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Patrick Monahan on his preview night surprise

By | Published on Friday 1 August 2014

Patrick Monahan

So Patrick Monahan may have won a ThreeWeeks Editors’ Award two years ago, but this time round he gets the First Night Surprise award.

Well known for involving his audience in his shows, Monahan noted at the start of his first preview at the Gilded Balloon earlier this week that most locals were probably at a zumba class on a such a damp Wednesday evening, and therefore he would kick off the proceedings by picking the audience member who “most looks like a zumba teacher” to join him on stage for a dance class.

Says Monahan: “As the music played I ran through the audience onto the stage and glanced quickly across the front row and spotted a bloke in a nice colourful shirt and shorts and thought ‘he looks perfect as my zumba teacher’. I grabbed him up and we danced on stage pretending to take a zumba class then I sat in his seat and he carried on alone”.

“Me and the audience laughed and cheered while he continued to dance”, Monahan goes on. “Then he sat down and I was laughing until I noticed something sticking out under his chair and saw it was a crutch. I panicked, lifted it up and showed it to the people sitting next to him, who were his son and daughter, and said ‘is this his?'”

They nodded. “I said to the audience ‘look what I found under his seat’ and held up the crutch. The whole audience gasped! I asked why he had a crutch and he said ‘because two weeks ago I had a new hip operation’. Everyone was laughing and cheering and I properly fainted. I kept apologising and said to his kids ‘why didn’t any of you stop him or tell me to stop him from dancing?’ They said ‘cos he was doing a good impression of a zumba teacher!'”

Monhan concludes: “The moral of this story is: if you do sit in the front row of my show, please, please, please let me know you have a mobility scooter, crutches or a wheel chair before I make you do some head spinning and break dancing!”

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