After emotional tweet
Only one person wants to see her performance, a day later the show is sold out thanks to Twitter
Georgie Grier triggered a run on her show’s tickets with an emotional tweet.
© Twitter: georgie_grier
After her first solo show at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, Georgie Grier was devastated. In tears, the actress later reported on Twitter that only one person had come. What followed is a small internet miracle.
All beginnings are difficult, but Georgie Griers did not expect it to be so difficult. Nobody wanted to see her play – well, almost nobody. A single person attended the presentation of her solo piece at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on Thursday. One. After that, the actress shed bitter tears. She later tweeted how disappointed she was: “There was only one person in the audience for my one-woman performance ‘Sunset’ at #edfringe today. That’s okay, isn’t it? It’s okay.. ?” She also put a picture showing her crying. 24 hours later she played in front of sold-out rows – thanks to social media.
Grier’s heartache tweet had gone viral and made waves online. Almost eleven million people have now seen the post. Thousands commented, sent encouraging words. The supporters also included real stage veterans. Including fellow actor and comedian Jason Manford, who comforted her with a video message. Manford shared his own devastating experience at the festival. He appeared there almost 20 years ago, the first few shows literally fell through.
Encouraging words from colleagues: “This is just the beginning”
“The first week, I think, was just such a grind. I was standing in the rain, handing out flyers and nobody came,” he said of the fact that it’s normal to play to empty rows at the beginning. It’s okay to get upset about being mad. He asked himself what he was actually doing and got “total imposter syndrome”. “You know what, this is just the beginning,” he said.
Manford isn’t the only one to offer words of support to Grier on social media. “It’s happened to all of us. Soon it will be nothing more than an anecdote,” Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain encouraged. More than once he had to buy his audience a drink as a thank you for being the only guests. The best thing about it is that the show gets better from performance to performance and that it is prepared later when the big audience comes. What he didn’t know: the large audience came faster than expected.
The next day Grier played in front of full rows, the show was sold out. “When I posted the video I was hoping for some messages of support or advice from other Fringe acts, but I had no idea how strongly people would respond to it,” Griers is quoted as saying by The Guardian. There are ups and downs every day, every hour on the Fringe, but ultimately she knows how lucky it is to be able to perform there, she said Friday night. “From a viewer yesterday, to a personal video from Jason Manford, thousands of messages of support on social media, and more faces in the audience today, it’s been a stirring 24 hours.”
Source: The Guardians, TheTelegraph