They can certainly expect to be very impressed with the technical aspects of the show, fooled and led up the garden path by the story and ultimately have a jolly good laugh!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.
Well, they just don't know anything else except that one form of their business, acting, and they don't really want to learn any other part of it, or they would. Directing and producing and putting a show together is very creative, for me.
The script was just the best I'd read in a long time and I love the humor, which I wasn't expecting, and I like the fact that my six year old daughter can see the show without being, you know, protected from it.
Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.
I think it's a very ephemeral thing, what makes a show a success.
My company is known for being funny as well as moving. You get a bit of everything in these shows. I think people know they're going to have a surprising experience.
There are plenty of examples of really well-executed shows you could look at and say, 'Well, clearly this show will have an audience; why wouldn't it?' And for whatever reason, it just doesn't catch on. So you never know going in.
Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.
Directly after the show people might have responded better to it, but who really knows. It did what it did and while it seems like a failure to most but it was a success for me and has given me so many opportunities.
And that's what the audience was feeling too, as they watched the show and as they watch it now. And overriding all of that is the way it was written. It was written honestly. There was never any manufactured laugh. There was never compromising of character.