Week #96 - Sioux City, IA

Before I get to the regular blog post, a word of thanks.  In Boston and Pittsburgh, the company collected donations for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.  Even in these difficult economic times, the audiences in both cities were generous.  The administration and local crew in both places were more than happy to help and the result was the collection of more than $17,000 for this worthy organization that supports people living in all kinds of difficult situations all across the country (BC/EFA has broadened their scope beyond the on-going AIDS crisis and supports all sorts of organizations).  I'm proud of the efforts of the extended Spamily.

Francesca and I were working on the final count and bundling when we paused to snap a photo...  The next day Francesca waited more than an hour while the bank counted up our deposit.

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Another op’nin, another show

In Philly, Boston or Baltimo’

A chance for stage folks to say hello

Another op’nin of another show. 

Cole Porter obviously never played Sioux City, Iowa.  Come to think of it, he very well might have – but he never played it with a 6 truck, modern Broadway musical. 

The Orpheum Theater in downtown Sioux City is a lovely theatre.  It opened as part of the famed Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit in 1927.  Like so many other theaters, the Orpheum fell upon hard times and was converted into a movie house.  It’s interiors were subdivided and the decorations deteriorated.  Gilt moldings were replaced with drop ceilings.  Mahogany trim was painted over.  Chandeliers were removed and the building lost its luster.  Fortunately, some residents banded together to restore the building when the last movie concern failed.  The theatre has been lovingly restored and given another life as a legitimate theater. 

We play lots of theatres that have a similar story: the Fabulous Fox in Atlanta, the Canon in Toronto and the Shea’s in Buffalo.  Those theatres all had quirks and inconveniences that made them challenging.  The stage at the Orpheum is quite simply too small for Spamalot.  In many theaters we’ve played, we’ve used all the available space and in some we’ve had to alter the show or cut some scenery to make it to opening night; to fit into the Orpheum for this week’s opening, we had to remove four feet of depth and several more feet of width from our (already reduced) deck.  This also meant that we had to make a whole series of cuts to the drops and other flown scenery just to make a show that fit onto the stage. 

The stage space was so small that there wasn't room for the Stage Managers' Calling Desk to sit on the deck, we called the show from the end of a small hallway off-stage left.  (In this photo, Ken is calling the show while Cuz has wedged himself behind the desk to work on the intercom.)

We knew before we arrived that the load-in was going to be difficult.  Keith and Ken had discussed various ways to make Spamalot fit, but it wasn’t until we got here that the enormity of the task was made clear.  When I arrived at the theatre Wednesday morning, Keith met me at the door ready to discus how to make Stage Left workable.  Ken arrived shortly there after and described his sleepless night spent trying to work out how to make the reduced show run.  The morning was trying.  Every adjustment and cut to the scenery had repercussions on choreography, staging and scene changes.  We do not have time allotted to rehearse major changes with the cast and even if we were to call the cast for a rehearsal, there was no stage time available as the load-in took right up until sound check. 

Everyone in the Spamily was grumpy.  We cursed the theatre, the local presenter and our booking agents.  We grumbled about the lousy hotels, the lack of internet access and the dearth of eateries.  “Why are we in Sioux City in the first place?!?” we all said. 

Then I went out to explore the theatre.  I wandered into the beautiful lobby and found a man with a trolley full of paint buckets.  He was meticulously working his way around the lobby touching up all the tiny nicks in the paint.  I was immediately embarrassed at my own attitude.  We were all busy complaining and grousing about what a dump this theater was, and here was this man who had such pride in the place that he wanted the theatre to look its best for opening night of our show. 

Of course that did not change the challenges that lay ahead for the rest of the day, but it did help me keep the whole thing in perspective.  The rest of the day was challenging indeed: my lighting focus (which I finished in an hour and a half last week) took more than four hours, we weren’t able to find room for all the scenery we had loaded-in and had to cut more as we got closer to opening, Graham and Ken spent an hour modifying the staging and spacing of the dance numbers so they would fit and Mark reworked many of the lighting cues.  When the cast arrived, we scrapped much of the sound check and used the time for a spacing rehearsal. 

I said a prayer to Dionysus at curtain time and then we dove headlong into the adventure of opening night.  Francesca and I played traffic cops, directing everyone to their quick changes and pointing out the presets of props that were not where they usually are.  All things considered, it went quite well.  No one died and the audience absolutely loved the show we gave them.  Things got smoother as the week went on, but doing the show on a stage the size of a postage stamp was a challenge all week.  The audiences in Sioux City were wildly appreciative, but after opening night, we never drew much of a crowd.  We did several shows for audience that numbered in the low hundreds.  (More people saw the show in a single night in Atlanta than in our whole run in Sioux City.) 

OK, enough about that.

Sioux City is certainly the smallest town we've played on the tour thus far.  Sioux City sits in the Northwest corner of Iowa, separated from Nebraska by the Missouri River and from South Dakota by the Big Sioux River.  It is these rivers that gave birth to Sioux City.  The Missouri was once a major highway for goods and people in the American West.  When the railroads made it to Sioux City, the city became a major port.  Goods traveling south on the Missouri could be loaded onto rail cars in Sioux City, shaving hundreds of miles of expensive (and dangerous) river travel off the journey that once used to take them all the way to St. Louis.  The area also became home to a major stockyard.  

The Missouri River reflecting the setting sun

The river was still pretty fast moving, but the December chill had it full of ice floes

Louis and Clark passed through the area as part of their exploration of the west.  The only member of their party to perish on the journey fell ill and died just south of present day Sioux City. Sergeant Charles Floyd died, probably of a burst appendix,  in August of 1804 as the Corps of Discovery traveled up the Missouri (thus, becoming the first American Soldier to die west of the Mississippi).  A monument marks the spot where his remains are interred (Lewis and Clark buried Floyd on a bluff overlooking the Missouri, but erosion of the bluff washed away the original cedar marker and some of the gravesite - the current monument stands 300 yards from the original site and is Floyd's fourth resting place).  The 100' obelisk was constructed by citizens of Sioux City at the turn of the century and was dedicated on Memorial Day in 1901.  In 1960, the monument was declared a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior (the first site to be so recognized).

w/ the Sergeant Floyd Monument

The Lewis and Clark expedition is the inspiration for a small museum on the shores of the Missouri River.  The Sioux City Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center was built as part of the Lewis and Clark Trail which allows travelers to retrace the 200 year-old journey.  The museum offered a peak into the daily life of the Corps of Discovery.  This was another opportunity for me to fill out some of the textbook history that I had mostly forgotten.  Yet again, I found myself amazed at what these brave people accomplished in an earlier time.  33 men departed from Hartford, IL in May of 1804 and pushed themselves all the way to the Pacific and back.  The journey took more than two years (they returned to St. Louis in September of 1806) and expanded the available knowledge of flora, fauna, geography and the native peoples exponentially.  The group spent the winter of 1804-5 in a crude "fort" (composed mostly of tents) in present-day North Dakota - a feat which I can not begin to imagine - and a second winter away from home on the Oregon coast.  By the time they returned, most of those left behind assumed they were dead.  Of course, the men were skilled, but they were also very lucky.  The man they picked up along the way to help interpret their communications with the Native Americans was married to Sacagawea who not only translated for them, but carried her infant son along on the journey (the baby's presence helped assure others that the expedition was not war-like) and who's lucky presence assured the expedition the acquisition of necessary horses from Indians at the foot of the Rocky Mountains when her long-lost brother (she was kidnapped by a raiding party as a youngster) turned out to be chief of the tribe they encountered.  Having traveled for nearly two years now, I can not imagine the sort of trip these brave men endured.

This statue (featuring William Clark, Seaman - Lewis' dog - and Meriwether Lewis) stands outside the Interpretive Center

Today, Sioux City is a town of less than 85,000 souls.  Its main industries are all related to the local slaughterhouses.  Several petfood concerns have facilities in town and the city is also home to the world's largest gelatin production facility.  As the largest city for more than a hour in any direction, Sioux City is home to an arena (the Tyson Events Center) and convention center.  While we were in town, we were competing for hotel space with a collegiate volleyball tournament being held at the Events Center.  Otherwise, it's a pretty sleepy place that has seen better days.  Downtown has some beautiful buildings from another era, but much of the action has moved out to the strip malls outside of town.

The main source of entertainment for the Spamily for the week was making fun of the Sioux City Airport.  The Sioux Gateway Airport is a former military base (actually still home to the 185th Air Refueling Wing of the Air National Guard) turned small regional airport.  The airport code is SUX.  We all found this hysterical.  In fact, I purchased several "Fly SUX" souvenirs, including a sticker for my trunk.  (The mayor of Sioux City petitioned the FAA to have the designator changed several times, but decided to stick with SUX when one of the other options presented by the FAA was "GAY".)  The airport is tiny.  There is one gate.  Only Northwest Airlink serves SUX and they only offer flights to and from Minneapolis/St. Paul.

These are ALL the flights offered at SUX.  That's five a day (except on Saturday, when there are only four).

They have a whole series of signs promoting Sioux City in the airport - I couldn't resist snapping some photos:

Wayne is obviously delighted by this sign: "Sioux City - A Great Place"

This was my favorite - all I could think was "Wanna bet?"

The week in Sioux City came to a happy end with my pre-dawn flight to MSP.  The plane was more than half Spamalot and we overwhelmed the staff at SUX.  Unfortunately, the plane was over-sold and poor Terry got bumped from the flight and had to kill 6 more hours before a flight had room for him (the 10AM was also booked full of Spamalot).  Everything went well for me, though, and I was back in NYC a half an hour ahead of schedule!  By one o'clock, SUX was a distant memory as I dropped my bags off in my very own bedroom!  Week #97 of the tour is another lay-off.  (We were booked to play Iowa City, but this summer's flooding ruined the theater.)  I'll be home enjoying the company of my wife, seeing a few shows, catching up with friends and working on my holiday shopping until it's time to hit the road again and fly off to Fayetteville, AR. 

JV