Audience Experience

This is a show from the 1960's, full of youth and culture and fun.  Built to be full of delights, to be commercially viable for kids and teenage girls.  Good music that can stand on its own, and an assemblage of character actors who can act the pants of of the 4 main costars. The boys are young and handsome, innocent and charming, attractive in their own way.  Blank slates that we all can put our minds into.  You want to kiss them or be them, or maybe both. But the references inside of each episode are countless, and I enjoy trying to count them all. It is the ideal medium for a Lesson plan of what America was in the 1960's, or what we thought we were, or what we wanted to be.  There are enough names and old-fashioned props to fill an encyclopedia.  Their pad is similar to the internet, packed full of random goodies that you can stumble over.  Mid Century Thrift Store. It is an easy way to digest history.  It looks like candy, but is actu...

Much like the stages of grief, a presentation (education, theater, software, ppt, book, etc) goes through the following phases: 1. The initial idea in its purest form 2. The exploration of the idea into a script, set series of words, images, etc 3. The actual presentation, successful or not successful method of conveying the dead words on a page and turning them into something that is comprehensible 4. What the presenter remembers as mistakes or things to change or improve 5. What the audience takes in from minute to minute BONUS: What both the audience and the presenter believe happened when looking back, the next day or the day after or years later

A GREAT play which caters to a VERY small segment of the NYC Indie Theater crowd.  Everyone who was there between 1997 and now. Or then. It's about the man (a culmination of his life's story) and why he became a critic. Now, we can't ALL go to everyone's shows, no matter how much we want to.  I made a point to go, and I was in town.  A good crowd, 30-40, but not a sell out. It left me wondering, what do these playwrights do?  All these artists?  Going from show to show. How do you build a career of moments?  Little by little, and then when you come to the end, you find a lot more to hang on for.

Any performance/presentation can be broken down by POV & MicroAttitudes: 1) What you intend to convey 2)The WORDS, text, images, events that literally get presented 3)The Microattitudes that underlie every moment, including intonations, jokes, facial expressions, etc 4) The interaction between the presenter & audience which evolves the performance 5)What the audience perceives moment to moment 6) What the audience actually REMEMBERS at the end of the night 7) What the audience members take away & REMEMBER about the night going forward into the future The MicroAttitudes are probably the biggest takeaway of all of the above.

If you were actively trying to confuse the medical community, you couldn't do much better than this!

In a city as crowded as NYC, finding a hidden quiet space is like gold. Here are a few I've found that make my life better. Grand Central's Biltmore Room has the old Track Announcement Board, in CHAULK!! On the other side of town, the Senior Engineer, Joe Kinney shows off the old electrical system of the New Yorker Hotel.  There is a secret (closed) tunnel to the subway under 34th street, which is decorated by lovely Aztec inspired tiles. You can find out the other secrets here!!  http://untappedcities.com/2016/09/13/the-top-10-secrets-of-the-new-yorker-hotel/

Freakonomics did a segment about "Sleep No More" and psychological manipulation of people/audiences, There is a long history in psychology of manipulating people/subjects. The Milgrim torture experiment. The Stanford prison experiment. Getting people to torture others. All of it is a bit of theater. A secondary consideration has only been about the researcher's specific manipulation in order to get spectacular results. Allowing the subjects in "control" to ham it up.