RUNNING: Cancelling a show

[ddsherrer]

Not sure where to put this because it's partially a legitimite question and partially just a vent so fell free to move it somewhere else...

I am currently stage managing an educational tour with a 5 show rep.  You read that correctly!  I oversee six actors and 5 shows and we do between 5-10 shows a week for schools, libraries and community events. From Sept. to May we currently have booked approx. 180 shows.  That's a lot of shows considering five years ago it was about 30.  The company has grown and grown and yet some things haven't changed which has been my biggest frustration since I arrived in Sept.  The days are long, the drives are hard and the pay is low; but I love what I do and I live on an island so overall I'm very happy with it.  

We will be cancelling our third and fourth show since Sept. tomorrow due to the death of the grandfather of one of my cast memebers. (This poor girl can't catch a break, she dislocated her shoulder two weeks ago and is having her wisdom teeth removed on Saturday!)  She calls me and I start the fun game of calling everyone else.  I call the Education Director who is my immediate boss and she says cancelling is fine due to the circumstances but could I please call the Artistic Director and get his take before making it official.  (She's in NYC with auditions and he's here in the office.) So I call the Artistic Director and let him know and then have to listen to a ten minute dialogue of "this is so inconvienent, we're going to lose money," etc.  Now, I have a very strong knowledge of our budget and I get that this is inconvienent but why wasn't his first question, "Is she ok?"  We've decided to cancel the shows but of course no one is answering at the numbers on the contract.

So I guess my question is: What have some of you gone through when you've cancelled shows?  What are some of the quirks you've come across along the years?  Every theatre is different and theatres with understudies would just continue in this case but we don't have that luxury.

[RuthNY]

On TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences) tours without Understudies, tours I SM'd for more years than I like to remember, my company and I always had a plan of how the show could be done if we were one actor short.  Sometimes our Artistic Director and her Staff came up with these plans, sometimes those of us actually out on the road came up with the plan. (After all, who knows the show better than the people who perform it, sometimes two or three times a day?)  I don't recall ever canceling a TYA performance down one actor, but I've heard stories of shows down two or more that have done so.

[ddsherrer]

Three of our five shows can be done down one person, but the other two have each actor playing multiple rolls and unfortunately leads to us canceling shows if those two shows are the ones scheduled.  I have done Schoolhouse Rock down a person (ironically the track of the  person who is out) so if that were the show we'd be fine.  This was something I brought up when I was first hired and everyone kind of looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.  "Why would someone be out?" I think that after this year the idea of having a swing/someone to help the SM and with bookings or children's fairs, etc. may grow on them. Let's hope!