Word: truckful
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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...
Judy Kaye, one of the stars, has met her fiance in the cast, and their lives are so giddy and romantic that the two of them have formed a prenuptial death pact: if either even considers doing a bus-and-truck again, then...
...stars, Imogene Coca and Frank Gorshin, are more sanguine about life on the road. Gorshin, who is tired of doing Kirk Douglas impressions, wants to show that he's serious about theater, and it's hard to get more serious than a bus-and-truck. Coca, who has been performing for nearly 70 years, simply loves the stage. For her, the bus-and-truck is a succession of opening nights. The most fun she ever had in theater, she says, was one night in Davenport, Iowa, where we have just arrived, when she was on an earlier tour...
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...