The Tour: Leg 3

This is the leg of the tour that is going to kick all our asses.  It consists almost exclusively of one-nighters, few of them having days between performances.  We were lucky in a sense to lose our scheduled performance in New Brunswick, NJ, as that's where we'd be right now, rather than enjoying our first day off.

Since I last blogged, we left Nashville at night and awoke on the campus of Mississippi State, where we performed The Spy.  After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama, where we performed Henry.  After the show, we loaded out and went to bed and awoke in the loading dock of the Opera House in Newberry, SC.  As sad as it is, we were fortunate at that point that our set did not fit at Newberry, so very little had to be loaded in or out.  Having not showered in close to four days, it was very nice to have a dedicated load-in day, and a day that ended early at that.  The following day, we had a one-hour Henry performance in the morning, which gave us a chance to try out some of our ideas for staging the Big Henry that night.  Without the set, a lot of our staging actually borrows a bit from the one-hour, such as having many of the entrances that happen on the upper gallery occur in the aisles.  The Opera House is a beautiful little theatre of about 400 seats, built in 1882, and beautifully restored to keep its historic feel.  We all decided it felt almost like a town meeting hall where the Declaration of Independence would have been read -- and regretted that we weren't performing The Spy there.  After the Baby Henry, we had a two-hour rehearsal (yuck -- but everyone was in good spirits and ready to bang out a restaged 3-hour show), and we blew through the entire show, mostly a cue-to-cue of the beginnings and ends of scenes, and in less than two hours we were done.   Then we did the Big Henry, an 8:00 show, which everybody usually dreads because it means we don't get done until 11.  But with the short load-out, we were actually closing the doors of the truck before midnight, and were able to join the cast at a local bar, drink, chat and play some pool together.  It's a very, very rare thing that our schedules allow us to all socialize in the same place, so it was a fun end to the Newberry experience.

That was last night.  Then we went to bed on the bus in the parking lot of the hotel we had stayed at the night before (which incidentally was only the second night in a real bed we've been able to sleep in on this leg), and woke up to the familiar alarm clock of Bart yelling "GET THE F*** UP!!!" at 10AM.  We were in a parking lot at Ashville Airport in North Carolina, where we have decided to spend our day off (had we not lost the gig in New Bruswick, we'd have been rushing to get there instead).  We rented a minivan, which Bart drove like a race car, up the winding roads of the mountains to visit some waterfalls and other sights where the bus would not have easily been able to fit.  After that we checked into a crew room at a Holiday Inn Express, and at night went to eat at a Middle-Eastern restaurant where Joel's brother used to be the chef.  It was really good.  Tonight the bus departs at 2:30AM, and we'll wake up in University Park, PA, where we'll have an honest-to-goodness day off, and then a full load in day at Penn State, followed by a two-show day of Henry.  And as is usually our custom, that two-show day means a 10AM student performance, followed by a 7:30 evening performance.  At least it's not 8:00.

This week has been pretty rough on us, but we're all aware that the tour is winding down, and soon we'll be back performing in New York, and then after that we're laid off for a week, and then have just one more week of touring the Northeast before we're done.   I'm sad for the tour to be ending, but I will be very happy to be able to stay put in one place for a while, even if I'll still be away from home.