The singer got through the show without too many gaffes, and about sixty percent of the show really worked well. All the laughs were there, but she frequently didn't capitalize on them and would drop energy. That was the biggest problem - the inability to address one of my key notes, which is that every time a song is over you have to re-engage the audience with the patter, which means you don't stand there trying to remember where you are and/or just stand there and let thirty seconds go by without talking. Every time she fumfered like that she lost what was an easy and captive and demonstrative audience. Happily, she had someone tape the show, and all she has to do is watch it and she'll see every instance of her dropping the ball. And she'll also see that when she picked up the energy and pace how well it worked and how much more responsive the audience was.
All that said, considering she hasn't performed in five years probably, she did very well - and the act really worked structurally, has a lot of laughs (a few of the laughs surprised even me - I knew the lines I wrote were funny but they really landed beautifully), and it tells a nice story. She needs to get a few shows under her belt and she'll be fine, as long as she learns from tonight's show. I think it was really good for her, and the reaction from the audience was swell. The songs are well chosen and well ordered and arranged. And the long version of Arthur's Song that I created was the best thing in the show - it tells an entire story of a budding romance, right through to to people moving in together - I did it by breaking the song up with patter in two sections.
