Upping The Tempo

Clashing with the Barnum production this week has been two football matches at the KC stadium and I knew I would miss them both. Well, that was what I thought until I realised that I would be able to make the last part of the afternoon Saturday match if the matinee performance finished in time and I cycled across town. That needed a little bit of help to achieve, but I managed it. For example, Mark and Nigel were able to up the tempo of the drumming and keyboard playing during ‘Join The Circus’ and ‘Black and White’. I even asked the stage hands to shave a couple of minutes off the interval (I even considered pushing the hands of the stage clock forward five minutes so the stage manager started five minutes early!). No need to worry though because as the matinee finished I was on my bike and across town via the bus station and the railway car park, over the footbridge and into the stadium to manage to catch the last twenty minutes.

After that I reversed the route and was back in the theatre by ten past five! A quick meal in the Clarence (massive fish and chips) before getting ready for the final performance. Rob got his plate spinning going before he came on stage tonight (his theory being he couldn’t get it up on stage) and that seemed to work fine. Nice to see a number of friends in the audience, including Luke who had journeyed down from Newcastle and made it (somehow) into the post production party. At the end of it all Neil was able to have his first drink for some time now that he was not going to be getting up on a tightrope.

And after all that it is the end of another successful production but the wheel now turns on to Hessle Theatre Company’s next production of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street.