Isabella B.
Yelp
Traveling to Europe has always been a dream of mine since college. What eventually got me to pull the trigger on my first solo Europe jaunt was a UK and Ireland comedy tour featuring some of the ladies from RuPaul's Drag Race. As soon as I saw the lineup I bought my ticket. In comparison, I bought my plane ticket a week later awaiting confirmation from my work for approved PTO. Not one of my smarter financial decisions, but at least I was able to finally to start doing Europe solo!
VENUE
If I'm reviewing the theater purely due to venue space it would be two stars higher. It's easily accessible from Dame Street, right across the street from Dublin Castle, one of the city's main attractions. There are a few hotels nearby, which also serve as a convenient home base for a city trip and quite a bit of restaurants that offer a quick meal without breaking the bank. Considering how expensive Dublin can be, my food budget wasn't affected very much.
There's three levels of seats. Depending on the show the lowest level seats can be removed for standing room only. Boxes are unfortunately for guests/crew/promoters of the performers.
I sat in the first few rows on the center-right section. The sound and lighting were ok, though I had issues with hearing some of the queens (but this could be attributed to the queens themselves mumbling). Seats were comfortable and there was proper ventilation.
EXPERIENCE
The two stars was due to the horrible experience I received during the meet & greet portion of the comedy show, which is a standard offering when seeing RuGirls perform. The ideal VIP M&G experience is that you're given a chance to take a picture with a queen, exchange a few pleasantries and have the queen sign any merch associated with her, whether brought with you or bought from the store. A well-executed M&G experience is because of good promoters AND good venue staff. Here's a breakdown what happened:
- Doors for the M&G would open at 5:30pm. The doors did not open for at least 15 minutes. Show started at 8pm.
- Way too many allocations for VIP within such a short period of time (~100). This only allowed people to briefly say hi to a few of the queens (not all) and take ONE SINGLE GROUP PICTURE. The picture's so bad that I refuse to post it in any social media site. However I realize this is the fault of greedy promoters - hence why I will never attend any Klub Kids event.
- Miscommunication with venue and promoter led to limited to NO time to mingle with the queens. In addition there was also no merch table, which is highly unusual for any drag show.
This is extremely disappointing because an actual M&G session (as opposed to just a single photo-op) and early access to merch table was included in the VIP ticket.
The show I watched was worth the price for general admission (~€40) but definitely not worth the €158.85 I paid for the VIP M&G experience (plus other incremental costs such as plane, hotel, etc.) Though I planned my one week Ireland vacation around this show, my traveling philosophy along with the other activities I planned on the other days made my overall Dublin visit excellent with this show being the only downer experience of my entire trip. Conversely, I have done VIP experiences for two other drag shows back in the US and while the venue for one of them could've been better, I had an excellent time at both shows. The VIP M&G experiences for those shows were well-executed and worth the price I paid for them.
While my horrible M&G experience won't prevent me from seeing a future show at the Olympia Theater, I'll only see a show here should I find myself in Dublin again. There's more opportunities to see the queens stateside and personally I prefer spending time in a unknown city exploring the sights and attractions.