Boone, North Carolina is located in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains and our hotel was at the base of some those beautiful mountains. We had a wonderful time exploring and just having fun.  Kelley, Liv and I went on a hike and saw a dead man's tent and, what we think was, an ocelot. Quite a welcome but nothing could deter us from heading into town for a great dinner at Moonshine Cafe (in the old county jail, circa 1886). We have now eaten at Moonwinks (Cuba NY), Blue Moon Cafe (Charlottesville) and Moonshine (Boone). A coincidence? I think not and all have had great food.  lt was college night at the hotel and a rousing game of darts ensued. Rick and I won, but only after a tortuous attempt by all for the bullseye. Where's Doug Mercer (The Acting Company's Associate Producing Artistic Director and darts champ extraordinaire!) when you need him? The next morning Hannah, Liv and I went adventuring and, in the afternoon, Chris, Steiner and I went for a hike in the Mountains up to an overlook tower.

That night we had a show in a large house (app. 1700 seats) on the Appalachian State University Campus. Carie's sister flew out from California for a few days and went to the show that night. One of the coordinators, Sally, took cast members grocery shopping the next morning and was a wonderful help.  After a wonderful time playing and playing in Boone, we were on the road to Spindale where we were greeted by a sign announcing the temperature, the time and us!

Elyria, OH ... FRIENDS! We arrived in Elyria with high excitement. Davis McCallum, our director was there and it was so good to have him in the house; his energy is so much a part of the company and the production. We also had Hannah's theater teachers from college, Liv's boyfriend and friends and Carie's theater family from Boise Shakespeare/Great Lakes. It was a such a joy to have a house full of friends. We were in a bigger house, 900 seats this time, and the theater was sort of a V shape with space age architecture -- a bit like doing the show in a space ship. It was so good to have our "box" back, although no live fire was allowed. The show went well and we spent the night out with Davis and our friends.

Cincinnati, OH ... We stayed at the Westin in downtown Cincinnati and our first night there was free -- some treated themselves to a nice dinner and then drinks at the Hilton's awesome art deco bar. Others went to see live bluegrass and Liv spent the evening with a home-cooked meal with her boyfriends family -- we were all jealous!

That afternoon we had our first Love, Shakespeare in a while, in a black box theatre at The School for Creative and Performing Arts. It was one of our best Love, Shakes and, after the show, the students were eager to talk about school and training and Christine, who stage manages Love, Shakespeare, was approached by two young stage managers wanting to see her book and talk to her.

The show the next night was in the Aronoff Center's Jarson-Kaplan Theatre. I think I have a new favorite space. The theater seats 450 people and has two shallow wrap around balconies that make the space feel very intimate. The acoustics were awesome and the the space felt so warm and giving. Our audience was very responsive and younger than many we've had and it was sold out. Jeff has a moment as Brocklehurst where he singles out a girl in the audience to make her stand up and, for the first time last night, someone actually stood up. It was amazing. The audience loved it, and so did she.
It was a terrific show and wonderful venue.

We went from Cincinnati to SOUTH BEND, IN for a performance at St. Mary's College, and like many times on this tour, we went from a small space to a large one -- St. Mary's seats 1300 and Hannah's boyfriend and his parents were in the audience, which was very nice. Another notable thing about our trip to South Bend was the Quality Inn which had a LARGE indoor atrium known as The Fundome with video games, ping-pong, pool, and a large open space where some of us got our work-out in for the day. Certainly a unique hotel experience for us.

FLINT, MI and TOLEDO, OH … Wow...two great adventures.  Flint was an interesting show for us, we did Love, Shakespeare as an evening performance for an adult audience.  The theater we were in was gorgeous and sits about 2,000 people.  Because of the needs of Love, Shakespeare, however, we set chairs up for the audience onstage for 200 and were full to capacity.

The show went well and allowed us to tailor some of the humor for adults.  Afterward, Liv, Matt, Jason and I taught the Acting Clues in Shakespeare workshop to anyone who wanted to stay and participate.  We had about 30 people in the class ranging in age from 16 to 75ish.  It took us a while to get our stride with that group, but by the end we were all enjoying ourselves and learning to boot.  Our final bit, where we work on the scene from Midsummer, saw three teenagers and one older gentleman (maybe 65) acting together.

We also took full advantage of the Flint Farmers Market and Steady Eddy's across the street.  Hannah's boyfriend Paul was with us and Mina had a close friend from Ann Arbor show up, too.

Our hotel in Toledo was right on the Maumee River and had a great view.  The show was in the recently renovated Valentine Theatre, which seats about 900.  The space was beautiful and the house full.  About 4 minutes into the show a local power transistor blew causing a power surge.  The power in the theater went out, we paused, lights came up and we continued.  Suddenly, Josiane (Production Stage Manager) yells hold from the house as the power surge has triggered the fire curtain.  So....off stage we go.  They reset and we started the show over from the top.

During intermission, the power blew again, tripping the fire curtain again and we were lost in the dark basement of the theater until Jackee, Christine, and Josiane came to find us with flashlights.  The rest of the show went off without a hitch.

At the end of the show, Hannah went out to meet a woman in the audience whose maiden name was Jane Eyre.  She was 70 years old.  The story gets better.  When she was six years old she had tickets to see Jane Eyre in the Valentine Theatre played by Katherine Hepburn and got the whooping cough and was unable to attend.  She waited 64 years to see the show in that theatre and wanted to meet Jane after.  A great night!

CANADA HERE WE COME!!! Our tour went international as we passed into Canada for our Windsor, Ontario show.  We all made it through customs -- shocking, I know -- and then headed into Windsor.  The show was at a beautifully restored theater, Capitol Theatre & Arts Centre, that sat approximately 900 people. Unfortunately, due to funding, the theater is due to close very soon, despite the recent renovations.

We had two workshops, Page to Stage and Stage Combat.  The show itself had great energy and joy, and we finished our time in Canada with equally-great sushi!

We then headed to Mississippi.  That meant a day drive to Louisville, KY, where we celebrated Matt's birthday bowling and dancing and then drove to Birmingham, AL.  The highlight of the drive was an afternoon stop in Nashville.  Our driver, Wes, lives in Nashville and told us the good spots to hit.  Beth and I had a great lunch in a historic hotel, now Merchants Restaurant.  Half the cast and crew bought cowboy boots and hats.  And we ended our time at a honky-tonk bar called The Stage listening to live music. I, unfortunately, left my camera (now found) at The Stage so there will be no new pictures for a few of these entries. 

Then, on to Starkville to do a show on the MSU campus.  The house here was small, approximately 450 seats, and full and the show went very well.  We also had fun exploring town, sampling the local ice cream and getting a good night’s sleep before heading to Arkansas.

Arkadelphia … the arc of brotherly love.  We got into Arkadelphia, AR after a long drive, had dinner at TaMolly's and crashed early.  The next day we went to DeGray Lake State Park where some people hiked, some kayaked and I canoed.  It was so nice to get out on water and do something totally different plus the weather was perfect, sunny and warm.

That afternoon we did the first half of a “put-in” rehearsal (for understudies).  It was a surreal experience to be wearing other actor's costumes and watching someone else in yours, but everything turned out well.  That night the show was relaxed and easy but still had a lot of drive.  At the end of the show, the audience leapt up and cheered, which thrilled us all. 

William, the costume design professor at Henderson State, ran costumes for the show and it was good to see the example of work ethic he set for his own students who served as an enthusiastic crew.  The next day Liv, Jason, Matt and I did an Acting Clues in Shakespeare workshop with those students – a group of 11 acting students, which was one of our most successful and fun workshops to date.

We then made a short drive to Pine Bluff, AR, one of the smallest theaters we’ve played (250 seats) but the stage was large enough for the whole set (yea!).   The show was free to the public, and we had a diverse and eclectic audience.  The show went well and, in the Talk Back afterwards, we found we had a lot of acting students from the local university.  They were curious and asked pertinent questions of how to stay in the business, training, etc.  It was a great Talk Back.

Lake Charles, our first stop in Louisiana and quite an adventure.  We stayed at the Isle of Capri Casino, where for lunch we had gumbo and crawfish.  The show was held at the Sulphur Library, and was open to the public, giving us a diverse audience who were very attentive.  The show was a challenge for us, as there is a lot of rythmic stomping in Love, Shakespeare and the room we were performing in was carpeted.  We muscled through that as best we could, and the show went off well.  One gentleman who came up after was in a collegiate Shakespeare class; we also had a high school English class and some local acting students.  Lake Charles is a community that was devastated by Hurricane Rita and lost 50% of its homes; the theater is still quarantined, which is why we performed in a library.

Natchitoches, LA was, indeed, an experience.  We arrived and immediately went to the theater for a put-in rehearsal as Liv had a family emergency.  The house was quite large (1300 seats) and was approximately 1/2 full.   With Liv gone, I stepped into her roles, Kelley into mine, and Mina into Kelley's leaving us without a live cellist and Josiane and Brendan with over 100 new music cues for the show.  All told, everything went off amazingly well.  The music was awesome, the backstage crew was astounding in their ability to push us around and get us where we needed to be in the right clothes.  The cast was doing the same for scene changes.  It was a surreal weird experience and we were glad to know we’d have Liv back soon.

After the performance, some students from Northwestern State took us out to the local pub and, the next day, they all came to our two workshops. This is a gorgeous, and the oldest, town in the Louisiana Purchase and full of great Victorian homes, including the one used in the movie Steel Magnolia's. That evening the entire cast and crew (23 of us) had dinner at Antoon's.

We move on to Ruston, with Liv returning but with illness hitting the cast.  Kelley was under the weather and Chris' voice was so shot that he was miked for the show.  For all that, the performance went well and we had a really good talk-back with many of the Louisiana Tech theater students.

Baton Rouge...what a blast.  We had an evening performance of Jane Eyre in Baton Rouge, in a nice little theater with about 500 people.  Bart (our bus driver) brought his mother and Liv's parent's came, as well.  The next morning we performed Love, Shakespeare for just 10 people, which was understandable as it was St. Patrick's Day and the entire city seemed to turn out for the parade – as did we as soon as the performance ended.  After collecting piles of beads, we all headed out to Bart's friend's house for a crawfish boil, where nearly 75 pounds of boiled crawfish were consumed.  Not to let that end our day, we then went back for a nap and headed out dancing.  We loved Baton Rouge!

The next morning we headed off to Tupelo, MS.  Our first show was an 8:30 a.m. Love, Shakes (early!!!) for a group of junior high students who were very excited by the kissing scenes – even that early in the morning.  Wes (our other bus driver) then took us to Elvis's birthplace for a little side trip.  That night we did Jane Eyre in a church. It was great to be in a church, the acoustics were amazing and the audience sat was in pews.

The next day we headed to Wesson, MS.   We did the show on the Copiah-Lincoln Community College campus in a building that looked as if it may have been a church at one point.  The dressing rooms were up spiral staircases on either side of the stage and had lookouts over the stage so we could watch the show from above, which was great.  The show went so well and the house was full of young students.  Afterwards they had a very nice reception for all the donors and subscribers to meet us.  There was a young Russian woman with her mother at the reception and her mother told Hannah she had named her daughter the Russian version of Jane after Jane Eyre.  

We drove overnight to Thomasville, GA where, the next morning, we had a performance of Love, Shakespeare.  The house sat approximately 500 people and we had a good 400 high school students in at 9:30 am. Our show that night was challenging – the stage was the shortest we had been on with very little depth and minimal wing space and lights, and a lift in the middle of the stage that made the playing surface uneven. However, it was nearly sold out and the show went quite well.  The presenters were lovely to us and made homemade sandwiches and brownies for the cast and crew.

Then on to Jacksonville, FL.  This was the first show in weeks where we had all of our technical elements: box, fire, and a full array of lights.  It was heaven.  The house was beautiful and sat approximately 530 and was pretty much full.  There were a lot of friends in the show that night and it went wonderfully – in the talk back, there was a request for the company to come back next year.   Timothy Carter, an Acting Company Alum from last year was there.  He is currently on tour with The Lion King.

We went from Jacksonville, FL to Newberry, SC which apparently has one of the 100 best main streets in small town America.  It was charming.  Our show was in the historic opera house that was built in the 1880s.  When it was first built, the lowest floor held the fire station and city offices with the stage on the third floor.  The stage is still on the third floor, but the bottom is now a lobby and theatre offices, and all the dressing rooms are on the second floor.  The theater seats 600 people and is a beautiful space that just fit our set.  We got to be very close to the audience and the acoustics were great. 

The space was nearly perfect. The show went well; it was our first matinee in a long time.  We all headed to The Blue Moon (carrying on the great tradition of restaurants with Moon in the name...Moonwinks, Moonshine...etc.) for dinner and cake made for us by Jackee's (wardrobe supervisor) mother.

 

Talladega, Alabama.  We did three Love, Shakespeares and two Jane Eyre's in Talladega.  The most shows we'd done in one place to date.  All of the performances were at The Ritz, a beautiful art deco theater. The Love, Shakespeares were well received and we had large groups of blind and hearing impaired students and were excited to discover what parts of the shows spoke most to them.  The hearing impaired students also came to Jane Eyre and we had ASL interpreters.  We were thrilled watching the amazing work the interpreters were doing.

We were told later by Michael Allen, the teaching artist of from The Acting Company, that the hearing impaired students loved the rhythm work in Love, Shakes and the vibrations from the cello in Jane Eyre.  Their teacher required a reading of Jane Eyre and our adaptation, so the students were well prepared for the show.  While in Talladega we also took a tour of the speedway and on the drive out watched Talladega Nights.

 

We headed then to West Palm Beach, Florida.  Since we were going to be in one spot for 4 days, most of the cast decided to pitch in to rent houses instead of staying in hotels – one of our better ideas.  I ended up in a 1920s bungalow called Hearts of Palms Cottage.  The house had a hot tub, hammock, two porches and was walking distance to the venue and the beach.  Heaven.

The venue was part of the Kravitz Center for the performing arts.  The space was a black box theater that sits 500 people.  We did two Love Shakespeare's and five Jane Eyre's here.  The space's raised stage was a little small for us.  We got to use the box, but lost about 9 inches of depth, which may not sound like much, but in show that is so choreographed, it's huge. The wings are small and we had a maze of stairs to maneuver.  That being said, the shows went well and were very well received.  The talk backs were extremely rewarding.

We also had a benefit night for The Acting Company in West Palm Beach on Sunday run by several of our Board Members and their friends.  There was a dinner before the show (the cast was only there for a brief cocktail party) and then attended a wine reception following the performance.  Everything went well and we all cleaned up very nicely!

Now...Vacation, vacation, vacation.  We'll meet up again in a week on the west coast of Florida to finish up the tour.

Lakeland, FL was our first show back after vacation. It was a bigger house than we'd been playing in much of the south, but the acoustics were great and it was a nice fit and a good place to start our West Coast Florida tour.

Our next show was in Clearwater at a small venue, only 200 seats, that is very similar in feel to the Baruch Performing Arts Center where we will be doing our New York Season. It was a good warm up for us. The place was sold out, and the audience was so nice and welcoming. Hannah's dad, Carie's mother and Josiane's mother were all there, which was great support for us. The venue was really lovely. And -- right next -- door was Jesse McCartney with thousands of his screaming young fans. It was such fun.

Earlier that day, Harrison and Tom Giddens, two supporters of The Acting Company (and friend of TAC President, Joan Warburg), had us to their condo in Tampa for a delicious lunch -- and treats to go! They were lovely to us and were at the show that night, front and center.

We then headed off to Sarasota where we did two Love, Shakespeares for over 2,000 students in a really beautiful theater. The students were well behaved and responsive and, as always, extremely interested in Matt being locked in a trunk and wondering if all the kisses were real. One student also asked if we knew what we were saying...

From Sarasota, to Jefferson City, TN, State College, PA, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and Duxbury, MA … the last week of the tour flew by with great audiences, welcoming theaters and wonderful memories.  We enjoyed it all but, must admit, our heads were skipping ahead to New York and our two-week, sold out off-Broadway run.  For many of us, it was our first time on a New York stage and facing theater-savvy audiences and major theater critics from publications like The New York Times, Backstage and The New Yorker magazine.  We had a grand opening and Patrons Night dinner to celebrate with the board members, staff and special friends that keep The Acting Company up and running.  The last night, more than a few tears were shed as we left the theater and gathered one more time to toast a wonderful season and new lifelong friends. 

Thanks for taking this tour with us!