Performance Report 2: Sideshow

It was a cool and rainy Saturday night, April 17th, 2010. I did not think many people would come to the last performance of what I thought was a minor production by the drama team here at UTD. As my wife and I approached the Comet Theater, the line of 30 or 40 people waiting to buy tickets astounded me. After we had bought our tickets and taken our seats I took some time to take note of my surroundings. It was a moderate-sized theater, seating 290 people [Manjunath], but it was packed, save a few seats near the front right of the stage (which I will touch on later). What I came to find out from Kathryn Evans, the director of Sideshow, was that this series of Sideshow performances has set the record for the most attended performance at UTD of all time. This being their sixth performance, I supposed the place must have been filled every other time (still, those front few seats were somewhat disquieting).
Before Sideshow began, I noticed the orchestra seated behind the stage, which I found unusual, since orchestras are usually seated in front and below the stage for musicals or operas. But in this performance, which was probably due to the limited size of the venue, they sat behind the stage, still visible throughout most of the musical.
As the performance started, around 8:30 pm, the stage was set with boxes of various sizes and a raised kiosk. The first musical number, which was a reoccurring theme throughout the musical, was “Say Hello to the Freaks.” A dramatic song, that serves to both introduce many of the primary characters in Sideshow, and also the setting of it. One of the characters, the Cannibal King, played by Brian Thomson, was dressed as a savage, and during his introduction in the song, he ran (on all fours) and leapt off the stage, over those few absent seats and circled back around onto the stage. A slight gasp went through the crowd, and I could see evident surprise on some of the girls seated near those vacant seats. “So I guess it was sold out,” I thought to myself, knowing now those seats were reserved for this stunt.
During many of the musical pieces, I noticed two somewhat unfortunate and distracting things. First, many of the minor performers’ voices could not reach the pitch required for their parts, and were forced to either go falsetto, or simply hit a flat note. All of the main characters (except maybe the freak-show owner) could adequately sing all their required pitches. The other feature that subtracted from this performance was the variance of volume between major and minor characters’ microphones. Many minor characters were at somewhere around half the volume of the protagonists in terms of amplification. This could have been due to the elaborate costumes and where the microphones must be located in order to suit the minor characters, while the primary performers had microphones attached to their heads. [Manjunath] In any case, it was very obvious at some points.
One thing should be clarified when I say “musical pieces.” Because this was a musical performance, almost everything was sung, even if it was not directly in a song. For example, during one dialogue, one character simply sung the word “how?” suspended over a single note for about a second, even though it did not follow any particular melodic pattern in a “song.”
Overall, the performance was put together with an air of precision, clearly seen to the audience that this was not simply thrown together, but was the product of much hard work and effort. Audience turn-outs reflected this, setting the record for attendance. The performers showed great enthusiasm and energy during their performances, which the audience responded well to (especially in the case of the Cannibal King).




Manjunath, Lakshman. Phone Interview, 4/22/2010. 2:00 pm.