Welcome to Night Vale
Jan. 17th, 2014 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydionY'all know how I feel about spoilers, and the Night Vale folks are asking people not to ruin the experience for people later in the tour. As a result what follows will discuss the live show Welcome to Night Vale experience in general, the act providing the weather, and the Neptune theater, where the performance was held. It will not contain quotes or plot spoilers, though there were many fascinating things I would love to geek to you about.
First off, I'd like to mention how fun the crowd was. There were folks with tee shirts and the like, but there were also some absolutely wonderful cosplays. There were the expected hoard of Cecils and many Carloses. There were interns and Dog Park Interns. There were eternal Scouts. There were all sorts of people in Night Vale inspired outfits. In our batch there were two, count them two, Glow Clouds. The batch after us had a really amazing Hooded Figure with glowing red eyes. We were on line from super early on and the group behind us had a voluble Cecil and some Dog Park Interns who were roll playing a lot of the time either with each other or other passing groups. I loved the crowd itself which felt like Family between all the deliberately geeky Cecils of various genders and the gloriously androgynous make up of the crowd in general. It felt safe. It felt like home. I was in my wonderfully warm Harkness cat with my Carlos/Cecil tee underneath. Apparently there is quite a lot of Night Vale/Torchwood cross over, and I made some single serving friends with people who wanted to talk to me about the coat or the show. I love this fandom so much. I think it helps that the podcast was so deliberately diverse from square one in all dimensions. I haven't felt this "among friends" in a crowd of strangers since I came North.
The Neptune Theater itself is beautiful with classic mouldings, deco touches, and fake stain glass murals. There are Neptune head lights with glowing green eyes. They had made an attempt to make the theater accessible with ramps, but the ramps were super steep and hard for me to manage. I'm a bit concerned about trying to get a wheelchair up some of those steep gradients or under control on the down gradients. I did see they had cleared space for a lady in a wheelchair in the main auditorium, and the nature of the seating makes that part easy, but it was hard for me as a person using a crutch and with balance issues to get in and out without endangering myself and others and the ushers were not flexible enough to let me get in through the front of the seating rows even though the show had not started yet and letting me go the safer aisle would have hurt nothing and inconvenienced far fewer people.
I need to talk about the ushers just generally, because denying me use of the wider aisle in the seating area for no obvious reason was not the real problem. No, the management had stationed an elderly usher up by the toilets and he was gender policing the people using them. No, it wasn't just me. I was clearly bowling down the center aisle gender expression wise, which being my intention and preferred expression wasn't an issue. I get that that makes people worry. The usher down below sensibly hedged her bets and neutrally told me that the Woman's was on the right and the Men's on the left. This is reasonable and appropriate for a customer service person unsure as to the gender of the customer addressing them. This is not my complaint. The issue was the elderly male usher challenging gender ambiguous people going into the restroom, including another member of our party as well as myself. This is never okay, but you'd think at a concert venue, particularly one in which I'd guess at least half of the audience for this particular show was presenting androgynous if not more, they'd let people pee without having to defend themselves from officialdom. Jesus Fucking Christ, if you see people striding (or in my case confidentially gimping) toward the restroom, leave them the fuck alone. They are on a possibly time critical mission and the contents of their pants is not your business. This is not in any way the fault of the folks from Night Vale, since I don't see how they could know that this beautiful and funky theater in the University District of Seattle was apparently run by gender policing assholes with a policy of harassing their fan base. Yes, We do intend to write both the Night Vale folks and the Neptune Theater to let them know what was going on last night.
I should probably also mention that the lines for concessions and merchandize were extremely long and it's likely best to pick a person in your group to do all the purchasing while the others grab seats. I don't know how big the other venues are, but ours was packed solid with scalpers trying to sell tickets to the sold out show. Best to make a plan in advance if you are going with friends. I was in the second row center, so right up close. Our party being large we were in a lock in the second and third row. We also cleverly arrived super early for general admidssion, hence us getting to sit together
* And now the show itself:
The Weather also serves as an opening act, so there is a mini-concert. The accordion player was shockingly sexy, with sad complicated eyes, and extremely intense, occasionally funny songs. He looked endearingly pleasantly shocked by the strongly positive reaction of the crowd to his music and was a really good fit with the Night Vale vibe. There was a fine fiddler for some songs and the combination worked really well. I may have to see if I can purchase a CD online.
And then there was Cecil with an occasional person on the second mike. He himself was as delightful as you'd expect and the show had a whole lot more energy than you might imagine from it being one or two people standing and talking into microphones. There were audience participation sections, and both the actors and the Weather responded well to occasional shouted lines from the audience.
Readers, it was like they had made this script with my interests in mind. I will not tell you what the plot was or which characters were referenced or included, but the script was excellent and really well suited to live shows in a theater generally and very pleasing to my group in it's particulars.
So short version: if you have a chance to see the Live version of Night Vale, do it! It's the same in all the ways one wants it to be, but with a whole lot of added dimensions that can only be experienced by a large group of really excited and happy people crowded together in a performance space
First off, I'd like to mention how fun the crowd was. There were folks with tee shirts and the like, but there were also some absolutely wonderful cosplays. There were the expected hoard of Cecils and many Carloses. There were interns and Dog Park Interns. There were eternal Scouts. There were all sorts of people in Night Vale inspired outfits. In our batch there were two, count them two, Glow Clouds. The batch after us had a really amazing Hooded Figure with glowing red eyes. We were on line from super early on and the group behind us had a voluble Cecil and some Dog Park Interns who were roll playing a lot of the time either with each other or other passing groups. I loved the crowd itself which felt like Family between all the deliberately geeky Cecils of various genders and the gloriously androgynous make up of the crowd in general. It felt safe. It felt like home. I was in my wonderfully warm Harkness cat with my Carlos/Cecil tee underneath. Apparently there is quite a lot of Night Vale/Torchwood cross over, and I made some single serving friends with people who wanted to talk to me about the coat or the show. I love this fandom so much. I think it helps that the podcast was so deliberately diverse from square one in all dimensions. I haven't felt this "among friends" in a crowd of strangers since I came North.
The Neptune Theater itself is beautiful with classic mouldings, deco touches, and fake stain glass murals. There are Neptune head lights with glowing green eyes. They had made an attempt to make the theater accessible with ramps, but the ramps were super steep and hard for me to manage. I'm a bit concerned about trying to get a wheelchair up some of those steep gradients or under control on the down gradients. I did see they had cleared space for a lady in a wheelchair in the main auditorium, and the nature of the seating makes that part easy, but it was hard for me as a person using a crutch and with balance issues to get in and out without endangering myself and others and the ushers were not flexible enough to let me get in through the front of the seating rows even though the show had not started yet and letting me go the safer aisle would have hurt nothing and inconvenienced far fewer people.
I need to talk about the ushers just generally, because denying me use of the wider aisle in the seating area for no obvious reason was not the real problem. No, the management had stationed an elderly usher up by the toilets and he was gender policing the people using them. No, it wasn't just me. I was clearly bowling down the center aisle gender expression wise, which being my intention and preferred expression wasn't an issue. I get that that makes people worry. The usher down below sensibly hedged her bets and neutrally told me that the Woman's was on the right and the Men's on the left. This is reasonable and appropriate for a customer service person unsure as to the gender of the customer addressing them. This is not my complaint. The issue was the elderly male usher challenging gender ambiguous people going into the restroom, including another member of our party as well as myself. This is never okay, but you'd think at a concert venue, particularly one in which I'd guess at least half of the audience for this particular show was presenting androgynous if not more, they'd let people pee without having to defend themselves from officialdom. Jesus Fucking Christ, if you see people striding (or in my case confidentially gimping) toward the restroom, leave them the fuck alone. They are on a possibly time critical mission and the contents of their pants is not your business. This is not in any way the fault of the folks from Night Vale, since I don't see how they could know that this beautiful and funky theater in the University District of Seattle was apparently run by gender policing assholes with a policy of harassing their fan base. Yes, We do intend to write both the Night Vale folks and the Neptune Theater to let them know what was going on last night.
I should probably also mention that the lines for concessions and merchandize were extremely long and it's likely best to pick a person in your group to do all the purchasing while the others grab seats. I don't know how big the other venues are, but ours was packed solid with scalpers trying to sell tickets to the sold out show. Best to make a plan in advance if you are going with friends. I was in the second row center, so right up close. Our party being large we were in a lock in the second and third row. We also cleverly arrived super early for general admidssion, hence us getting to sit together
* And now the show itself:
The Weather also serves as an opening act, so there is a mini-concert. The accordion player was shockingly sexy, with sad complicated eyes, and extremely intense, occasionally funny songs. He looked endearingly pleasantly shocked by the strongly positive reaction of the crowd to his music and was a really good fit with the Night Vale vibe. There was a fine fiddler for some songs and the combination worked really well. I may have to see if I can purchase a CD online.
And then there was Cecil with an occasional person on the second mike. He himself was as delightful as you'd expect and the show had a whole lot more energy than you might imagine from it being one or two people standing and talking into microphones. There were audience participation sections, and both the actors and the Weather responded well to occasional shouted lines from the audience.
Readers, it was like they had made this script with my interests in mind. I will not tell you what the plot was or which characters were referenced or included, but the script was excellent and really well suited to live shows in a theater generally and very pleasing to my group in it's particulars.
So short version: if you have a chance to see the Live version of Night Vale, do it! It's the same in all the ways one wants it to be, but with a whole lot of added dimensions that can only be experienced by a large group of really excited and happy people crowded together in a performance space
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-18 06:35 am (UTC)The venue itself apparently does some LGBT stuff, and has had Dan Savage there. So I'm guessing that they could have read reviews about the theater or had it recommended to them as a good safe space with plenty of seats. I don't think they are to blame either, but given how awesome all the Nightvale folks are on social justice issues, I'm hopeful they'd be interested in getting this resolved before coming back again.
Wish I'd been able to say something to that usher, but of course this stuff is always out of the blue when urination is the only thing in mind. I am grateful the show was so awesome, because this incident didn't ruin the show for me. Took me a bit to get into the music at the beginning, though. OMG that accordion.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-18 09:06 am (UTC)