Just can’t wait to get on the road again

Jeremy reminded me yesterday of this gloriously awful production of the Nutcracker that we worked on together, back in the day. His post brought back a flood of memories. My friend Ray ran the theatre at my college, and he knew a guy who needed a stage manager. I didn’t have much going on that month, so I signed on board. This was a touring show, mind you, so we spent a lot of time in a rented fifteen-foot box truck from Budget, either stuck in traffic or trying not to flip over on the interchange from 290 to 495 North.

The organizers had a good thing going. They ran a dance school in Cambridge, and they taught dance classes to little kids all over Massachusetts. The high-school kids got the lead roles, and the director played Drosselmeyer. But the little kids from the various regional classes did not tour. There was a different crop of between fifty and eighty kids (representing party children, mice, toy soldiers, snowflakes, sheep, angels, and Polichinelles) appearing in the show at every destination, which meant that there was a fresh group of parents shelling out buckets of cash every weekend: $15 audition fee, $35 “production fee,” and then of course the entire family was expected to buy tickets to the performance itself.

The kids were great. They were incredibly enthusiastic. When I went down to their dressing room to call, “ten minutes, please,” they would roar back, “THANK YOU, TEN MINUTES!” The lead dancers, in contrast, routinely failed to acknowledge my presence at all. Suit yourselves; show starts with or without you.

My favorite moment was when we were loading in to the auditorium at Wachusett Regional High School. We opened the loading dock door and discovered that the wings were filled with folded-up choral risers, plus an acoustical shell. The wing space was pretty limited to begin with, and these risers took up the entire space. We couldn’t even unload the truck with them there.

We were on a tight schedule; we had to put the marley down before we could even start on the lights. So I had my crew start wheeling these risers out into the hallway by the cafeteria.

Immediately, a little man fussed out of the orchestra rehearsal room, demanding to know what we thought we were doing. I explained that we had rented the auditorium, and needed to, you know, actually use it. We would be very careful with his precious risers and put them back where we found them at the end of load-out.

He said, “No! You don’t understand. It’s almost lunch time—the kids will throw food at the risers!”

I just gaped. Jeremy stepped in, and said, “I think what Dave is trying to say is, what the hell kind of place are you running here? Who’s in charge, the students or the teachers?” I honestly couldn’t believe my ears. If we had tried throwing food when I was in high school, there would have been hell to pay.

In spite of the apparent buckets of money coming into the box office, the show was pretty low-budget. This included the company manager’s tendency to take his time about paying me and my crew. I provided detailed time cards, and he grudgingly wrote checks. But when we finished the last show, they still owed us close to eight hundred dollars, and as the weeks turned into months, it became fairly obvious that they had no intention of paying us at all.

After the holiday season was over, they put on a spring production; I forget what it was. They found some other sucker to stage-manage. And they booked the theatre at my college, which, you may recall, was run by my friend Ray.

So they showed up bright and early with their beat-up Budget truck, and loaded everything onto the dock. The truck was blocking the alley, so Ray asked them to move it before they started to unpack and lay out the marley. They were on a tight schedule, as usual, but they agreed.

When they returned from the parking lot, they discovered that the theatre was locked up tight, with all of their gear inside. Ray was sitting on the front steps, looking pensive. When the director asked him to let them in, Ray drew on his cigarette, puffed out the smoke, and drawled, “I understand you owe my friend Dave some money.”

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