Listening to the audience

Previews give you the last piece of the puzzle when working on a new show. That last piece is the audience. The Boy Detective Fails is a unique show. I'm not sure I've ever seen a musical like it. It has wild shifts in tone. Not one of its characters can be remotely described as typical. The two romantic leads don't exist in the realm of leading man or ingenue. Hell, he's a medicated, obsessive compulsive, former child detective, and she's a kleptomaniac who doesn't like to talk to other human beings. They're as heartbreaking as they are funny. Doing an innovative show presents problems when sussing out the audience. If it's something new, they might not necessarily "get" the show and you have to sort of endure part of the audience not going along for the ride. Now Boy Detective to me is a pretty accessible show. This is not a show where you know from the minute you start rehearsals that some people are just really not going to like. So early previews have been interesting. The audience seemed to totally be with us in the 15 minute opening when we are introduced to the world of the play and flashback to see Billy Argo's history as a boy detective. The lead character's sister commits suicide at the end of the sequence, and we find out that Billy tries to kill himself and is institutionalized and then released after a 10 year stay and put in a half way house.  The next song Caroline is a beautiful one showing Billy remembering his sister and steeling himself to solve the heartbreaking mystery of why his sister took her life . We are then introduced to Billy's childhood arch nemesis Professor Von Golum who has been put in the same halfway house with Billy.

His first number is a real old school musical theater number-- -very funny. Well it has not been landing. The first change we made to address the problem: we changed his costume. Up to that point Von Golum was dressed in white silk pajamas. It is the way he is described in Joe Meno's novel. Kathleen Geldard and I met after a preview and I said "I want to try changing the costume. Let's try him in regular pajamas and robe." She totally agreed with me. After a quick costume fitting Tom Simpson who played Von Golum went on in the new costume and the response to him was VERY different. They seemed to be much more open to the character. In the white silk I think he seemed too "other" to lofty. The new costume brought the character down to earth. That little change helped tremendously. And still the number wasn't quite landing as well as it needed and deserved to. I mean Adam Gwon write a kick as number and we had to figure out a way to give it a kick as response. Well, we listened to the audience. You couldn't not listen to them. That number relied on the audience. It's a conversation back and forth between the show itself and the audience-- they tell you if they like it. And since that song's success relied on the audience going along for the ride and enjoying it, we knew something we were doing wasn't resonating. Again, they were with us for 25 minutes. In the Von Golum introduction scene we discover whey he has been put in this halfway house. He tells us that he has always had an problem with understanding women and so in order to figure out how they work, he decides to "open one up." Now yes, this is a horrifying, sick, revelation. Joe's book has some very dark humor in it. Interestingly during the workshop two years earlier, that moment stopped the show... with laughter! But you could hear it in the preview audiences. I was sitting there in the middle of them. Some would laugh out loud-- getting the dark humor. Some would laugh but very uncomfortably. Some would look at the person next to them in shock. And some were clearly angry at this revelation.  After a few previews we discovered that the audience had not recovered from Caroline's suicide. In the staging she slits her wrists and blood streams down her arms. It was too much to ask the audience for laughter at such a revelation about Von Golum. Well, Joe rewrote the line and at the next performance the number played like gang busters. So.. listen to the audience!