We are now in the part of the tour that was, for a lot of us, I think, the big selling point of this whole adventure: a week-long sit-down in Florida. Let’s take a look at the budget:
Per diem: $90/day
Hotel room: $99/daydamn.
Food: NY prices
Martinis: NY pricesdamn.
Despite the fact that we’re spending a lot more money here than we would pretty much anywhere else, I think the sunshine and warm weather (remember this is a company that spent the first two months in Minneapolis in winter), combined with the free time and calm routine of a sit-down, has been well worth it.
We’re playing at the Kravis Center, which is a large complex of two indoor theatres and an outdoor amphitheater. Our neighbor across the hall is one of the tours of Jersey Boys, which is in the middle of a three-week run.
Our theatre is a large black box that apparently also gets converted into a dining room for other kind of events. The stage is made of temporary platforms 40 inches high. The tricky part is that all the access to the space is at floor level, meaning that the wingspace is at floor level and the actors have to go up stairs to get to the set and the playing space. Which wouldn’t be such a problem if there was some extra room on the stage platform. But as it is, the set barely fits on the platform, so the moment they get off the physical set they have to deal with stairs. Getting from one entrance to another usually involves exiting, going down stairs, walking along the narrow floor-level space that is crammed with prop tables, and then back up another set of stairs to access a different part of the set. It is cr-a-zy. But it has been the subject of frequent conversations on the crew bus, at venues, hotels, restaurants and bars across the country for months now, and we worked out with the venue staff the best way to prepare the space for our arrival. It’s weird, but the fact that it functions at all is a miracle.
The backstage area is a veritable obstacle course (one actor actually had to vault onto a platform and under a railing because he forgot he had to set himself in a different place for his entrance until the last minute). However, onstage the set actually fits really well into the space. It’s very intimate, but the Rinker has a very high ceiling and an openness that matches the scale of the set well. Sometimes our set is a tiny speck in a house with a 60-foot proscenium, and then there was Baruch where the audience literally had their feet on the stage. The subtitle for the show among the crew and staff during the Baruch load-in was “Shakespeare… IN YOUR FACE!!!” This is a little bit like that because the edge of the marley is only a couple feet from the front row, but it all feels a little more in proportion.
We actually are doing a lot of the Baruch staging for the fights, because the actors are close enough to the edge of the stage, and the audience is lower than where the swords swing out downstage, but still very near, and Corey felt the impending danger would distract the audience from concentrating on the story. Since we did all the legwork at Baruch, we have a bag of tricks that we can pull from selectively when a venue requires a change in staging, and can mix-and-match to only alter the show as much as we have to.
We also had to change some entrances (which we do to a small extent in a lot of venues), many due to the fact that our only stage left entrance is about 18″ wide and down a flight of stairs in view of the audience. Directing traffic through that entrance late in the second act was a bit of a puzzle.
I must say the cast has done a great job of justifying the presence of the onstage escape stairs. It’s not easy to take a show that was staged on a flat surface and suddenly make everyone enter and exit on stairs for no apparent reason. Before the first performance they had a quick discussion of how to handle it, and the basic idea was just to start acting before you get to the stairs. They’re doing a great job making it make some kind of sense in every situation.
We’re doing six performances while we’re here, including two school shows that were originally scheduled to be the 1-hour R&J, but just a week or two ago were changed to be full shows. It required a large flurry of emails among the departments to make sure that could happen (including delaying the load-out for a day), but I’m very happy they made that decision. The 1-hour is a great intro to Shakespeare for groups who for some reason can’t see the full show, but it’s no comparison to a real production with sets, costumes, lighting and sound, and since we’ve got the show loaded in anyway, we might as well go whole hog. It’s more work for us, but the payoff for the audience is exponentially higher in my opinion.
There have also been a number of social events, from birthday parties to free dinner and drinks for the cast and crew at a local restaurant, to a fancy benefit for the cast to mingle with board members and other donors. It’s definitely a change of pace from our usual breakneck pace at which we roll into town, do a show, and roll out.
After this we head to Chattanooga for another sit-down, which includes only two performances of R&J and two days of work on our Alice in Wonderland development process. After that it’s vacation time! So the West Palm stop has been kind of the gateway to our vacation. It won’t be easy when we come back, so we’re enjoying the cushy part of the tour while we can.
