Making Your Mind Up

Concert productions are not always a straight-forward choice for societies, but can be a good fall-back when trying to showcase a range of talents. Getting them right is never as easy as you think when you have no structure or script to fall back on. How do you ensure the audience buys-in to your production wholeheartedly? Do you pick show favourites and audience pleasers? Do you mix it up with lesser known numbers? How do you link it all together?

I’m always keen to see a concert production as this often showcases the kind of talent and creativity that a society and director is capable of when they’re freed from the “script”.

I went along to Maryport’s opening night production of “Making Your Mind Up” with enthusiasm as I’d already seen some of the promotional material on social media, which hyped the show as a “Song Contest Like No Other!”. Entering the auditorium, my guest and I were handed a European flag each with which to wave and eagerly waited for the show to commence.

The staging consisted of LED screens positioned at various parts of the stage, in a formation that allowed for a tunnel through the centre screen, and some small screens in a tower at either side making electronic stage legs, which framed the stage nicely. We were greeted with electronic “TV contest” style graphics, continuously moving.

Once the show started we were introduced to the show by our accented male and female duo, played by Nicky Dixon and Katie Weir, who, with fake broken English and mistaken innuendo explained how the contest would work. Their script was witty and enthusiastic and got a great reaction and buy-in from the audience. It was very much in a “Eurovision” vein. We then had each song performed for us with very distinctive choreography, graphics, costumes and style.

These were all past Eurovision hits and each one clearly had a lot of work put into it. We were then expected to vote using our phones for a winning song, which would then be performed once more. Voting was live, with a countdown on screen, and results were then provided after the interval. I’m assured these were genuinely counted up and the votes were given, country by country, just like in the “real Eurovision”.

The remainder of the show included some fill-in hits from previous years. There were so many good performances to enjoy and it was a real ensemble production with performers rotating between taking centre stage and backing parts, giving everyone a chance to shine. I do wish the programme had included the lead singers for each song as well, as it would be nice to refer to some of these performers, but well done to all of them regardless.

Technically, this show looked like a fun (and possibly stressful?) production to put on - so many elements to potentially go wrong, but they didn’t! Well, there was a blip with one song being in the wrong order, and causing a short break, but it hardly mattered as it felt like the sort of technical quirk you’d see in the real “Eurovision”. The production team had clearly worked their socks off making every single element as good as they could possibly make it.

Computer graphics on stage were slick and professional. The sound was crisp and clear. The “scene changes” were smooth with good transitions, the dialogue was clear, relevant and funny and delivered the narrative arc perfectly. Most importantly, the audience had a damned good time with excellent entertainment. Could you improve things? Sure, there are a few minor adjustments which might have helped, but they’re just tweaks: The method of texting was a little confusing, maybe it could have been explained more easily, and the same country code was given for Ireland and Israel in the programme, or perhaps we could have had a video recap while the voting was taking place of each song. Some of the intro dialogue could be made a little snappier perhaps. As I say, these are suggestions but I loved the production as it was. It was everything you could wish for in an interactive song contest. Well done to everyone involved in the production, particularly Clark Wilkinson as Director (and Choreographer, Scenic Designer, Constructor, and Keyboard player), who should be very pleased with how this turned out.

Thank you MAODS for inviting me.

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