quite sure
if they’ve considered fully how you need a focused space. This was even a
problem at one of Mostly’s past long-term homes; this particular venue was
managed by two people, one of whom was 100% onboard with our requirements,
while I suspect the other had pictured it more like a musical open mic night
with someone strumming away on a guitar in the corner while the audience drank
and chatted away. That kind of set-up is bad enough when you’re playing music -
I’ve done enough gigs like that myself, believe me - but it's disastrous for
comedy, which requires complete attention to work; you can’t build a story with
people coming and going, both literally and in terms of concentration.
Thankfully we were unlikely to have too
much to be concerned about today, as the person who had contacted us about it had
been to a couple of our previous dates, plus the museum is hoping to stage
more of these types of events in future, to bring in a wider and more varied clientele. The
type of museum could very easily have led to us being lost at one end of
a cavernous space (all will become clear when I reveal where it is) but it
turns out the room in question is a reasonable size with good
acoustics, with a capacity very similar tothe ballroom at the Sun Hotel.
The person we met today wasn’t the woman I'd met with previously as she was off-sick, but knew enough
about what we do to not be thrown by it, plus she seemed more than happy with
our requirements. We just need the budget to be signed off now to go
ahead. It should be a nice addition to our already impressive
forthcoming run of dates. If it works, we may even wind up putting a few more dates there in the diary in future; we shall see, we shall see...