Gracing the Stage(s) (UPDATED with photo links!)
(Photographer Skye Regan, who’s been doing a terrific job documenting Impromptu Splendor through her camera lens, has uploaded a treasure trove of pictures of the GTS launch show’s performers to her Flicker account. You can view Skye’s photos of the launch party shows, and more, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyesthelimit/ . Saturday night was also captured on camera by Albert Lee, who will hopefully have his pictures available just as soon as he gets his website up and running. Enjoy! – Steve)
What a weekend it was. 2 nights, 2 venues, 24 acts (including hosts Iron Cobra and The Flirts), more than 8 hours of entertainment, minus two 20 minute intermissions, and a lot of very impressed audience members, many of whom left talking excitedly about acts they’d not known before these shows.
Julie Tepperman played anxious bride Rachel in Convergence's Theatre's side-splitting excerpt from their play "Yichud/Seclusion", Friday night at Bread and Circus (this and all subsequent photos in this post are by Skye Regan).
Both nights had two things in common:
- it seemed like every third person in the doors of the venues exclaimed “this place is great! Why haven’t I been here before?” So, between that and the great advance press the shows got, my tertiary goal of promoting the venues certainly seems to have been accomplished;
- The shows couldn’t have gone any better on stage, save for going a little long both nights (the shows both started around 9:20pm and wrapped up around 1:30am), and for an occasionally hair-raising mic at Night 1.
Maylee judges a "fierce" competition of pose-offs during the Sweatshop Hop, Saturday at Comedy Bar.
Night One at Bread and Circus had a respectable audience turnout, and a great media and VIP turnout; in the audience were 3 staff writers from Torontoist, 2 from Blog T.O., reps from Plank Magazine, the Toronto Music Blog Collective, and Stillepost, and at least three music promoters. I was a bit of a stress case, worrying about off-stage issues, but it all worked out, off stage and on, chiefly due to the efforts of my volunteer coordinator Deborah Robinson and her crew behind the scenes, and on stage courtesy of stage technician Gordon Peck and his right hand man Craig Pickthorne (asking Deb and Gord for help with the shows was by far the smartest thing I did, logistically).
If Friday was a little touch and go at times (though that never showed on stage), Saturday’s Night Two at Comedy Bar went as smooth as silk. There’d been considerably more advance tickets sold for Saturday’s show, and the crowd turned up despite a pretty intense snowstorm. I was relaxed enough to get up there in my shirt and tie and do some ridiculously fun aerobics moves with headliners The Sweatshop Hop, and there were still enough people at Comedy Bar after 1am that the afterparty with The Bob Kerr Singers had an appreciative audience ( birthday boy Bob’s guests were Hawkmail, Adam Christie, Megan Fraser, and Levi Macdougall, who joined Maylee Todd and Ryan V. Hays as one of the elite few who performed both nights).
Below is a full roll call of the performers, in order of appearance (I encourage you to visit their online homes), and a few more choice photos of the night, all courtesy of crack snapshooter Skye Regan. Skye’s pics, and Albert Lee‘s from Night 2, will be up online in a gallery format of some form or another very soon (I’ll update this post with the links when they’re posted) . Read more…
