When you think of a fun event happening, whether it be a fundraiser, work holiday party, birthday party, or a wedding, what are 3 basic elements that might come to mind for the night? You might think of food, drinks and entertainment! I’d like to touch a little bit on a typical timeline for Dueling Pianos and the importance of that timing as it relates to dinner and our performance.
If we’re playing at a fundraiser or corporate event, a basic timeline might go something like this: Doors open at 6pm for guests to arrive, they might enjoy cocktails and mingling until dinner is served at 7pm and then we perform from 8pm – 10pm. For fundraisers, there might be a live auction sometime before we start playing.
If a client came to me with this timeline or a similar one, I would say “that looks great!”. Where we might run into a problem is when the dinner time looks to be too short or if there are heavy hors d’oeuvres being served throughout the night and will clearly interfere with our show.
As a rule, we cannot perform while most of your guests are eating. Our show relies heavily on crowd participation. When we hit that stage (or performance area) we want to go full on and get everybody clapping and singing as much as we can. The start of the show really sets up how the rest of it may go. It’s hard for a person to sing if they have a mouthful of meatballs or clap their hands to the bit if they’re holding utensils. I’ve seen it too many times where we start our show and half the room is just taking their seats with a plate full of food and the other half is midway through a chicken dinner… nobody participates. We then have to back off our show and play boring songs until most people are finished and ready to go. I know that it can be a little difficult to judge exactly how long it will take for your guests to get through a food line or for plates to be served. We’re always ready to go at least 10 minutes before the scheduled start time or 15 minutes after the scheduled start time. If your venue and timeline allows for it we would still be happy to play for the full time contracted.
In the case of having a heavy hors d’oeuvres table, we ask that it be closed and torn down at least 10 minutes before we begin our performance. If there needs to be any announcements about that in advance so your guests are informed of that stipulation, we’d be happy to do so or let somebody from your event use our microphones to make that clear.
In the end, we want to provide the best entertainment we can for your party and it greatly helps if most of the audience is done or near done eating before we get to it. This way they can sing “Bah Bah Bah” during Sweet Caroline without spitting chunks of food on their neighbors.