NY Public Library for the Performing Arts Curator Doug Reside on Broadway on Tour

BroadwayWorld.com continues our exclusive content series, in collaboration with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which delves into the library's unparalleled archives, and resources. Below, check out a piece by Doug Reside (Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator for the Billy Rose Theatre Division) on Broadway on Tour:

As the new Broadway season gets underway in New York, another "Broadway" season is beginning--starting, perhaps, on the winding Manhattan thoroughfare but travelling far from the theatre district to civic auditoriums and music halls across the country. Each year, a number of new tours of plays and musicals designed by Broadway artists and starring professional actors who are members of the Actors Equity union begin a journey through the major touring venues of North America. This season, eight Equity tours join long-running perennial favorites like Phantom of the Opera and Wicked travelling in buses and trucks down the very broad ways of the nation's interstates.

One of these tours, a new production of The Sound of Music, has not (yet) been to Broadway. Two others Elf and White Christmas are relaunches of holiday tours that have already been around the country a couple of times before. The remaining five are touring productions from the past two Broadway seasons: Beautiful, The Bridges of Madison County, Cabaret, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, and If/Then. Converting a production designed for an open-ended run in a specific New York theater into a traveling, easily transportable show for venues of varying dimensions can be a difficult challenge, and one that often forces at least some elements of the production to change.

When Les Miserables toured in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a great deal of publicity in the touring cities about how the production was a nearly-exact replica of the Broadway and London shows. The set, lights and costumes (some duplicated in case of damage) were brought in on eight trucks[1] and essentially slipped in over the existing stage. Nonetheless, not all stages could support the trap door which was used as an entrance and exit in the Broadway production, and so, on at least some tour stops, the Thenardiers would run on from the wings for their part in "One Day More," and Javert would simply peer down the grating, shake it, and then run offstage to find an easier way into the sewers. The same challenge faces some tours of Wicked today. On Broadway, for her final entrance, Elphaba emerges from a trap door that opens out towards stage right, allowing her to pop up through the hole in the stage in full view of the audience. On the tour, a simulated trapdoor on a platform rolls onto the stage along with a large set piece (placed directly next to it). The trap door opens out towards the audience, blocking their view of the hole. This presumably allows Elphaba to crawl from behind the set piece and crouch behind the open "trap door" until she stands up to "emerge" from it.

In some cases, tours actually physically change the venues in which they perform. The success of the tours of the British "megamusical" hits of the 1980s and 1990s gave an infusion of cash to venues and allowed some to renovate in order to be better equipped to bring in larger shows. In a 1991 article for the Chicago Tribune, Richard Christiansen noted that the success of the tours of Les Miserables established Chicago's Auditorium Theater "as a prime legitimate playhouse" and, along with the tour of Phantom of the Opera made possible "$2 million in renovation and restoration work."[2]. A 1995 piece by Patricia Corrigan in the St. Louis Post Dispatch[3] announced a similar $2 million renovation of St. Louis's Fox Theatre, which, as the venue's executive director David Fay explained, was necessary to "book Broadway touring shows that require more than 30 feet of stage depth." Fay explained that the city missed the first tour of Phantom of the Opera because it required 36 feet, and, that his team "had to chip out 6 inches of facing on the two-foot-thick support beams" at the back of the stage in order to fit the 29-foot platform required for the smaller, second tour of Phantom in 1993. After the renovation, the Fox booked tours of Beauty and the Beast and Miss Saigon, and became one of the very few venues to host the Linda Balgord tour of Sunset Blvd. in 1997 before it closed early because the size of the production reportedly made the travel costs so exorbitant that ticket sales could not cover the expenses.

Of this season's new tours, only If/Then, with its huge, multi-level set, would seem to pose any significant technical challenges for tours. In the past, the semi-nude moment in Bridges of Madison County, the language of some of the lyrics of If/Then (e.g. the song that the Internet might abbreviate "WTF"), or the sexual content in Cabaret might have concerned the administration of some theaters to the point that they might have requested alterations to the content. However, successful tours of Avenue Q and Book of Mormon have demonstrated that audiences are willing to buy tickets to musicals that might have earned an R-rating as films. Nonetheless, in this post-megamusical era, creative teams may feel a greater sense of freedom to reimagine the touring productions as something other than a replica of their Broadway work (especially since only Gentleman's Guide and Beautiful are still running in NYC).

However closely these tours resemble their Broadway counterparts, they will, along with cast recordings, help to shape the popular memory of these titles. Many in the audience of these productions will not have seen, and will never see, the Broadway version. For this reason, tours represent an important, but sometimes neglected, part of theater history. With productions of so many titles that have already started to define this decade of musical theater now touring, this promises to be a particularly historical touring season.