DALLAS (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Talia Suskauer knows what its like to be green. She remembers the feel of pigment and powder on her arms, neck, and face; how the color seemed to seep into her pores and linger behind her ears; what it was like to see a strange but familiar self staring back from a mirror.
But on a hot July afternoon in Dallas, she didn't know that getting painted once again would make her cry.
Sixteen months after the touring production of Wicked in which Suskauer stars as the green-skinned witch Elphaba was forced to close, the cast and crew have reassembled in Dallas for a high-stakes effort to start again. The shows first performance here Tuesday, the first by any touring Broadway production since the coronavirus pandemic shut down shows across the nation, will be a sign of hope for a battered theater industry, but also a test at a time when the spread of the delta variant has Americans once again on edge.
Each show is going to be someones first time back at the theater, so each show is going to be emotional, Suskauer said. She had her own emotions to draw on, tearing up as she eased back into the makeup chair for the first time since the tours shutdown in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 13, 2020. I felt like our purpose was being stripped away, she said, and now, to come back, its overwhelming.
Touring is a huge part of the commercial theater ecosystem. Its big money in the most recent full theater season, 18.5 million people attended touring shows in North America, and those productions grossed $1.6 billion.
The resumption of touring will once again allow people who live far from New York to see Broadway titles. And it will provide much-needed income for actors, musicians and other theater workers left unemployed by the pandemic.
If anybody doesnt love a national tour, theres something theyre not getting, said Cleavant Derricks, who in 1982 won a Tony Award for his role in the original Broadway production of Dreamgirls, and who now plays the wizard in the Wicked tour. Youre going from state to state, meeting different people, seeing different aspects of the country, and each night applause comes your way. How can you beat something like that?
A revisionist backstory for The Wizard of Oz, Wicked is a musical theater juggernaut that opened on Broadway in 2003, has sold more than $5 billion worth of tickets and has been seen by more than 60 million people in 100 cities around the world. The show, which revolves around a fraught friendship between witches Elphaba and Glinda, has been running so long that Suskauer and her co-star and fellow Floridian, Allison Bailey, both saw it as children.
I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical, said Bailey, who plays Glinda. Its why I wanted to do theater.
Wicked, with songs by Stephen Schwartz, a book by Winnie Holzman and direction by Joe Mantello, has been touring North America since 2005. The tour now travels from city to city in 13 trucks that transport the set, the sound and light equipment, more than 300 costumes and about 100 wigs.
The touring company includes 33 actors, an 18-person crew, six musicians, three stage managers, two company managers and a physical therapist, as well as 16 dogs, one cat and three ferrets brought along for companionship. The traveling company is then supplemented at each stop by 32 local crew members and nine local musicians, as well as dozens of stagehands to help load the set in and out.
The resumption of the Wicked tour, which comes a month before the first musicals are scheduled to restart on Broadway, will soon be followed by others: Beginning in mid-August, touring productions of Hamilton will resume in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Tempe, Arizona; and in September, tours of Frozen and My Fair Lady, as well as the play What the Constitution Means to Me, will hit the road.
In New York, ticket holders to Broadway shows will be required to show proof of vaccination and wear masks, at least through October. In Dallas, the touring production of Wicked is requiring vaccines for cast and crew, but not for the audience, which will be instructed to wear masks. Actors will be barred from interacting with the audience, meaning no stage-door autographs or selfies, and no backstage tours.
Early indicators are that audiences are eager to return: The five-week Dallas run has sold strongly, and prices have held steady, ranging from $25 for a lottery ticket to $169 for the best seats.
When the pandemic forced the tour to close last year, the crew packed the set and costumes into boxes and left them in the Madison theater, imagining theyd be back in a few weeks. Then, as the shutdown dragged on, the crew went back to load those boxes into trucks. Ten of the trucks spent nearly a year parked in a Wisconsin truck yard, while three others containing temperature-sensitive electronics, wigs and wardrobe were sent to a climate-controlled warehouse in Pennsylvania.
Some members of the company went home, but some had no homes they are usually on the road so much, they dont need them so they either stayed with family or rented something somewhere.
Since Ive been married, Ive never been home this long, ever, said the tours hair supervisor, Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, who has been with Wicked off and on since 2003. I went to Fort Lauderdale my husband is there and we actually still love each other, so it worked out!
Reuniting was fun, but restarting was complicated, and the show set aside three weeks to get ready at Dallas Music Hall at Fair Park, the 3,420-seat venue Wicked was returning to for the sixth time. The cast was rusty, and needed to rerehearse the show, while the crew needed to assess each piece of equipment for possible damage after months of disuse.
We were worried about what was going to come out of the trucks, said David OBrien, tour production stage manager. Opening these boxes of clothes, what are we going to find, and whats it going to smell like?
There were minor problems a dimmer rack that needed to be reprogrammed and a warped board in the set floor that caused a sliding statue to jam but for the most part, the crew was delighted with how well the equipment held up.
While the crew reassembled the Tony-winning set, the cast rehearsed in the lobby, working on a sprung floor rented from the Texas Ballet Theater.
Its been 16 months of singing in your shower, which is different than singing with multiple people, said Evan Roider, tour music director, but they came back ready to go.
There were jokes about expanded waistlines and forgotten dance steps. Its a little more snug this time around! Suskauer said of her costume when a button popped as she rehearsed.
By the time they were working in the theater, underneath a proscenium featuring the shows red-eyed dragon, the cast was polishing details. Careful with your wand! associate director Lisa Leguillou instructed Bailey as she rehearsed her entrance in a floating bubble. Its covering your face!
There are, of course, new safety protocols, which the Wicked team is sharing in video meetings with crews from other tours as they, too, prepare to restart. Some measures are now familiar: plentiful hand sanitizer, plus masks and gloves and air scrubbers. But there are also more theater-specific strategies. Ultraviolet wands are being used to clean mask interiors, lest too much disinfectant give actors headaches. Actors now scan QR codes for their daily check-ins, in lieu of the traditional sign-in sheet on a clipboard. And partitions are being installed in the orchestra pit to try to contain any aerosols emitted by reed and brass instruments.
Our biggest concerns have been how to reinvent things we do in a COVID world, said Steve Quinn, tour company manager, who has been touring with Wicked for 16 years. Were the guinea pigs, and were just trying to navigate this.
The companys excitement about being back together and making a show is tempered by some anxiety, particularly among the crew. I want to make sure I have covered all my bases, so not by my hands would anybody become sick or injured by something I didnt think of, said Joyce McGilberry, tour makeup supervisor. I wanted to come back, but I cant deny my concerns.
The tour company has a wide range of experience. Rebecca Gans Reavis had been playing a flying monkey for just a week before the tour shut down, while Laurel Parrish, advance wardrobe supervisor, has been with Wicked since it opened on Broadway.
Reavis, heartbroken, spent the pandemic in Wichita, Kansas, where she and her husband took jobs teaching at her mothers dance studio; Parrish, in northern Manhattan, worked for a cheesemonger while taking on passion projects in embroidery and sewing.
I dont think I knew how much I missed it until we started back, Parrish said. Seeing the clothes was like seeing old friends.
When two of the shows cast members opted not to return after the pandemic, that created openings for the return of an alumnus, Clifton Davis, who at 75 is the oldest member of the tour cast, and a newbie, Anthony Lee Bryant, a Los Angeles-based dancer who had auditioned for the show six times before landing a spot.
Theater is being resurrected, thank God, said Davis, who is relishing a second go as Doctor Dillamond, an erudite goat who taught at Shiz University when Glinda (then known as Galinda) and Elphaba were students there. Davis previously played the same role in 2012.
As Bryant scrupulously took notes on dance moves, and Davis practiced his bleat, some moments seemed sure to land differently, even though they were crafted years ago. Chief among them: Glindas opening line, which Bailey utters as she floats in on her bubble:
Its good to see me, isnt it?
I think Im going to say it the same, but its going to feel different, Bailey said. I feel like Im saying it on behalf of theater itself.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.