[As readers of Rick On Theater know by now, I have an occasional series of
articles on this blog describing jobs and professions in theater that few even
avid theatergoers know much about. I’ve
covered stage managers, dance captains, swings, understudies, and wig-makers;
now I’m posting an article from Equity News (vol. 104, no. 4 [Fall 2019], entitled “Equity on Tour”) which
features interviews with union members who work on national tours of Broadway
shows. I couldn’t imagine a more
appropriate article to post on ROT.]
“ALL IN A YEAR: EQUITY MEMBERS BUSY WITH NATIONAL TOURS IN 2019”
Perhaps the only thing harder than making a living on stage or backstage is doing so while touring. And yet, there are now more members doing just that than at any point since the last recession. With interest in touring only continuing to grow, Equity News sat down with seven tour veterans – a mix that included stage managers, an understudy, principals and chorus – to find out what they have learned from life on the road. Special thanks to Kevin McMahon, chair of the SETA [Short Engagement Touring Agreement] Committee, for helping to lead the conversation. What follows is their conversation and their lessons, edited for space and clarity.
WHAT WOULD YOU TELL A NEW MEMBER BEFORE THEIR FIRST TOUR?
Kevin McMahon: For me, it’s “bring less.” You don’t need it. If you do need something, you can buy it.
John Atherlay: It’s okay not to know the answers; ask questions. And don’t try and fake it.
Christine Toy
Johnson: I’d pass along some great advice I got from my friend Jose Llana
right before I left town. He had just come back from two years on the road with
The King and I and suggested these
top three things:
1. Ziploc bags will be your friends. (Now I have reusable
ones, and they are my friends.)
2. You don’t need that much stuff. You may have a couple of
parties where you really want to dress up, but he said he started the tour with
five suits and by the end was down to one black blazer, which he used for all
press and opening nights.
3. You don’t need to lug around gigantic, Costco-sized lotions and shampoos. Normal sizes are good!
Andrew Bacigalupo: Know we’re not brain surgeons. It’s serious, we’re all professionals, but everything doesn’t have to get elevated so quickly. There doesn’t have to be stress. This is something we want to do, so let’s enjoy doing this. There’s a lot of pressure to be perfect because everybody’s watching, but really, everybody’s in this together.
Marina Lazzaretto: It’s important to find the things that bring you joy and do them in every city. For me, I plan my workout in every city. I find the places that I want to go to, and that’s what brings me joy, and I plan my life around that.
David O’Brien: I go on websites like TripAdvisor to see the top ten things to do and try to do at least one of them in each city; something to get me out of the theater so I don’t lose my mind. I would definitely advise new people to take advantage of the cities they’re going to, because it’s such a great experience to travel the country.
Sid Solomon: I’m a big fan of meeting people. My first Equity job, I spent two years touring with The Acting Company, which is a very different kind of touring model where you’re very bus-and-truck, one night here, one night there, in very small towns.
I did everything that I could to try to meet people who lived in those places. Sit down at a restaurant that’s known as a place where people from that city go and start a conversation. The country is wide and vast and filled with lots of different kinds of people, and the people in the city are the ones we’re there to do the show for. So, every opportunity that I could take to just meet somebody and find out what their life is like felt to me like it enriched my ability to do the work that I was in that city to do.
McMahon: Most of my good memories of my years on the road revolve around the stuff that we did with my friends, like that the trip on the balloon in Albuquerque with “O’B” (David O’Brien), trips to the dog park with all my dog friends on the road . . . that’s a part of living. That’s your life.
O’Brien: We have 14 dogs on our tour now, Kevin!
HOW DO YOU STAY HEALTHY ON THE ROAD?
Johnson: Come From Away is like a 100-minute long sprint, and I find I have to prepare myself in a different way than I have for other shows. As much as I do love seeing as much as I can of the cities I’m in, I am also very conscious of not having a mindset that I’m on vacation. The only reason I’m away from my home and my husband and my dog for most of the year is to do the show.
So I’ll do whatever I need to do to be at my optimal energy for the show. It’s all about balance. I am a writer as well, and part of the leadership of Equity and the Dramatists’ Guild, and I chair a few committees. I get up at 6:30 or 7 in the morning just naturally. When it occurred to me that I needed to be at my optimal energy 12 hours after I got up, I realized that I had to really be mindful of structuring my day for both physical and mental wellbeing. It took me months to set up the parameters so that I could do this.
I don’t do meetings on Mondays anymore because even if it’s a travel day or golden day; it’s a day off. I don’t do meetings after a certain time in the afternoon because I have to reset my body clock and take a little nap or be quiet. Now I don’t really do a lot of things after the show, except for on Sundays, and it seems super boring sometimes, but for me it’s all about making sure that I am at my peak performance level at all times. I’m proud to say that (as we speak) I’ve done every single performance of our run so far.
Lazzaretto: I want to talk about food on the road, because I think it’s particularly difficult to feel your best and to perform your best when you’re consistently eating out at garbage restaurants. I make it a priority to find a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s in each city. I travel with a plate, a bowl and a kitchen knife so that I can have my normal diet, food that I would eat at home, in my hotel or in my Airbnb. And that helps me maintain my optimal body health for my show.
Johnson: Same. Exactly. It’s absolutely vital to do that.
Solomon: It has always been my experience that people who do what we do tend to be creatures of habit. We were touring with a lot of first-time-touring people, and it was really important for all of us to accept the limitations of touring as quickly as possible, to understand that for as much as you have a dedicated routine at home, there are realities to being on the road. The sooner you’re willing to figure out how to maintain as much of your routine, as many of the things that make you happy on a day-to-day basis, you should do that. For me, it’s light in hotels. I need there to be some light in my room, and I will go back to the front desk and ask for a room with better light.
My health suffered for the first six months of the tour because I’m an outdoor runner. We were in cold weather cities a lot, and I had a really hard time adjusting my exercise schedule.
Atherlay: I don’t do workout routines very often because my schedule changes at the drop of a dime, so I tend to walk around a lot. I listen to Sirius Radio, and I just see the different sites. I’ve been touring long enough that I’ve seen them all, so I know where to go that gives me peace.
I also tend to find the closest hotel to the theater so that I can go away between shows or after rehearsal and before the show, so my day is broken up. I’m not spending 12–13 hours in the theater, but maybe four or five, then going away for two hours and coming back. It refreshes my brain and relaxes me a lot.
YOU BRING UP A GOOD POINT. WHAT DOES EVERYONE DO FOR MENTAL HEALTH?
Bacigalupo: We’ve been talking about mental health on my tour recently. I think, as Christine said, we’re not here on vacation. We’re not there just to have fun in the city. We’re there to do the show. Some people go out after the shows, to this bar or that place with an “always on the move” mentality. I think it’s important to realize that I wouldn’t necessarily do that while I was at home, so working on the road I don’t need to feel the pressure to do that either. It’s okay to have time to yourself.
McMahon: I couldn’t agree with you more, Andrew. Sometimes you’re 50 years old and you feel like you’re back in high school with the parties and who didn’t get invited to this thing, and you have to step back and like realize, okay this is just for now. This is just this week, and next week we’ll be in a different city. It will all be different.
Lazzaretto: For my own mental health, it was important to realize early on in my experience that you don’t have to feel like you have to be everyone’s friend. If we worked in a normal office, you wouldn’t feel obligated to spend all your time with every person you worked with, so it’s okay to realize that not everyone on your tour is going to be your friend. You do your work together, and you can be pleasant and nice to each other, but you don’t have to feel bad if you’re not invited to something. You don’t have to be everyone’s friend. It’s okay.
O’Brien: I’m sober. I’ve been sober for 29 years, and it has its specific challenges on the road. And that is my staying healthy. A lot of it has to do with having my dog, finding people that aren’t in that party mindset. It can be done, but it’s much more challenging on the road.
STAGE MANAGERS: HOW IS YOUR ROLE DIFFERENT ON THE ROAD COMPARED TO DOING A SIT-DOWN PRODUCTION?
O’Brien: There’s so much more to it on the road, which is why I like being on the road. So much of my career was in New York, and I always found it to be a challenge, especially on shows that did run a long time. I was on Cats for five years. Five years in New York is to me tougher than five years on the road. The excitement of going from city to city and being in a new theater and a new environment gives everything a new energy.
Atherlay: I’m with O’B. I much prefer the road. We’re in Toronto at the Mirvish, and it’s our first theater without a crossover. So we had to go in and figure out what costume changes need to be moved where. And focusing the show where we are – our second stop didn’t have box booms, so we had to move everything to the front and deal with the challenge of making it look the same without the same positions, which is very, very difficult.
But I’ve been around so much, a lot of cities become second homes to me. I know the challenges in Toronto, what we’ll have at the Golden Gate in San Francisco, what we’re going to have in Cleveland when we get there in a couple of weeks. But it’s the challenges I prefer.
Bacigalupo: When you’re always moving, there’s more of a “we’re all in this together vibe,” and it’s a whole different atmosphere to the show.
WHAT TOOLS DO YOU USE TO GET YOURSELF ACCLIMATED TO A CITY?
McMahon: I always go on Trip Advisor, and there’s a new Facebook group I think a lot of us belong to called Tour Talk, where people share advice on cities and actually give tips on hotels, which was very helpful to me on my last tour.
Solomon: I have for a very long time kept a membership to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and they have an extensive reciprocal membership program for not all that much money that gets me free entry into art museums in basically every city. And so early in each week, I would go and find the major art museum in the city. It’s usually in the center of town, and it usually has some deep rich history about how it was founded and it tends to be such a part of the civic identity of a city, that it tended to tell me a lot really quickly.
Johnson: I eat a 90% Paleo menu, so I will Google “Paleo + [name of the city]” and find the restaurants that fit the bill. There’s a small group of us that likes to find a good restaurant to go to on the first night in a city, so I make the reservation and find something that’s a treat for all of us. I also start with locating the nearest Whole Foods, because you can do wonders with a rotisserie chicken and a box of salad.
O’Brien: On our tour now, we have a group of people that love to eat breakfast, so we find breakfast restaurants in our cities. It’s been great.
Bacigalupo: On every Tuesday or every load-in day, we do a management lunch where company management and stage management go out together. There’s a lot of excitement in the days before we to go a city about where we are going to lunch on Tuesday. And then just the stage managers, the three of us, always do brunch sometime in the week, and it’s important to us to have the time that’s just our department to check in.
Lazzaretto: To me, the people who know the city the best are the locals. I like to find a yoga place in every city, and I talk to the people in class there. They tell me where their favorite restaurant is or what their favorite art museum is, or what else I shouldn’t miss.
McMahon: I couldn’t agree more. I used to talk to the dressers, and I would research the dog parks and ask the people there what they like, and I’ve never been steered wrong.
DOES ANYONE HERE TRAVEL WITH THEIR FAMILY?
Johnson: My husband Bruce and my dog Joey travel with me often but not full time. In the first year of Come From Away, we had four children traveling with us, five dogs and at least two or three spouses full time. My company has been extraordinary about welcoming all extended family to everything we do, which has been, I think, really essential to the inclusive happy family feeling that we have in our show.
McMahon: For me, my husband Doug and I have a five-week rule. We had to see each other, physically, at least once every five weeks. That was the absolute rule.
Atherlay: I have three kids. My two boys grew up when I was doing Beauty and the Beast, so I was home for them. When I started touring again, we put a map on the kitchen refrigerator. My ex-wife would pinpoint where I was, and when I would call them, we’d talk about time differences and seasonal differences, and I got them to figure out what the country was. Before computers and texts, our communication was phone calls. My daughter, who is now 18, would visit me on the road because her mother’s grandmother lived outside of Chicago. Four or five times when I was playing Detroit, they would be driving home from Chicago and stop off to spend the weekend with me, to the point where when she was in first grade, my daughter told everybody at school that her daddy lived in Detroit.
It’s about communicating. It’s about talking and sending postcards and showing your kids where everything is. And now my daughter is studying theatre management in college.
Bacigalupo: I have a boyfriend that I started seeing last summer, before I started this tour. We didn’t get quite to seeing each other every five weeks, but we haven’t been apart for more than two months at a time. It’s important to have somebody that you can go to who’s not involved with the show. It helps to realize there’s a world outside the isolated bubble of the tour. I don’t think I could have made it through this tour without having someone I could go to as a sounding board who’s not really involved with the production.
WHEN YOU HAVE A CONTRACT THAT IS EXPIRING, HOW DO YOU DECIDE TO RENEW OR NOT TO RENEW?
Johnson: For all of us, I think you check the boxes: do you love the show? Are they treating you well, both salary-wise and globally? Are you artistically fulfilled? Kevin, you taught me this. If you have at least two of these three things, it’s easy to stay.
I think I can speak for everyone in the Come From Away company – we feel so invested in the message of the show. No one ever wants to be out. No one ever wants to not do the show. The people that left didn’t really want to leave; they had children going to school or other commitments that they needed to tend to.
For me, the positives outweigh the negatives (being away from home), so it was not a hard decision to stay for year two.
Solomon: Our situation was a little different in that we opened the first national tour the beginning of September and we closed in the middle of August. So the first national tour came to an end, but we knew the show was going to continue on for a second tour on a new contract.
Once we knew what the details of the contract were, there started to be conversations with the cast about continuing on with our show. If you haven’t seen The Play That Goes Wrong, it’s very intricate. It’s complicated. It’s very dangerous. And the more people you have who have done it before, the better off you are.
I loved my time on the road. I loved the tour. I loved the show. I love the people. Understudying the show is a particular challenge. I was not in the same kind of physical pain the rest of the cast is on a daily basis, but the mental anguish of not only keeping that show in my head but being prepared for it on a nightto-night basis was its own special kind of thing.
For me, it simply came down to having to be away from my wife and my dog and my family. My whole life is here in New York. Another minimum nine months on the road just wasn’t the right choice for me right now. And for me that’s actually kind of a big deal. All I ever wanted to do is work. No job is too small, no role is too small. I just want to be doing something all the time. So I’m kind of proud of myself. It was time to look for the next adventure.
Lazzaretto: I think that the number one thing for me as I’m evaluating whether or not I want to continue a contract is: am I still growing as an artist? Am I feeling stagnant? Is there more I can gain from this specific production? What is the level of my happiness doing this job? Whether I’m going to be happy is the most important.
Atherlay: I look at how I’m being treated. I look at what they offer me to renew. I’ve been very fortunate so far in that I’ve been treated very well. I don’t believe in just leaving work. It’s not in my nature.
Bacigalupo: With stage managers, we don’t really have a contract renewal, we’re just here until we’re not here. I had an opportunity to leave the show for another show earlier in the year, and I felt such anguish about leaving this creative team. I have so much respect for them, and I care about them so much, and they have really helped my career move forward, so I felt a big responsibility to them.
I felt a lot of responsibility for the show. Everybody is replaceable, but I was in the room when the show was created. I know why we’re doing this move, not just that we’re crossing to this number at this moment. And I think a lot of that gets lost in translation as you pass the show on to another PSM.
O’Brien: The only thing I would say is the same as Marina. I left Wicked once because I felt I wasn’t as happy, and I wasn’t serving the show – I was not doing my best job at that time. I thought I needed to take a break from Wicked, and then once the position opened up again, I came back because I realized the show makes me happy. But I will leave a contract if I feel like I’m not doing it justice.
WHEN YOU HAVE A CHOICE FOR HOUSING & TRAVEL, WHAT FACTORS DO YOU CONSIDER IN MAKING THOSE DECISIONS?
McMahon: For me, I’ll tell you that Marriott Rewards Points were as important as my 401(k). (Laughs) If there was a Marriott, I knew there would be a consistent quality of housing, and they’re usually pet friendly.
Johnson: Because we’ve traveled with so many pets, our company manager has made sure that all of our housing has been pet-friendly. I generally stay with the company because I like to be around them, and I don’t like to travel home from the theater by myself. It’s most important for me to be really near the theater if possible, because I like to get there early and also go back to the hotel in between shows to rest. One other thing: the presence or absence of refrigerator and microwave. That’s really important too, because otherwise, you know, you can’t have your rotisserie chicken and a box of salad if you don’t have any place to put them to keep them cool.
O’Brien: I will also look at the company choices and look at ratings, just because where I’m living is so important to me. I will be miserable in a place if my housing is bad.
Bacigalupo: I have stayed at an Airbnb twice on this whole tour in the past year. I get super anxious about Airbnbs – there seems to be a lot of pressure in finding the best Airbnb, the closest Airbnb, the cheapest Airbnb. It’s like a full-time job. It’s too much stress to figure out, so I’ve stayed in the company option most of the time. Even if it was a more expensive option, I would still pick the company hotel, because I knew that if there were issues with the room, if the water doesn’t work, if there was mold, the company would take care of it.
And I do the same for travel. I know a lot of people do their own travel between cities, but I do Monday load-ins. The stress of a flight delay if I paid for the ticket is a lot higher than if the flight’s delayed and the company’s paid for it, because if I don’t make it to load-in, the company will help to figure it out. That takes all of that stress away from me.
Atherlay: Location is important to me, especially with my schedule. And sometimes the pricing is ludicrous, but it’s par for the course. Like Andrew, I’ve had too many actors spend too much time complaining about the Airbnb: that it’s not what they what they signed up for, it’s not what was advertised. I find the hotel is important because it’s my peace of mind. If it is a bad hotel, someone’s going to take care of it and fix it or move me or upgrade me or something.
Lazzaretto: I feel the same. Proximity to the venue is always top priority for me. I’m one of those people who’s splitting my time between the hotels and Airbnb dependent on the length of stay. If we’re somewhere for a week, I’m more likely to just choose the closest hotel option. If we’re somewhere a little longer, I like to have a kitchen.
HOW DOES BEING IN THE UNION AFFECT YOUR TIME ON THE ROAD? ARE THERE TIMES YOU’VE TURNED TO THE UNION FOR HELP?
McMahon: Speaking personally, I know I was on the phone a lot with my reps. Our tour had a lot of new members on the road, and they didn’t understand the rules and working conditions. I was deputy, and I became a teacher for a lot of people about Equity and the contract. The union was incredibly helpful to me in every capacity.
Solomon: Something both being a union member and now being a union officer had me very mindful of on the road was how I interacted with other workers on the road.
Especially when you are living in hotels, taking taxis, going to restaurants – you are constantly interacting with the hospitality industry. And so many of the workers that you are interacting with are unionized workers; sometimes they’re workers who are trying to unionize. I did everything I could to be as mindful as possible of being respectful to fellow workers. Whether that was being mindful of appropriately tipping at hotels, or in cities where there’s a difference between how people are paid to drive – a licensed taxi as opposed to just getting in somebody’s car for Uber – I tried to err on the side of that being mindful to how I was contributing to the way another person made their living.
Lazzaretto: I learned so much about our union and the contracts from Kevin when I was on the road with him. The one thing I like to tell new members in the shows I’m doing is not to be afraid to call the union. It’s there to help you and to be a resource. Call your rep, ask them questions. They’re all so lovely and helpful and willing to give you the information.
McMahon: Being a deputy also becomes a teaching experience for new members. I took that duty very seriously.
Johnson: One of the things I’m most mindful of is our 401(k). That’s an awesome thing that’s part of a negotiated contract. I’m especially grateful to be on a long-term job, having a long-term contribution from the employer in place along with my own.
Atherlay: I have a philosophy, and I teach my deputies all the time, that the words in your agreement are as important as the words in your script. I find that Equity has always been very responsive towards me when I do call with an issue.
O’Brien: With Wicked, we get a lot of new people, new people to Equity who have just signed their first contracts. One of the things that we started on this tour: when a new person joins, we do a meeting. The company buys them dinner, and the associate company manager and my first assistant stage manager go out and explain everything about the road. Then we have a separate meeting where we talk to them about how to use their deputies. And it’s been working really well.
Bacigalupo: In the past two years or so, when I moved to New York, I joined committees and I came to membership meetings. And I think that having the knowledge is such a huge help to understand the bigger picture of what’s going on, to understand what the rulebook rules are, what the agreement is. It’s so interesting to see the reasoning behind the things in these agreements. It’s so cool what you’re doing at Wicked to explain this to people, opening up the agreement and going through it together – I just wrote that down and might steal it for the future.
* *
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[I’m a dog-lover, so I wanted to include this little
sidebar to the Equity News cover article. ~Rick]
“HAVE DOG, WILL TRAVEL”
One of the things that makes life on the road a little easier is being able to travel with a pet.
“Right now, we’re so fortunate we can even take our dogs to the theater, like we have like six dogs at the theater every day,” said Marina Lazzaretto. “They hang out in the dressing rooms. Gandalf even has his own Cats costume. I wouldn’t tour without him. Like, I can’t imagine my life on the road without him. He brings me so much joy and like he brings so much joy to other people at the theater and at the hotel, too.”
Caring for an animal on the road can be a challenge. Once Lazzaretto found a good veterinarian in Oklahoma, so she makes a point to stop when she is in the area and take Gandalf to visit the veterinarian they’ve come to know.
Stage Manager David O’Brien drives himself from stop to stop so that he can travel with his dog, a 55-pound rescue mix. “I actually adopted him on the road,” said O’Brien. “My other dog, Charlie, was 15 and passed last year. I was without a dog on the road for about five months. Having one makes all the difference in the world to me.”
“A pet can really be the key to everything – making sure
that we have the normal thread of joy in our lives,” said Christine Toy Johnson,
who often travels with Joey, a six-year-old Westie. “How we navigate that, and
when we find that is supported by the people we are working with – that is
really just everything.”
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MEET THE
INTERVIEWEES
JOHN ATHERLAY
John is Production Stage Manager with The Band’s Visit. Before that he spent two years on a cruise ship. Other touring experience includes Cabaret, Blithe Spirit, Porgy and Bess, Anything Goes, Fela! and Man of La Mancha.
ANDREW BACIGALUPO
Andrew was the Production Stage Manager on the recently concluded Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tour. Prior to that, he toured with Elf: The Musical, The Sound of Music and Million Dollar Quartet.
MARINA LAZZARETTO
Marina is an actor currently on the Cats tour. Before that, she toured with American in Paris, Wicked and Come Fly Away.
KEVIN MCMAHON
Kevin is chair of the Short Engagement Touring Agreement (SETA) Committee. In addition to serving as a Western Principal Councillor, he toured with Wicked for six years and with Bright Star for one year.
DAVID O’BRIEN
David has been the Production Stage Manager for Wicked on the road for seven years. Prior to that, he did 17 Broadway shows and tours of Chicago, Cats and White Christmas.
SID SOLOMON
Sid toured as an understudy on The Play that Goes Wrong. It was his first experience on a commercial tour as an Equity member. He also serves as Equity’s Eastern Regional Vice President.
CHRISTINE TOY JOHNSON
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