Hey everyone… we’re on our break for Thanksgiving and I’m chillin in Port Orange, FL with two members of the cast at one of their parents houses. Finally, some home cooked meals, time to relax in a non-bus seating fashion, and the ability to catch up with my “To-do list”, which included finally sending my mom some information she’d been asking for for like a month… sorry Mom, hahaha.
So the last week before break was very fun and very interesting… Once we got to North Charleston, SC we were greeted with a wonderful theatre and our producers came in with a film crew. We learned a quick Christmas song arranged by our tour music director and then filmed 3 Christmas commercials to be used for Rogers and Hammerstein, some Chicago TV stations, and general holiday marketing (which is funny, since we’re not doing any shows in December, lol)… I was sooo tired from basically two days of traveling tho, so I had two small hiccups during the show that usually don’t happen… but that was just the tip of the iceberg for my flubs, cuz then we got to Florence, SC, haha.
Prior to Florence, we went down to Athens, GA and had a GREAT performance, the town had really excited fans and I had a lot of fun talking to some of them after the show for like two hours, and the theatre had a dinner set up for us after the show that had THE BEST crab dip!!!… So then we got to Florence…
We were the inaugural show at the brand spanking new FMU (Francis Marion University) theatre… The theatre was AWESOME, straight out of the Frank Gehry-style design pages. But as with all “firsts” there are complications… 2 minutes in to the performance the lighting program blacked out!!!… the only lights working on the stage were the spotlights; the stage manager had to pull the plug, make an announcement that we were having tech issues, and close the curtain. But everything happens for a reason… everyone was already on crazy edge prior to the show because the thai restaurant that a lot of the cast went to had the worst service ever and NONE of the people that went there got their food, so even those of us who didn’t go to it, felt the wrath of the hungry actors that came back pissed that they had to do the show insanely hungry. The weird energy led into the show as Graffiti Pete couldn’t find his boombox (a major prop for his character) and went on to dance without it and one of our ensemble women accidently kicked over a trash can back stage right before her entrance, which was loud as hell when it fell… Then the lights blacked out… In the 5 minutes it took the crew to fix the problem, everyone got themselves together and we flew through the rest of the show without a problem… EXCEPT my tongue decided to turn off in the middle of the song 96,000…
My line is, “I’d be a business man richer than Nina’s Daddy”
My tongue uttered, “I’d be a RUSINESS man BITCHER than RINA’S NADDY”
Oops… it happens…
The poor crew had it just as bad in Maryville, TN because for some reason there were issues with sound and lighting at their theatre too… but just as they always have before, the crew got it done at zero hour and pulled everything together for the show to go on as scheduled, despite literally telling us, “Don’t be surprised if something blows during the show and we have to do it with just the piano at some point.”… hahaha, that would’ve been interesting. To cap off that whole last crazy week before break, someone broke into the theatre and was crawling around the catwalk in the ceiling, so we had cops walking around checking on us throughout the show, trying to catch the assailant, and keeping in contact with our lone crew soldier holding it down alone in the booth upstairs to make sure he wasn’t attacked during the show. All-in-all another exciting week on the road!!!
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!!!! 🙂