Performance Report 2

Professor Young Music 1306
I went to a performance on Thursday, April 8th, at 8 at night called Side Show: the Musical; the performance was live in the University Theatre.
The theatre that Side Show was performed in was not huge and was not small; it was large enough to stage the props necessary for the play. Of course, by the title you can tell it was a musical; the performers were composed of UT Dallas faculty and students. The musical is based on a true story about two girls that are conjoined twins; their names were Daisy and Violent Hilton. The story turns out to be like a traditional freak show kind of thing I thought and just goes into their career, personal life, and motivation. Their personal life is composed mostly of wishes/dreams, interesting relationships, and personal hardships.
Keep in mind that this was a musical and if you’ve seen one musical you can get a feel for most of the others. This had a mixture of orchestra music and singers. The piano gave many of the songs an attitude that set the mood of the musical sometimes hinting a sense of fear or mischief. But, at other times the musical had tunes that were rather happy in texture. There was jazz music that was used to suite the time period, the early 1900s. So as you can imagine there were brass instruments, keyboards and other instruments associated with jazz.
The performers of the Side Show were UT Dallas faculty and students. The main characters, Daisy and Violet Hilton were played by Robin Clayton and Emily McCoy. The costumes or one may call visual elements of this performance were what made it amazing. Like every other musical the performers were usually singing or dancing to the music being put on by the orchestra. A unique visual element of this performance was the conjoined twins because they had to stay next to each other for the whole musical. I thought that the costumes that they used suite the time period and definitely suite their profession at times. Robin and Emily did a very good job on playing the twins because there was hardly a moment when I was bored of watching the show. This could also have been due to the constant movement of people on the stage and the interaction of the audience with the performers. It also seemed like all of the performers had their movements and lines recited very well.
The night I went there were actually quite a bit of people in the theatre. This surprised me because the musical was not free of charge. My crowd was composed primarily of students and adults. The adults I assume were mostly parents of the performers and the students were probably there to watch the show for a class. Anyone was aloud in the door as long as they paid. The musical isn’t a very famous one so I from what I saw there weren’t many people there for the pure entertainment of the show. The audience to performer interaction was unique because of the combination of costumes and music. Not everyday you get to see freaky costumes with jazzy music.
The time and space of this performance seemed much different than the performance that I went to not too long ago. The attitude of the performers was different, almost over energetic. I believe that this was caused because it is the last performance of the semester. Like I said before, the performance had a good flow, or good transitions between scenes.
In the end the performance turned out to be a well choreographed musical with a good representation of the time period. The orchestra played flawlessly and so did the actors. This piece over Daisy and Violet Hilton proved to entertain a younger audience, with songs telling an interesting story.
Works Cited
Evans, Kathryn. Side Show.4/8/2010.Richardon: University Theatre.Evans