After a successful comedy festival run of “Can’t Afford a Real Show?”, Karin Muiznieks is returning to the butterfly club for a return season. Daniel talks to her about her show and her experiences as a newcomer to the comedy community.
Karin’s début show made an impression, garnering a great review from The Groggy Squirrel and pulling in decent crowds. Many shows struggle at satellite venues, but the Butterfly Club is a unique location. “They are awesome. They have their inbuilt fan club that you can just tap into and say “Hello! Come see me”. I did get fairly good crowds… I got lots of people that just like cabaret, rather than just normal (comedy festival) punters.”
It wasn’t all a dream run, including a close encounter with every musical performer’s worst fear. “I lost my voice during the festival as well, halfway through. I had my four shows, then I had three nights off and then another four and on the three days in between I couldn’t even speak. My voice was totally gone, and I was going out to see comedy and not being able to laugh because I had no voice at all. Mysteriously, I could still sing, but I couldn’t talk. It was really wierd. My songs were OK and the energy was a bit shaky, but it sort of magically pulled itself together for the hour that I had to perform, but then I would go back to being urrrrrgggghhh.”
“You’ve got no one else to blame… it’s just you, and your only objective is to make people laugh”
Karin had been studying musical theatre for most of her life, but found the worlds of cabaret and comedy to be much more appealing. “I kind of got tired of music theatre, because my role in it was very subordinate. To be an actor, you have to listen to the director and be part of other people’s visions and the amount of input you have and the amount of control you have over your own work is only a fraction of what the public is going to see. Whereas in comedy and caberet, it’s all you. You’ve got no one else to blame, and you can’t hide behind anything, and say ‘oh, it was the artistic vision’ – it’s not – it’s just you, and your only objective is to make people laugh. So I got bored with music theatre and stepped into a realm where I had more control”.
Karin first stepped onto the cabaret stage during the 2006 Cabaret Festival. “I was really lucky because the butterfly club didn’t ask me to make a brief or anything – I didn’t have to write a proposal of what I wanted to achieve, they just said ‘Here is an hour, do what you want, we’ll check up on you later’. It was just sort of finding my feet, and creating something that I could control and figure out what I could do. I think I was very scared in it as well, which is something that has been stripping away every time I do another season of cabaret, I get less and less scared about it. But the first one was more about conquering fear.”
Despite having made her cabaret debut last year, Karin had only a few months comedy stage experience before the festival. “I started enquiring around October, November, and I booked the Butterfly Club in October, and I only did my very first stand-up comedy gig on the first of November. And that was my first one ever. So I had decided I was going to go into the festival and then sort of decided to figure out what comedy was. So I was sort of a backwards way of getting to it.”
“It was good because it made me get my act together really really fast and meant that I had to learn stuff because I had a time limit when I had to be cut off and I had to know what I was doing by this day in April. It kind of kick-started me and made me want to learn everything. I got into impro comedy and started doing standup gigs all over the place and I just sort of dug into everything. I just really, really tried to get my head around what it was all about, and it sort of worked because by the time the festival came around I had a show which I was happy with.”
“They have all this stuff that they just want to give away”.
Throwing herself into comedy didn’t just mean throwing herself onto the stage. “I just walked into this environment, this community, and just went ‘Hi!’ and just smiled and beamed and jumped up and down and people looked at me and said ‘Who is that person?’. I just made a few friends there. A lot of the people that I know are up to ten years older than me and have had shit loads of experience in comedy. They have all this stuff that they just want to give away, it’s so brilliant because in music theatre, people were very protective of their knowledge, and everybody wants the upper hand, because it’s so cut-throat. The whole industry is ‘I want this part, and you can’t have it, so I have to fast’.”
“Just because the nature of a comedy night is that everyone gets up for five or ten minutes and the more variety you have the better. It’s very fertile ground for everyone to be an individual, and everyone is as welcome as anyone else, and a young fourteen year old boy is just as cool as a fifty year old lady – everyone has a place in the industry, and the industry is just whoever is in it.”
Since the festival, Karin has been doing some polishing to her show and working on some material for Dan Walmsley’s upcoming Planet Nerd sketch show on Channel 31. Dan has had a big influence over Karin’s comedy. “He and I have the same sort of brain. We went to the same high school, and we’re very similar mentally – we laugh at the same things – puns and random stuff. He’s very willing to give his time – I’ve been writing a lot of songs recently and I’ll send manuscripts and music and songs off to him, and he’ll look at them and say “oh well, this is what I think”. In like a mentoring role, he’s helping me to clarify who I am.”
The main focus for the next few months, however, will be on Karin’s next show. “One of my friends from music theatre and I are planning to write a cabaret together. I want to write the entire score myself from scratch, so thats going to take me a couple of months to get that together. It’s going to be the tale of two people trying to make it in showbiz from two different perspectives – I’m doing it through comedy and writing my own stuff, and she’s doing amateur shows and getting up her skills and become really good at what she does and then cross over into professional. And we’re going to meet up and make this show about what we’re doing.”
“I’m going to aim for just after fringe festival, to at least have it up and running. The one thing that I didn’t like about the comedy festival was the competition. I couldn’t really get as much out of it as I would like because there was just so many other things going.”
Throwing herself into comedy is starting to return dividends. “Being part of the community, things just roll up. It’s really self-perpetuating, and it keeps snowballing into bigger things. Hopefully in a couple of years I can live off it. You’ve got to have a really high turnover to make a living out of that. People will come and see you, but then they want something different. I think that might be a bit of a problem with this season, a lot of the people that were interested in Can’t Afford a Real Show saw it in the festival and now are just going ‘Yeah, that was good, but what else have you got? Give me something new’. So if I was going to make money out of that alone, I would have to work very very hard.”
“Can’t Afford A Real Show?” will be running from Thursday June 7th to Saturday June 9th at The Butterfly Club. Call 9690 2000 or visit www.thebutterflyclub.com for bookings.