October 31, 2010 Happy Halloween!

Hello, it has been awhile since I was here writing to you. We have now performed in 16 cites, 7 States and 1 Canadian Province!! There isn’t a lot of down time on this tour and this blog business is harder than I thought. My sister did warn me….Well, I did learn a good lesson. I don’t know if you remember, I tried to write an installment one night a few weeks ago, had several versions as the computer keyboard is touchy and erased several of my versions until finally it was 3 am, I was frustrated and tired and just wrote a shortened version. Now I am using Word Documents so I can save my work as I go along and not have it vanish into the netherworld of cyberspace. Well enough of; that let us journey along the highways of America on a bus shall we?

OY!! Riding on a bus for 8 hours is the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done. I thought I could sleep anywhere. I have been known to fall asleep sitting in uncomfortable positions in a car. This is not so easy on a bus. If you happen to be thinking of going on tour, make sure you negotiate in your contract that you will have the bus seat plus the seat next to you as well so that you can stretch out. Even with that I have to extend my legs into the aisle at times. Some of the others who have a seat mate end up sleeping on the floor. Muscle cramps and a sore back are everyday occurrences. Then, of course, we have to get off the bus and go perform!! I am painting a rather absurd picture, but most of it is true. In reality, the Company Manager, who is great, arranges for us to arrive at our destination with two hours to spare before we have to be at the theater. Thus, we can hit the exercise room, stretch, take a shower or a nap or go find somewhere to eat, all before our 5pm company meeting.

You see, every venue is different. Stage left might have a large wing or no space at all. We have a very large house and a tailor shop that live in the Stage Right Wing. Some nights, we get to the theater to find out that entrances have to be adjusted as there just isn’t space for people and set!! We will be in a theater this week that has no pit for the orchestra. That will be an adventure. Anyway, back to the schedule. We get to the theater; have the meeting where they tell us changes to the show and where everything is-i.e. costumes, mikes, props, bathrooms. Next is Sound Check. Whenever we get to a new venue, which this week will be everyday, Deniz and Crystal, our fabulous Sound Team, have the orchestra and the actors do a sound check. This is very important as each house has different acoustics. Sometimes there is reverb that needs to be addressed, sometimes it is monitors out of place, always it is what we will sound like in the venue. They do a terrific job!! My husband, Peter, was at our opening in Detroit at the Fabulous Fox Theater, built in the 1920’s and you wouldn’t believe all the greats who have performed there and signed the wall (now including our cast!!). Anyway, Peter said the sound was so great. After sound check we have a half hour to get something to eat or rest or start to get ready for the show.

In rereading what I have just written, I realized I should probably tell you a day in the life:

If we are heading to a new venue our schedule looks like this:

A time for luggage drop off for the bus, a half hour later we depart. Most mornings if we have a long bus ride, the day starts at  7:30 am or 8:00am. We have also had some 6:30am starts!! After a performance the night before!! This is not the life for the faint of heart!!

On the bus trip, we stop for 15 minutes every two hours to stretch, hit a bath room and have an hour to eat a meal. If it is a short ride, under 5 hours, we don’t get a meal stop as we will eat once we reach our destination. Once we arrive at the hotel, there is usually 2 hours before bus call to go to the venue for the stuff I mentioned earlier. If we are lucky enough to be in a place for more than one night, we don’t have to be at the theater until a half hour before curtain. These days are great as one can sleep late, see some of the surrounding countryside or just do one’s own thing!

Laundry is another task that becomes part of the learning curve. When to do it, where, how to fit it into the schedule, how to pack so you have enough clothes without taking multiple suitcases out of the bus for one nighters…..Most of the hotels we are staying in have one washing machine and one dryer. If you take too long getting to the laundry room, the line is quite long and your day is taken up doing laundry. Some of us now have our laundry bags on the bus and immediately hit the laundry room before we even go to our hotel room! During the rehearsal period, when we had meetings about what to pack, large numbers of underwear were mentioned!! Since we have such a large number of one nighters, and we are on and off the bus nearly everyday, it does become difficult to schlep large suitcases on and off the bus, so most of us have figured out how to pack for two or even three weeks at a time, find that laundry room and keep wearing the same clothes. In fact, today is a GOLDEN DAY, meaning we don’t have to travel AND we don’t have a performance tonight. So today the Bus Driver, Dave who is so fabulous and kindhearted is taking the bus and anyone who needs to do laundry to the Laundromat. The hotel’s machine is not working…..Thank goodness I did Laundry a couple of hotels ago!!

Seeing America from the bus is interesting. From my perspective a lot of the uniqueness of areas has been lost due to the standardization of building malls and fast food joints. They are everywhere. The scary thing is if one has been sleeping on the bus and wakes up once the bus stops, looks around, it looks the same as the last stop and one starts to wonder have we just gone in a circle. The same stores, the same fast food, boring!!!!!!!!!!!! For variety one day, our Company Manager had the bus go on smaller highways instead of the Interstate. We passed through smaller towns that did have personality and local shops. In one such shop we had a wonderful experience. They were having the local Lions Club meeting, so there were several older gentlemen sitting discussing various events for Paducah, Texas. As all 28 of us converged on the bathrooms and shop, some of the men started talking to us. One asked our Music Director a great question, “Are y’all traveling or are you going somewhere?” to which our MD responded, “Yes.” Then another gentleman asked another cast member what we were doing, he was told we were part of the Fiddler on the Roof National Tour traveling throughout the US and Canada to which the gentleman from Paducah responded, “That’s nice. Most people who come through here are either lost or on the run!” Tells you how out of the way and small this place really was.

The other wonderful thing about America is how nice everyone is. Wherever we have gone people have gone out of their way to be nice to us. We have had wonderful experiences in terrific restaurants and hotels across Middle America. We begin our Southern Experience now. We leave Texas tomorrow and head for Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida with a quick trip into Arkansas. All of our audiences have been terrific, cheering and clapping and continuing to give us standing ovations. As we were getting on the bus, two sisters ran over to us one night after a show in Amarillo, Texas. They were cute as could be; the younger one was no more than 10 years old. She was jumping up and down in her enthusiasm about the show. She said we were “Awesome!” Both sisters thought we were terrific and really enjoyed the performance and wanted to tell us. It was so special to see how we affect our audiences, especially young children!

We also have local crew members and local dressers to help us with the costumes. There is not a lot of time to talk or socialize with these people, but they have all been so terrific and kind and I would like to publicly thank them here. It is a very hard job they do. The crew, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, travel by bus overnight and get to the venue before us. They instruct the crew and dressers as to what the night ahead will bring. Most times it is just for one performance. Luckily we just had three shows in Lubbock, so we all could get used to the routine at this theater and by the third show, things were really rocking!

Well, is seems I have covered all I wanted to say this time around. I want to go spend some of my valuable “GOLDEN DAY” hours in the exercise room and then out to dinner with some members from our orchestra! Happy Halloween to all and to all a good night.

Blog posting, Sunday, October 03, 2010

Hello, I am now riding through Tennessee on the BUS! I will now take the time to write a more complete recounting of our time so far.

First, we had our second preview last night in Chattanooga at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium. We had about 1700 people last night. What a wonderful crowd, we got a standing ovation. A friend of one of the cast members who has seen many incarnations of FIDDLER said this was one of the best casts he has ever seen and predicts we will only get better and better!! Yesterday, Sammy, our director, had us in early, fine tuning scenes and dance numbers, making sure we were in better positions for sight lines for the audience as well as having more fluidity in the scenes. Dialogue was helped along with more background information. Ken, the Assistant Director/Assistant Choreographer, gave great advice and counsel to us, adding more flavor and depth to our characterizations. It paid off, the performance was so much better.

I have said it before, and I will probably say it again throughout the next 9 months, this cast is exceptional. Every person, now including our clarinetist, mandolin player, violinist and trumpet player (they are on the bus with us as well as the merchandise lady and our Company Manager, Nicole) is incredible-very talented at what they do as well as being very interesting nice caring human beings! I am so lucky to be a part of this cast. Our Tevye, John Preece is a veteran of 9 National Tours and yet he is so supportive and wonderful to be with onstage, generous with his talent and with his humor! Our conductor, David Andrews Rogers, or DAR as he likes to be known has gone off to Singapore for a quick gig as part of a Musical Festival Celebrating Rock Musicians of the 1980’s. We will miss him, but Nathan will take over the baton. He is our rehearsal and pit pianist. Very talented!! DAR will rejoin us in Lincoln, Nebraska and will then be with us for the duration.

All of us this morning felt as if we have graduated from a very intensive course on building a top notch show and are now ready to spread our wings and perform on our own. Ken and Sammy as well as Suzayn, our Stage Manager and all of the fabulous Design Team were very much in charge during our Tech Week. The actors were very secondary to all of the various people and things that had to be accomplished during our marathon 9 days in Chattanooga. Luckily we had two performances or previews for audiences there. Now we are heading to Detroit to open on Wednesday, October 6, 2010. Sammy will meet us there and we will have more rehearsals where he will further refine our performances.

The crew is traveling separately in three 20 foot container semis! They had a load out last night and will load in to the theater on Tuesday. All of the costumes are in large gondolas as are the props and sets. It is quite amazing to see all of the thousands of articles of stuff that we use boxed up and sent on its way. Last night was hilarious in that we were trying out best to get out of costume and quickly give laundry, shoes, wigs, costumes, makeup and other various sundries to the appropriate person, who would then pack it up and load it on the correct gondola. My dressing roommate, Birdie, who plays “Yente” in the show, said it reminded her of a hospital room where the nurses keep coming in to take temperatures or straighten up while the poor patient is trying to sleep. We of course weren’t sleeping, but trying out best to get organized, yet having constant interruptions. Anyway, it all got done.

I haven’t mentioned the wig person, Sonia, a lovely young woman who is very calm under pressure. I have a quick change right before the song “Sabbath Prayer”.  For those of you who are not theatre people, a quick change is a costume change that has to occur on stage or in the wings as there is no time to get back to the dressing area. Usually it occurs in less than two minutes hence “quick change”. During the two days of rehearsals before the previews, I was not making it back on in time for my entrance. A scene is constructed in such a way that there are cue lines when an actor must be walking onstage in order for their next line or next action to be on time and not cause a huge gap with others standing onstage doing nothing….So since I was late both rehearsals it was a little disconcerting for me to say the least. At one point the director told the actors to start calling for me and adlibbing. When I finally got on I told them I couldn’t find my “Shaitle” (Yiddish for wig). Since we didn’t want this to happen during the actual performance, it was decided that we would have a quick change rehearsal. When we first started we finished in two minutes. Our Wardrobe Master, Jay, who is really on top of things, helped us figure out what comes off first and how to best get the dress on quickly. There were two people helping me and we practiced the moves 5 times and got it down to 50 seconds! Not bad, Huh?? Needless to say, I was on time, even early waiting for my cue for both of the previews. Every new theatre, and there will be 80 of them, will have a new dresser assisting me as well as Sonia, our wig lady helping me. Luckily Sonia will instruct the new dresser as to the sequence of events that have to happen to make the quick change work. Thank goodness, Sonia will be there and Jay will keep his eye on this as well. Ah, the life. Oh I didn’t mention that the quick change takes place behind the house on stage next to Tevye and his dresser, he has a quick change as well and there are four brawny stage hands back there waiting to move the house for the next scene, a little crowded. Oh, and we can’t let the audience see us!!! But we are getting it done.

Well that is enough for one day. I will let you know how the bus is in the next installment. We will be stopping for lunch soon.

More later…..

October 1, 2010

Well folks this is the third attempt at this. Everytime I finish a post and try to do spell check the damn computer goes wonky and I lose the work. I am tired and want to go to sleep. I wanted to fill you in on what has been happening this past month and I did, but I didn't hit save in time! Oh well. Here is the third attempt.

Quickly, the past four weeks have been very intense, lots of rehearsals, lots of learning things about the characters, show, props, sets, people we are working with and each other. We were in New York for the three weeks from 10 am until 6 pm Monday through Saturday. Sammy Dallas Bayes our director and DAR, our musical director kept us very busy learning choreography for the big dances, learning the scenes, the music and the set changes. OY the set changes. Most of the actors have to help move the set pieces.

We had a much deserved day off on September 22 and on September 23 we all flew to Chattanooga, Tennessee for our Tech Week. Tech week is very difficult for actors in that we are no longer the most important thing on the stage. Now we have to add the design team, the sound team, the set team, the prop team, the orchestra and the costumes. Each day brought another piece to the puzzle that is the "Show". We as actors just stand around waiting for the sound man to get rid of the hum in the sound system, waiting for lights to be adjusted or waiting for a set piece to be moved or learning where we go for a quick change during a scene or what the clarinetist will do during the "Bottle Dance"! It is quite exciting to see the show come together in layers like this. Each day brought a new piece to make up the whole. Our cast is very talented and our Tevye, John Preece is exceptional. He is a wonderful colleague. In New York when I had no idea what I was doing, he dragged me around and made sure I was always in the right place. Now we have fun onstage with the lights, costumes and sets! Our Village of Anatevka is really becoming a reality. Each person in the cast is terrific and brings a unique talent to the show. It is a pleasure to work with them and watch them grow as performers. We are so lucky in that we all have wonderful senses of humor and get along very well onstage and off. I think this is very important as our journey is just beginning...on a confined space for several months...the bus.

But I digress. Tonight was opening preview with a live audience. It was a wonderful audience. We made them laugh and cry and we got a standing ovation! I think we have a hit! It was so great to perform for people after all of our hard work. Now we will continue to have fun and create magic every night.

Now I have to go to sleep as I have a 12:30pm rehearsal and another preview tomorrow night.
Good night and sleep well. Will have more to say later....Thanks for listening...