Tour Begins - Day 1!

Our first day on tour took us to Faith North Montessori School near downtown Phoenix. We arrived in our Childsplay logo wrapped vehicles (thank you NASCAR Angels) and of even some of the actors were decked out Childsplay tee-shirts. It was a very exciting, official beginning and everything went very smoothly. Our stage manager, Alfredo Macias and Childsplay’s Assistant Production Manager, Gretchen Schafer, joined us today, which really helped us succeed.


A tour show requires us to drive out to the school, unload our set into the space provided, do the show and the reload then set back into the vans before we depart. After a few months on the road everything becomes clockwork, but the first day everything feels unfamiliar. “What box is my stomach pad in?” “Where’s my mask?” “How does this go together again?” “Which way do the rocks go (in the van)?” These were a few of the questions actors posed today.


So the logistics of touring Andorcles and the Lion were brand new to all of us. However, we’ve been doing the show for weeks now and performing it is very familiar to us, except for the slippery floors that is. At the top of the show we looked more like figure skaters than actors. But we quickly got our feet underneath us (with very small steps all day) and the show turned out to be a fun one.


My favorite moment from our day today was the reaction from the students to the Lion’s entrance. A school show is so different from a show in the theatre. First of all the children are much more comfortable in their own cafeteria than in a theatre. So you get reactions from the kids that are completely uncensored. Second, the kids are so much closer to the actors than in the theatre, so they are even more involved in the story and tend to talk directly to you. The actors can see every student and every teacher, and today I literally could have reached out and touched the children in the front row from the stone I sit on down stage.


So, now that you get a feel for the intimacy of the space we were in with three-hundred children, you’ll understand why all of them, and especially the kindergartners who sit in front, screamed their heads off when Jeremiah entered as the Lion. He rushed downstage growling and they all screamed at the top of their lungs!! It was pandemonium for a few moments.


There is also a moment in the play when all the actors make birdcalls and the Lion demands “silence.” Well all the children today joined us and made birdcalls too! This leads me to what I (re)learned today: kids will get ahead of you if you let them because they are SMART!


Fun tidbit for tomorrow’s show: Eric Boudreau, who plays Lelio, committed to bring doughnuts for the entire cast! Yum!!