Word: bus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is a theater crowd in places like Davenport, which is why bus-and- truck tours exist. The doyenne here is Mary Nighswander, a little old lady who wears her white hair in a bun and speaks telegraphese ("Knit it myself," she asserts of her sequined cardigan). Nighswander runs the Broadway Theatre League, which has been bringing bus-and-trucks to town for 27 years. She has a $25,000 check in her pocket for tonight's show. If she doesn't hand it over by intermission, she says, "the cast sits on the curtain for the second...
...audiences are paying their $20 or $30 a seat for glamour and a taste of the theater life, the theatrical types say they signed on with the bus-and- truck mainly for the money. The members of the company all collect a per diem expense, and the idea is to live on the per diem and stash the paycheck for when they get back to New York. "You need a nest egg in this business," says Bruce Daniels, a lead, "so you can survive while you're out trying to get . . ." -- his voice deepens and Tivoli lights blink...
...cast's schedule constitutes idle luxury compared with life on the crew bus. At 7 on a Thursday morning, 31 hours out of Davenport's Adler theater and six hours out of the Coronado in Rockford, Ill., the crew bus sits at curbside in Peoria, a black bomb emitting oily blue smoke. The bus shudders intermittently as crew members wake and drop down out of their bunks. It shudders three times for Joe Burns, prop master: when he sits up and bangs his forehead on the bottom of the overhead bunk, when he flops back again on his pillow...
...Franklin, who did his first bus-and-truck in 1954, is dauntlessly cheerful. "An exciting day before us," he declares, putting on an artsy accent. "Bringing the-ah-ter to the masses." Franklin nips at a bottle of Maalox and goes off to work singing "It's a beautiful day in Peoria" to the tune of Mr. Rogers' theme song. Burns starts his day with Mountain Dew, because he has checked the label and found caffeine prominent among the ingredients...
...half-hour approaches, the members of the cast arrive and start to shake off the bus blahs. It is only another show. It is only Peoria. An actor, pretending to be blase, puts on a whiny voice and sings, "It's time to be theatrical again/ It's time to pull out all the stops again." Still, there is an audience out there, and the cast can never get enough laughter and applause. As she rushes offstage in the first act, Kaye remarks, "It's a very user-unfriendly house." Gorshin, who is perennially down, declares, "It's just...