The $28,000 Mistake!

The “Evita” cast just completed their first bus trip. Most of our tour travel will be by air; but if the distance is under 500 miles, the producers have the option of traveling the company by bus. We left New York on Friday evening and arrived in Waterbury, Connecticut three hours later. Yesterday morning, we started tech rehearsals. I’ve just returned tonight from 10 hours of standing... as the designers stopped and started scenes, layering light, sound and other elements to the staging completed in New York.

Traveling by bus brought back a memory from a previous tour of “Evita”. The 1992 National Tour began in July of that year and was to run 22 weeks. Instead, the tour ended on Mother’s Day of 1994, having played 85 cities in 87 weeks. In February of 1994, “Evita” was playing a “split week” (two cities in one week); the split was between Savannah, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee. After our plane took off from Savannah, the plane’s captain announced that we were being re-routed to Little Rock, Arkansas instead of our intended destination. Memphis was being hit by a devastating ice storm.

When we arrived in Little Rock, our company manager decided that she was going to make sure that we made it to Memphis that day. We spent several hours in the airport, but eventually all flights were cancelled. Instead of putting us up in a local hotel, Pat (who had spent the entire afternoon in the airport bar) ordered buses from Fayetteville. All local bus companies had turned her down, citing the dangerous driving conditions. In fact, the buses she hired arrived two hours later than planned, as the drivers had to first take welding torches to the bus barn doors and melt several inches of ice from the locks.

My first action when we arrived in Little Rock was to call my close friend Steve who works for the State of Arkansas as a planner in the Highway Department. Steve advised me that there had already been countless accidents on the icy interstate between Little Rock and Memphis, many of them involving 18-wheelers; he said that it would be a very risky trip. I tried to persuade Pat to cancel the group bus trip, but she was insistent. For the first time in several years of touring, I made a decision to refuse to get on the bus.

I told Pat I knew my responsibilities... when I needed to be at the theatre in Memphis, but that I was not going to board a bus in an ice storm and would be staying in Little Rock. I would stay with my friend, rent a car and do the 120-mile drive the next day. Steve made a difficult trip to the airport to get me and I spent the night in comfort at his home. The next day, I rented a car and made the drive on broken chunks of ice, creeping along in heavy traffic, weaving around abandoned cars and twisted wreckages of vehicles where the drivers had lost control in the deadly conditions. I arrived safely six hours later. The trip should have taken two hours under normal conditions.

When I checked into the hotel, I bumped into fellow cast members and found out the full details of their horrible night. It turns out the cast, which had left the previous evening, arrived in Memphis only an hour before I did... mid-afternoon of the next day. They spent 19 stationary hours on the Interstate, stranded with other travelers, sharing their buses with random passengers from one of Continental Airlines’ flights. Families in cars, with even less resources, continually asked to board the bus to use the bathrooms throughout the night. There was no food or water on the bus, other than what a couple of people had purchased at the airport. The buses were freezing cold, despite the drivers’ best efforts to keep them warm.

The cast was asked to go on and perform "Evita" that evening in Memphis, despite the lack of rest for the majority of the company, the danger and trauma of the trip. The company manager’s ill-advised decision nearly resulted in her firing and cost the producers $28,000 in overtime, penalties and rules violations. I wasn’t a recipient of any of those monies; but, for me, nothing could have replaced being safe and secure in a friend’s home, or the certain knowledge that there are times in your life when you have to put your personal safety first. On that day, I learned how expensive a lapse in judgment can be.