Word: crew
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that's what matters. Indeed, we are on a bus-and- truck tour, a theatrical institution of small renown wherein cast, crew, orchestra, props and scenery pile into buses and trucks to barnstorm the country. This particular company is spending five months on the road doing mostly one-night stands. They wake up in time to make the bus, travel much of the day to a new theater, play their parts, then adjourn to a hotel till bus call the next morning. Thus pass strings of small cities: Harlingen, McAllen, Corpus Christi; Pueblo, Albuquerque, El Paso. Four months into...
...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...
...crew seldom sees the inside of a hotel. They generally hit the road around 1 a.m., when the lights and scenery are packed up after the night's show, then start unpacking it again with a local crew at a new theater at 8 the same morning. They have a delicate and demanding job. The scenery and equipment fill two 48-ft. truck trailers, and some theaters aren't big enough to accommodate the whole show. Some theaters aren't fit to accommodate any show. Burns is still muttering about one theater where the local crew chief, a plumber, counterbalanced...
Peoria, which has a roomy new theater, goes smoothly. No one in the local crew shows up under the influence of cherry Robitussin, as happened at an earlier stop. No one threatens a sit-down strike, as happened when Burns lit up a cigar in the truck trailer in Madison...
...actors bask momentarily in the applause. And then, almost before they have left the stage, the crew swarms over the set. A starry sky gets folded up and tucked into a basket. The sleeping-car set begins to tremble under the ratchetting of half a dozen socket wrenches and quickly comes apart in 40 pieces. Someone shouts, "Hit it!" And a dozen men bully a light rack onto a truck, wheels humming and clattering up the aluminum ramp...