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From Issue #11, Winter
2006
TOURING:
How one RT Ensemble does it.
By Bob Demers
The idea of touring
our Readers Theatre Ensemble around the State of Maine came early on.
We formed Open Book Players in the spring of 1996 as a specialized community
theater. A year later we booked our first five Summer dates at small
libraries in nearby communities. This was in addition to a regular fall
and winter schedule of 2-4 full productions at our home venue in Gardiner
Maine. The process hasn't changed much since then.
Here's how we
do the Tour part of our schedule:
Around the first
of each year our Artistic Director sits down with our board of directors,
all of whom are personally active as cast and crew. No warm bodies here.
Our AD proposes a program theme and content for the upcoming summer
tour. This is discussed and tweaked to everyone's satisfaction. The
working title of the Summer2006 tour is "Pets of All Sorts".
The program will consist of 6-8 individual RT plays adding up to a program
of 50-60 minutes. We will adapt these stories from the published works
of Maine authors of children's books, with permission of course.
The AD and sometimes
one or two others spend the rest of the winter and early spring corresponding
with authors, scripting the stories and preparing them for rehearsal
and performance.
A series of 6-8
rehearsals begins in late May or early June in preparation for the first
tour performance later in the month.
In the meantime,
another of our number, the Tour Promoter, gets busy updating our database
of libraries - there are over four hundred in Maine - and writing the
e-mail notices and other promotional materials specific to the theme.
We advertise
for bookings in four ways:
1) Our own opt-in
e-mail list has grown steadily over the years to about five-hundred.
Two mailings go out to this list. First is an early notice with a few
tantalizing details and a mention that the tour program will soon be
published. This allows libraries a little time to pursue whatever small
grants may be available to meet our modest fees (more on that below).
2) We make one
or two low-key posts to the official discussion list of the state library
association. The list claims over a thousand subscribers.
3) Press releases
go out to Maine dailies and weeklies whenever we can come up with a
novel or newsworthy slant.
4) And of course
our web site to which we refer people on every possible occasion by
every possible means.
Some of our group
are retired, but most are students, teachers and others with full time
jobs. Because of this we limit our tour to 14-18 venues per summer which
sometimes creates an interesting competition for available dates. The
actual available dates are determined by midwinter by the 5-7 people
who will be in the tour cast. These dates are posted on our web site
along with details about our fee. A request-for-proposal form is also
included.
Our fee includes
a basic sum plus allowances for travel, meals and lodgings as/if applicable.
Details are posted on our web site.
Bookings are
secured with a one-page contract that has worked well for us over the
past eight years.
In about eighty-six
tour performances we've had to cancel one. Several years ago we were
touring with a cast of five. Two days before a scheduled date, two of
the cast came down with serious flu. No substitutes were available on
such short notice. Unfortuantely, the date was at our home town library
and the library director took it personally. We offered a free performance
at a later date, but the director ignored the offer, and us. Thus it
is that we have never been invited to perform at our own home town library.
Bob Demers
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