Friday, May 30
We woke up to find we'd gotten our long-awaited first review. We felt this had been hindering us from selling more tickets to our show, and while we supposedly had four reviewers the first night, none of them had yet posted, which wouldn't help us at the festival. Fortunately this one came out before we closed, and it was decidedly enthusiastic, even giving me mention more than once!
Around 12:30, we all left together, walking to Old Town to work on a fundraiser video while also enjoying the sunny weather and each others' company. We ended up in Old Town Square, where we watched the marionettes go through their elaborate cuckoo-clock-like movements on the great clock tower on the hour at 2PM. Then we went into a small museum on the square that happened to be showing a Dalí exhibition along with another on Alfons Mucha, whose work we all wanted to see as well. In fact, I was not alone in feeling relatively uninspired by the Dalí and really fascinated by the Mucha. It was particularly interesting to see the final room of the exhibit, which featured a lot of photographs he'd taken of his women, seeing his muses in their real form before he ascribed otherworldly brilliance to them.
Sofia and I walked back towards Lesser Town over the Karluv Most and up the hill on the other side of the river up to the Museum of Alchemists, where there was a one-man Fringe show on Machiavelli. We both found it rather prosaic, detailing minute facts about Florentine history during the Renaissance, and all of a sudden it turned into an attack on America in the final ten minutes. The Machiavelli character realized that he was sent to see us to warn us not to repeat the mistakes of the past but directed a piercing hatred at our country in a way that felt quite personal, even if I agree with some of the flaws he highlighted. It also seemed rather hypocritical for a thoroughly British man to walk about a stage pretending to be Italian for an hour before criticizing the people of America for destroying the world and co-opting less powerful countries in the process.
Night four of ¡Olé! we hit a new level. We had a sold out audience, which was markedly different than playing to half-full theaters, and I felt myself bringing more energy to the show. The other cast members responded to this with more vigor themselves, but we also shaped our scenes with more fluidity. If we'd had good shows before, this show exceeded what we thought we could get out of it. It made us want to hit that mark every night to come, of which there was only one. We heard similar enthusiasm after the show from audience members, which included Jake's parents and brother, who told me he'd never seen the production in its previous iterations as strong as we performed it that night.
The walk home was ebullient, and a handful of us decided to go out to dinner, finding an Uzbeki restaurant down the block that thankfully still happened to be open a little after 10PM. It was definitely the most delicious meal of the trip, comprising of lamb and goat meat and milk in dumplings, soups, and puff pastry. We stumbled into it but were all thoroughly impressed by the food, which just contributed to our good mood.
Later in the evening we all caught up at the Fringe bar, and chatted for hours more, spirits high, triumphant, and eager to share our show with more people around the world. (We'd gotten word that people from other international festivals had attended and taken notice.)
The Vlatava, as seen a block from our apartment.
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