Joshua Zamrycki's Weblog

Sunday morning. It's cold and wet and windy and I'm stuck sitting under an air conditioner at this internet cafe - pretty much par for the course here in gloomy old Edinburgh. In contrast, the Festival has been totally amazing and bright. I've seen some wonderful shows and met some equally wonderful people. But I'm now ready to head home. It's been a long and arduous month. We're all tired and ready for a siesta under Barcelona's warm sunny skies. Soon... We fly home on Wednesday. But there are still two days left in this bohemouth of an arts festival. Today and tomorrow. That not only means that we have two more shows to perform, but it means that I only have two more days to see as many other shows as humanly possible.

This month, I have already seen 55 shows! More than anyone else I know. I figure: if I'm gonna lose the equivalent of a small family fortune here, I may as well make the most of it. So today I'll try and see another four shows and then another three or four tomorrow. Then I'll be ready to die a happy man. I've decided not to write reviews for all of the shows I've seen, but I'll probably do a round-up of the best and worst of the Fringe. Probably from the comfort of my own home next week sometime.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Two days ago, Jan and I celebrated our one month anniversary. That's right: we've been married for over a month! To celebrate, we saw a couple shows and then went to an Italian restaurant where we drank a lovely bottle of Lambrusco (a Clayton-Zamrycki favorite).

On a related note: 'Thank You' notes should be started, completed and mailed out in the next couple weeks. Sorry for the Festival delay.

In other related news: I'm finally getting used to wearing this ring.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After one of our performances last week, a reviewer who had been in the audience invited us to take part in the Pick Of The Fringe - a showcase for the best shows being presented in the Fringe Festival. So today we performed an excerpt from our show and were interviewed in front of a 300 person audience. True, most of the people in the audience were over 50, but we've come to discover that this is one of our target audiences. Very good publicity and it will hopefully result in some more ticket sales.

After the Pick Of The Fringe, we had our daily performance at 3:15 to one of our most wonderful audiences yet. It wasn't the biggest audience of our run, but they swallowed every joke - hook, line and sinker. A very good feeling.

And in case you haven't read the review of our show from ThreeWeeks yet, here it is:

Everything about this radio play was done perfectly: it was well-written with talented actors and an on-stage MP3 player for sound effects. The softness of the leading lady’s vocals lured me into the story, while the on-stage energy of three many-voiced men was a visual treat in itself. Although it was mainly an aural performance, visual tools such as headscarves, guns and white breaches added extra dimensions. The jokes made me laugh out loud (rather embarrassingly) while the peculiar story holds you in, never dropping a beat. Told largely from the perspective of the ships parrot, this is absolutely charming and beautifully played. A must see.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's 9pm and I am officially on holiday for the next day and a half! Woo-hoo!!

Tomorrow is Fringe Sunday and the overwhelming majority of Festival shows take the day off to perform outdoors down at The Meadows so the world at large can see what they have been missing. We're gonna miss this one. After totally humiliating ourselves trying to perform a part of the show on the Royal Mile while people walked by without even glancing at us, we determined that justice cannot be done to our show in an outdoor "look at me!" setting. So we're gonna kick back and take the day off. Lord knows we need it.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The festival is progressing and all is mad. Huzzah. Someone told me that the average Fringe audience is comprised of nine people. I don't find this very surprising considering that there are over 1,500 shows on. I have been keeping track of our audience totals and will be releasing the results in line-graph format when the month is over. All I can say is that there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to why some show are selling out while others sell zero tickets for a given night. Our house sales have varied from five people on our opening day to the record 40 people that showed up for today's show. We were named a 'Pick Of The Fringe' and got a glowing review from ThreeWeeks (www.threeweeks.co.uk) and we're hoping this will thrust our ticket sales into high gear. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I'm battling a nasty cold/sinus infection. Performing everyday while handing out flyers to the entire city in this miserable weather for the entire month really takes its toll. I'm still planning on writing up some reviews for some of the shows I've seen (I've been averaging about two shows a day), but I have been convinced to only write about the good ones. Who knows, maybe I won't even get around to it at all. If this head cold keeps up, I'll probably spend more time in this internet cafe than chasing down new shows to see. Off I go!

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow, I guess I'm married now. That was weird.

Don't get me wrong - our wedding day (July 24) was probably the most beautiful and special day of my life. I can't imagine anything that would have made it even better than it actually was. But it all still feels like a dream. Jan just wrote an email to a bunch of friends and signed it 'Jan & Josh (my new husband)'. That made us both look at each other, absorb what she had just written for three quarters of a second, and then laugh. We're no different now than we were before, but we honestly haven't had time for the magic to sink in. Just six days after the wedding, we flew off to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival and that is where we are now.

The last week has been a non-stop rollercoaster of mental and physical hurdles with new adventures, people, and challenges around every corner. We're all plum tuckered out.

I'd love to write an in-depth recap of the wedding, but without pictures, I don't think I can do it justice. You'll just have to wait until we get home in September for the blow by blow. So if you have any photos of the Big Day, please send them on to us - we never get tired of looking at ourselves. In the meantime, I'm going to try and write reviews of all of the shows that I've seen here at the festival. Jan thinks that I should wait until the festival is over in case I write an unfavorable review and some other company stumbles upon my blog and decides to seek vengance. I'm not that concerned. So get ready for the best and the worst of the Festival Fringe... coming soon to this blog!

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)