If living at the turn of the 21st century has taught us anything, it's that sensitive personal matters are best experienced through public media, preferably in front of a large audience of strangers. We mean, Jessica Simpson and Kim Kardashian have found perfect happiness and everlasting love by exposing intimate personal relationships, and you can too. This weekend in fact. Z Dating Game at Z Space this Saturday night celebrates indecent romantic exposure in a live show based on 1960s reality TV pioneer, The Dating Game.
The game involves three groups of single people competing to win a date over the sounds of the house band, professional interpretive dancers, and the loud and judgmental public.
We chatted with PianoFight's artistic director Rob Ready, the alliterative co-founder of PianoFight and producer and host of "Z Dating Game."
Hi Rob Ready! How long have you been producing and hosting this show?
Since the dawn of time. Guy meets girl (or guy meets guy, or girl meets girl, or person meets person), and they chat, ask each other questions, perform ridiculous tasks to demonstrate their passion, and ultimately fall deeply in love. Forever. And ever. The end. And Jack Morse and I have been glorifying (and mangling) that process on stage for about a year.
Should those with crippling stage fright and social anxiety come? How much audience participation is there? Just asking for a friend!
Audience members are as involved as they want to be. If you want to cheer a contestant on to true love -- do it. If you want to let somebody know their response was terrible -- heckle them. If you think the host looks dead sexy and just want to squeal in delight, nobody is going to stop you. Unless of course you do something totally out of line, at which point I will rally the rest of the crowd to boo you out of the building.
Squealing in delight already. Ideally, how drunk do you recommend being for this show?
As a responsible adult, I would never encourage someone to drink to excess... that said, very drunk. Or kinda drunk. Or totally sober and drunk in love. It doesn't matter. You're gonna have an awesome time whatever state you're in.
Diplomatic without ruling out shitfacedness. Excellent. Why does this show work in this city?
San Francisco is full of vibrant, weird, interesting, awesome humans. This show puts them on stage, and in doing so, has as much fun as humanly possible (another strong S.F. tradition).
Does one have to have seen the real Dating Show to understand "Z Dating Game"?
Absolutely not. We had never seen the show when we started producing "Z Dating Game." Hopefully, we've all been down the path to true love. And having hundreds of strangers vocally question your every step is a totally universal way to get there. If there's one thing we all know, it's that young, single, slightly inebriated people will do just about anything for a date. And that's really fun to be a part of.
We'll drink to that. Z Dating Game is this Saturday at 8 p.m. at Z Space (450 Florida). Tickets are $10.
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