Grantblings

Puppet Up! Toronto – Tour Diary – Prelude

It is the night before!

The night before Henson Alternative’s Puppet Up Uncensored crew heads off to Canada for a string of shows at the Panasonic Theatre in Toronto, Canada.  I’m a little more than excited.  This is going to be a lot of fun.  I thought that the tour I was on earlier this year couldn’t be topped.  This might do it.

What I’m excited for most about this trip is the lack of travel.  Now, do not get me wrong, I LOVE to travel.  I love airports and busses and hotels and exploring new places.  It’s all fantastic.  But this will be a run of shows in one theatre for two weeks.  I love the idea of going to the same place every day and just working on this show.  Making each show better, tighter, exploring more.

These trips are always fun because I get to know my fellow castmates better and this time around there’s a few folks I haven’t been on tours with for a long time so it’ll be great to work with a completely new of improv.  Really keeps me on my toes.

When we are on a tour like the one we were on earlier this year, each new venue has a million little adjustments to be made to get our show up.  Our, amazing, tech crew rocks each venue to get it ready for our show which has a lot of moving pieces that need to be just right.  With this run, after the first few shows, we’ll get in a groove and we’ll be able to just work on having fun.

The closest I’ve been able to get to this was the San Francisco run in 2011.  That was 5 shows.  This is 14.  By the end of the show I feel I’ll really have it down.  And this time around I’ll be performing some pieces that I haven’t performed before.  This time around I get to play the ‘Big Tube’ or ‘Big Java’ in the Java piece.  An honor and I’m really excited to take on that challenge.

We also have a brand new finale that we’ve been working on. It’s really unique and I’m excited for audiences to see it.

As before I’ll do my best to blog every day, so if you feel like it, stay right here and join me as the Puppet Up crew invades Toronto!

LET’S DO THIS!